Sir! The breathtaking splendour of your Troll, the mastery of its inception, the subtlety of its exectution, shall be remembered forever in the anals of Slashdot hostory.
Do your bit for the destruction of md5 by adding to the database using this simple script! #!/usr/bin/perl system 'apg -n 5 > okpasswords'; open(passfile, "okpasswords");
while($password = ){
chop $password;
print $password.";"; } print "\n";
Then just paste 'em in.
Farewell Md5. Thou hast served us surprisingly well.
Because of those FS advocates. It's no different if a friend (and I use the term loosely) tells you not to buy a new Ford Mustang, and then steals it when you do. That's what we call fucked up.
No. Bitkeeper was a ticking time bomb, waiting to explode. Sooner or later, it would have come right back to bite everyone in the ass.
The situation is analagous to Linus accepting a booby trapped Ford Mustang, gratis from McVoy, and then getting irritated when Tridgell safely detonates the device while he's in the store buying supplies for an offroad camping trip.
It's said that the Palestinians are simply too backward and dysfunctional to understand this concept. It's said that the Palestinians 'never miss an opportunity to ''miss an opportunity.'' Well, that is their problem, not ours.
Hell, you could take all the Palestinians and put them in the middle of the endless slums of Lagos or Nairobi or Abidjan or Kinshasa and they would just -disappear- as if they never existed.
The Palestinians don't realize how lucky they are to have the Israelis as the occupying force in their land.
Your views sir, are to be frank, extremely odious and an anethema to decent human compassion. You need to take history lessons. Fast.
You forgot the number one reason people resort to terrorism.
7) It's the only political voice they (think they) have.
People don't just wake up one morning and decide, "Hmmm, I think... I'll blow myself up." It take years of social and political supression to create the kind of pressure necessary to get precipitate terrorism, paticularly suicide terrorism.
In a recent study, it was found that the majority of suicide bombers were actually quite intelligent and affluent by comparision, and generally had no previous record of violence. Strange but true.
The moral of the story is that terrorists are trying to say something. Their message is usually lost amid the shrapnel, but if you look into it you'll find most have quite legitimate grievences. Does this justify killing other people? Well you'll find that the repression they're subject to has a way of twisting peoples views on that too.
Bottom line. Terrorism doesn't "happen". It's created. The solution is to find the cause, not treat the symptoms.
TFA says it all: "I don't use IE at all, but I'll test on it because I have to," said Web designer Donna Donohue...."We code to standards to be compliant with Firefox, and then hack for IE."
So if MS is standards compliant with IE7, there should be nothing to worry about. Of course we all know that that is NOT going to happen. IE7 might be standards based, but expect sweet and fattening IE7 only extentions in HTML pages that will break other browsers rendering.
I suppose this is why MS is calling for developers to pay attention to the new IE UA. IE7 might be rendering in a totally different way to IE5/6 and so will need to be treated differently to other browsers. In other words, MS wouldn't need to bother to mention this if IE7 was standards compliant. I'm smelling a hoard of compatability problems in the near future dragging us all back to the dark ages similar to the following.
However, Champeon added that he builds sites from the ground up to work in any Web browser, by following the set of principles known as "progressive enhancement." Uhhhgghh!! I've met "progressive enhancement" once before. You've never seen such ugly, malformed, duplicitous code. Non standards compliant web site code that tries to be cross-browser is most of the reason I decided not to get into web development.
Not to sound condecending, but I long ago became too irritated by the sound of hard disks churning and clanking as they swaped or virtual memory was being allocated.
Memory is cheap now. Some of it is slow, but it is cheap, and at least it's faster than swapping. Do yourself a favour if your system is swapping and go out and buy yourself half a gig of cheap memory. It'll cost about $100, yes, but think of the time you'll save.
I'm running FC3 at the moment with, 1GB of memory(the decadance). I don't think the swap has ever been used. Ever. OK extreme example, but I guessing at lot of 512MB machines + $100 = a lot less swapping.
All that said the whole cache memory thing bothers me. if nothing is using the cache memory, then why does it go out to swap?
As for laptops. Yes laptop memory is more expensive. On top of that, CPU usage comes with battery time cost. There should be a laptop install, along with the workstation, desktop and server installs. This would be a lower memory, lower performance install for laptops and older machines, with candy services turned off. That is, if there isn't one already.
All this said, cheap memory is still no excuse for bloat. Packages should learn to slim. It's no good adding extra features if the users system is slowing to a craw. Linux will only be a lot more competative with Longhorn if it is using less resources than both Longhorn AND the current gen Windows, as Linux will be replacing a lot of old Win XP and 2000 machines. Distros should support more compact installations supporting 128MB RAM machines.
Great, now I can look forward to €45 titles instead of €60 ones. This despite the favourable US/Euro exchange rate. So instead of paying ~$71 for my games, I'll now be paying ~$53 dollars, which is still more than the $50 that is paid for games in the States!!! Arrgghh!!
I would just like to say that Halo is^H^H 2 is still the pinacle and greatest shining example of what first person shooters strive to be. It is a work or surpassing excellence, unmatched in brilliance. I give thanks daily for it's creation, knowing that without it my life would not have been worth living. Playing on Xbox live is the most immesive and rewarding.......Oh... this is about just Bungie?
There should be a public enquiry, Macarthy style into the USPTO. It's directors should be jailed, the people who granted the patents should follow.
Too extreme? These people are crippling the economy of the world! They have broken their mandate and gone out of their way to turn the whole patent system into a joke.
I think jail time for those responsible for issuing patents like this isn't out of the question,
Better is... better. Yes. But Better graphics != Better
But the GT1 - GT4 hop is unbelievable. Graphically yes, but you are in fact playing almost exactly the same game, just with different and more shiny cars. When is the innovation.(I am aware that shinier cars are in fact the primary reason people buy GT games)
Now use the above analogy with any of your favorite games. Final Fantasy VII vs. Final Fantasy X-2? Huge. Indeed. However I will still submit, as will many others, that FFVII is a better game than FFX-2, or indeed FFX itself.
Grand Theft Auto 1 vs. Vice City/San Andreas? Unbelievably huge difference. Exactly. The GTA series has gone up and up. Are graphics the reason for this. No. Sure the move to 3D was nessesary, but beyond that what rockstar have done is add more and more content. they have innovated, not rennovated graphics.
In 2 or 3 years when the best of the best come out for the next gen consoles, it will blow the pants off whatever came out in the early months of the current generation consoles, IMHO. Great, better graphics. Then why do I have the feeling that the lineup on next-gen consoles will be less impressive than the current offerings?
Primary example of how better graphics != better gameplay. Spiderman 2. Bravo to the developers. they toned down the graphics and in return gave us a far superior game than the original on the PS2. if they had fallen into the rut of, "games MUST have better graphics or they won't sell" we'd never have gotten the genius that was swinging across manhatten, from rooftop to street, with no loading times. Kudos.
I for one, will take better gameplay over better graphics 10 times out of 10. Graphics are like good look. It's nice for your lover to be stunning, but most of us are ultimately happier with an average looking person with a great personality.
I know that this is exactly the type of thing the patent system was designed for, and that this guy should get his patents at the drop of a hat.
But having listened to the amount for rubbish software patents and the arguments against them, I found myself thinking, on first reading the article, that he shouldn't get a patent, because it will be abused. He'll monopolise, it's not really innovative(fish do ity), he'll over price the technology, stifle innovation, etc, etc....
Wow. Software patents have really twisted my view of the whole patent system.
I hope that ideas like this will save innocence until they are of age. And what age is that? 14? 16? 18? 21? The day after they're married? For that matter, what the hell is this innocence of which you speak?
Children should be taught about sex from the age of two onwards. It should be a continuous educational process, like talking, walking, reading and playing. Those who think that this is somehow "wrong", "dirty" or takes away "innocence" are poster children for this to be done for every single child.
The idea that children grow up not knowing what sex is, or worse learning all they know from smut jokes and pop up porn is absolutely ridiculous and if parents are too embarrassed about sex, for whatever reason, to teach them, then, ridiculous as it sounds, the state will have to provide, once again.
If my eight years old is subjected to a pop up porn ad, I'll expect them to know exactly whats going on, rather than sit there gawk eyed, blush and later pretend like it never happened.
To be honest with you, someone has at last made a TCO argument that makes sense to be. You have shown that considering that software was such a small percentage of your IT budget, savings to be made by using Linux were small in comparison to the project as a whole. You also appear to have gotton the bulk licencing deal of the century, which was probably a good incentive to go with windows.
I would agree, that in 2001 Linux was not a viable option for your network as it still too immature. Your point about Oracle is also significant as at the time again, no alternative existed. Also at the time, apps in Linux were lacking, so it would not have been a good idea to use it. By the time 2007/2008 comes around, then yes, naturally Linux will be on the list of alternatives. And I would say that even now, and certainly by 2007/8, it will be a significantly more inticing solution than an XP pro based network. I don't know why you dismiss the "free" distros on the workstations. I am aware of at least one medium sized (~150 PCs) network where this is the case.
Everything you are doing with windows is more doable now in Linux. It clearly wasn't in 2001. Also in 2001, all other *nix based solutions were probably more expensive than windows solutions, so your choice to go with windows in 2001, was probably a good one. And as I recall in 2001 the windows security situation had not become as outrageous as it is today. So your solution at that time, was both a fairly cost effective and secure one.
On the matter of your "zero" security problems. I would say your true rate is somewhat higher than this. Yes, a monday morning audit on the wiped machines will reveal "zero" problems, but I feel a friday evening audit would tell a different story. Again, the keystone of your security is the OS imaging and reinstallation on weekends. If you stopped reimaging, for whatever reason, would your network remain secure? Imaging OSes is a luxury a great many admins simply cannot afford. Is this really a solution, or a workaround? And is this what has to be put up with to run an efficient windows network.
2. The CEO of the privately held company helped design parts of the IT policy. A very, very saavy man. Him and the old CIO that I replaced (after he dropped dead) designed the IT policy from the ground up. As I said before, good management is probobly the only reason your solution has lasted this long. One quarter with a PHB type CEO and your solution will be biting the dust.
3. Contrary to your claims of the extremely time consuming nature of the process, it was only time consuming for the machines. As I mentioned, the IT department here was very small. Myself, four full timers, a handful of part timers on the help desk, and that's it. For managing 50,000 machines and 100,000 users, with 80 servers in the mix. Thats a good ratio, and depending on your industry, probably 5 times better than anyone else. I cannot for the life of me see how a handful of IT staff handled 100,000 users. I worked in a company with 200 users and the five helpdesk personel spent most of their time running about, setting up email clients, installing new hardware and finding lost files. What are you doing to the clueless lusers who lose their files or forget their training? Who installs new PCs? Are you delegating duties? If you are then you need to revise your estimates of helpdesk personel.
How? See, we had dozens of you guys show up, take a tour, and tell us how linux would be much better! Save us a million bucks a year! It's like the long distance guy who calls up and says he can save me $50 a month on my phone bill, not knowing my phone bill is only $25 to start with.
How is it going to be more manageable? We had complete control of every workstation. We had neatly divided groups of policies that were handed out to users. Machines were evenly and routinely updated. Making large changes was as easy as small changes. We were able to quickly and easily deploy large changes as needed.
The fact is, you have no basis for your assertion. You assume that *nix would have been better, because you can't believe that a Windows network would work well. But I am telling you this: it did.
To begin. Windows licencing. I haven't looked at this in a long time, but I'm going to hazard a lowest possible estimate of $50 per machine, not user, per annum. Times 50,000 machines. Bang. $2.5 million big ones. Are you using office? Lets pretend you've got the lisencing agreement of the century. $100, per user, per annum. Boom! $10 million dollars. Down the toilet. And I mean down the toilet. No organisation should be paying $10 million for office. No one.
Lets not even mention the servers. I shudder to think of the fodders of money you are forking over for the privilage of ADT and Exchange.
This is my basis for lower cost. Let the TCO waving legions come and get me. They are full of it. We are talking 50,000 machines here. User licencing costs are $0 total for linux. Zero dollars! Server? There's always RedHat to buy from if you wanted to buy. That's expensive, but seriously, for a network this size, your server should be your own, rather than Redhat's.
How is it going to be more manageable? Where do I begin? For a start, do you even want PC's anymore? You could go for thin-clients on NX or the like and save yourself millions by the time the next upgrade cycle comes up. Every single thing about Linux is customisable. Everything. There is nothing you cannot manage. Right down to chroot to keep clever users in check. You say you can manage windows. Not half so well as you could manage *nix. Updating. Can you say auto-rpm. Every app updates itself. Every app, thousands of apps. Not that you need many apps anyway if your migrating from windows. Everything that you have described doing in windows can be done in Linux, and I would imagine to a greater level of customisability. At least you won't have to image anymore. Training is obviously an issue, but a lot of apps are similar to the MS apps anyway. Migration of custom solutions could give troub
That's utter bullocks. I should disregard the rest of your post, but you are entirely incorrect. Win32 API does not bypass file system permissions, registry permissions, etc. Yes, if there is an exploit/bug those restrictions *could* be bypassed.
I have personally witnessed a knowladgeable hacker use win32 API calls to gain admin privilages on a PC so he could install firefox on the PC. That said, your restriction to trusted binaries might cope with this, but exploits in trusted binaries are still a problem in this regard.
False. Very easy. Boot each image once a week on a test machine/VMware. Update all apps, the OS, anything else you want to do. Then that image is pushed out to the clients. Very, very efficent delivery method. The lynchpin of your solution appears to be the OS reinstallation on login. You have basically given up on any attempt to secure the OS itself and simply wipe it regardless. While some might regard this as an effective solution(and indeed it is the only solution when rootkits are the problem) it isn't really a security solution. It is a security workaround to the inherent insecurity of windows. A very extreme one at that. You admit it takes 6 minutes for each reinstallation on login. Think of the network traffic alone!
And the reinstallation is not a good solution. If so much as one vendor decides not to support it, or worse becomes belligerent enough to ask more money to give you the privilage of the extra copies this entails, your careful plan is blown sky high. Microsoft support it NOW. What about in the future? What about other vendors? What happens when the company's newly bought solution just won't play nice with this and the vendor just won't budge? Trouble. No wonder your not using AV software.
OS reinstallation on login is not a solution. At best, it's a declaration of the unmanagbility of windows. If this is what it takes to run a windows network, what the hell are you running a windows network for. With so many locked down apps and OS images, I doubt most of your clients are using custom built solutions or anything other than Office and web browsing, so OS migration should be a lot easier.
Though your tribulations in securing the network are impressive, your whole network is a prime example of the need to move off windows. It's a poster child for a switch, not a reason to stay. If this is the level of time and resources it takes to keep a windows network clean, I'm better off elsewhere.
You can throw any professional at it you want, the thing is tight. You don't think our IDS was going off with attempted crackings at all hours, practically every day? You don't think we didnt have malicious users trying to cause trouble?
How about I throw new company management at it(read Pointy-Haired Boss)? Management that's easily swayed by a slick vendor who's product won't fit into your model, and who persuades the boss that it's your model that's at fault. "Our app needs admin privilages", "We don't support imaging", "Imaging costs extra"
Your solution is working because you have an unusual amount of power for an IT director. You have enough control over the network to implement this. The arrival of a Pointy-Haired Boss will torpedo all your carefully laid plans and bring ruination to your boxen. Admittedly a PHB wouldn't look to kindly on a network of mac, bsd or linux boxen, but at least you could argue an OS migration would be too difficult.
Though valient, your efforts are all ultimately unnessesary. You have labouriously pounded out a windows shaped hole in the wall of secure networking, something that few other managers could ever dream of doing. A 50K user, unix based solution would be more efficient, more manageable and more flexible than what you've set up. Why didn't you take this option?
Close, but no. They had full access that was heavily filtered through a proxy, and aggressively tracked for nasty things. Filtering? 50K users? What's wrong with this picture? Is this proxy in the Top 10 supercomputer lists?
Not true, my friend! Lock it down! Lock down the registry, disable ActiveX, filter out drive-by installs at the proxy. Run the user as a user, not an administrator. What about the win32 APIs. They allow admin privilages even if the user is running a reduced privilage.
Users are unable by permission to mount removable media. So you have effectively banned removeable media. Actually, I agree with this, but your users a probobly p/o'ed
False! 100K users, 50k machines, no infections, no spyware, never, not once! Now I know something is wrong with your network. I suggest you audit it, immediately.
Yu are buying into a victim culture of IT! Its too hard! MS ruins it for me! It's all those baddies against me! The baddies are out there man. They are pros. Spammers, marketers, DDOSers who spend their days finding and exploiting holes in windows boxes. Malware doesn't happen by accident. it happens because very determined people want your boxen for their twisted money making schemes. People blame user stupidity and ignorence for malware issues, but in truth it is the cunning and ingenuity of ruthless crackers which is to blame.
1. No users ran with admin privelages, ever. That is huge, huge, huge. Even when I was logged in to a dev box, I was was not an administrator of anything. We heavily used RunAs techniques for slightly privelaged operations. Users aren't admins you say? Tough luck sonny. It's called win32 API programming and it gets past all such restrictions. Malware will most likely run as admin whether your user is one or not. user mode will not save you.
2. We used group policies to specify exactly which binaries a specific user or group of users could run. This is also huge. I hope iexplore.exe and outlook.exe were in there, cause if they wern't.... msnmessenger too.
3. ActiveX completely disabled. Naturally. However a better step would be to ensure ActiveX is never used by switching to alternate browsers. Also, the users(malware) may, for whatever reason, find a way to turn ActiveX back on, or worse, request it! Getting rid of IE altogether is a better step.
4. All web content went through our web proxy, which aggresively filtered out potential problems. Well i should hope it did go through a proxy, otherwise you'll have quite a large rental charge on your telephone bill. And your proxies "filtered" all web content? Are they supercomputers!?
5. Aggressive use of known good machine images. Each machine was literally one of 3 templates. We could log a user off remotely, reboot the box from the network RIS server, reload his/her machine image template, boot back up, log the user back in, and they'd never know that their entire hard drive had been erased, the OS and apps recopied, and reset. That process was an extreme measure, but it took about 6 minutes, start to finish. It was like a slightly longer version of a reboot to users.
So basically what you're saying is each boot was a throwaway OS image, which you simply wipe after each user logs off.
OK, I'm not even going to begin to describe how much hassle your solution is, especially when it comes to upgrade time. It's also most likely illegal and unsupported, as you aren't usually allowed to make such back ups of software. Good luck getting support.
On top of that, I patiently await the day one of your machines become infected at 09:05 and proceeds to infect the entire network. You'll have one hell of a day then. Do you expect to tell all 100K of your users to log off at the same time? Do you realise that the machines will be reinfected by those that wern't turned off? Even if you do get a company wide switch off, I doubt your servers will be able to handle the load. Good luck with that.
Your solution is extreme. If this is what it takes to run a windows network you should be asking yourself why you are running a windows network.
Finally, it's worth noting, we never had an anti-virus package on the workstations
...We used no anti-spyware packages!...
...outgoing ports were watched but not restricted (we let them have an IM package installed...
...there was nothing stopping them from trying to visit any old dark corner.
Your network sir, is a disaster waiting to happen. The next sobig or sasser will cripple it quickly. I'd wager it is spending most of its life as a productive DDOS or spam botnet as we speak. it is a juicy plum, waiting to be picked by professional cracker gangs.
In my time, we never had (1) any problems with patching, (2) a single piece of spyware found on any machine, (3) a single virus or worm or other such outbreak of unauthorized software, (4) any data loss or corruption and (5) a single BSOD. I had a core group of 12 servers that were "mission critical", whose uptime from the day I started to the day my replacement came aboard was perfect.
OK. Either a) Your machines and users are swamed with infections and you're just too self confident to see it. or b) Your network does not in fact have any access to the net(at all!)
You do realise that on most windows boxes a user so much as visiting a malicious site will infect the machine. This is not to mention the legions of suspect attachements they open everyday? Do you even run Spybot or equililents? Have you heard of USB drives? Do root kits ring a bell?
I'm not going to elaborate on all the things that can lead to infection on a windows box, or what an infection can result in. What I will say is that Anti-virus, firewalls and automatic updates cannot gaurantee security. You've got users, on windows boxes. Face it. They will be infected within one week of clean install. There is nothing short of cutting your net connection and bolting shut media drives. Nothing.
You may feel you're still dealing with script kiddie written viruses and worms, written only for kicks. You're not. You're playing with the big boys now. Spammers and marketers whos 24/7 purpose in life is to get a hold of your machines and maintain that hold whether you like it or not.
But take a long hard look at what McVoy's licence was doing. It was placing a restriction on who could be a Linux programmer! Not groovy man!
Like it or not, there was a huge danger that McVoy could have extended the terms of his licence further down the road, when the Linux programmers were even more dependant on his "free" software.
This has little to do with philosophies, Tridgell's or otherwise. Using Bitkeeper was not a bad decision. Accepting McVoy's license was!
What would you say if I started an OSS project and then said you could only work on it if you wern't doing any XYZ programming. You'd laugh me off Sourceforge. Open source is about reducing restrictions on software. The Open Source movement sees restrictive licences as damage and routes around them, and that's what Tridgell did. This kind of action isn't a liability, it's an asset to the movement. OSS is not about shared source, cherry OS, or Larry McVoy saying who can or cannot work on the Linux kernel.
If you want to use BitKeeper on your OSS project, then pay for it. Don't sign your freedom, or that of your developers, away to some childish licence so you can save a few bucks.
McVoy was never Linux's "friend". He was a businessman, looking for Linus and crew as poster boys to sell his product.
Linus was fooled. Sure Bitkeeper was a superior product, but the fact is that if the Linux developers really wanted it, they should have ponyed up the cash. McVoys ridiculous licence sounded like something you'd hear in junior high sleepover party. It's for free, but I control what you do. Yes McVoy did not have a say over the Linux project, but he did in effect have a say of what the Linux developers did with their private lives. This was really asking too much. If I work for company X which develops an alternative to bitkeeper then I can't help write Linux. That not good karma man. That's exclusionary, not inclusionary. That's not what Linux is about!
The cost of accepting his agreement in my opinion, was more expensive for Linux than simply forking over $500,000. You can't put a price on cordial developer relations, and McVoy and his "free" product have really soured relations. I hope everyone is mature enough to realise this.
I don't know what McVoy is up to now. He's openly decieved everyone before, by saying he was "for" open source. He wasn't. He was for himself. Nothing wrong with that, it's telling other people you arn't that was wrong.
What's he doing now? Discrediting Linux. Why? We can quickly deduce it's for himself. How does he benefit? Lure away disgruntled developers? Hardly. Linux developers are a little above falling for this level of petulance. Maybe he's getting hard cash for voicing such opinions. He wouldn't be the first. Can you say Yankee?
The bitkeeper fiasco is an example of how you can't eat your cake and keep it too. If Linus wanted bitkeeper he should have paid the full licence fee. Anything less was fooling no one. If you want to play with proprierty sorftware, you have to pay the price, one way or the other.
In a way, this has benefited the whole OSS movement. We now have a perfect case study on how not to use proprietry solutions in an OSS product. In other words, don't give one vendor undeserved and unaccountable control over either your project or your developers.
The information was already freely available only the print was done by Elsevier ea which charge for the distribution cost (like GPL: Information is free, but someone is allowed to charge you for the distribution cost).
Incorrect. The information certainly was not free. The publisher retains the copyright.
True. I can obtain the information for a fee, usually of the order of $20~$50 for a single article, however once I have obtained the information, it is still not mine. I have obtained only a single user license. I cannot copy and distribute the material to other, with or with a distrobution fee, as the copyright has been transferred to the publisher, and remains there. I have rights only to read, not to write to or copy.
This may seem pedantic to some. What's the difference? Surely people photocopy articles anyway and get around this.
Well, consider the future of journal subscription. What happens when articles are locked up by DRM, and I have no rights to do anything except read the article on a single computer, or perhaps print one and only one hard copy. This is coming. For music and films, it is already here. What makes you think scientific articles are immune.
The real bad part about the magazine prints is that the distribution cost is very high. No it isn't. In the digital age, the cost of information distrobution is effecitvely zero. Hence the old publishers business model is no longer applicable. Like the music industry, they need to change the way they do business.
The real advantage of a system like darenet (at moment when it is not being/.ed) is the ability to find all the articles which did not make it into the magazines, and it is better seachrable. No. That advantage could easily be conferred by a private publisher, and indeed has been, for the modest sum of $20~$50 per article. The REAL advantage of DAREnet is that the information is free as in freedom(I hope). Hence we all benefit from its ability to flow without restrictions from mind to mind, rather than only the publisher benefiting from the massive artificial restrictions on information flow they implement.
I believe I have been sold a counterfeit copy of my computer operating system.
The package contained an OS, Office Software, Games, Web browsers, Email clients, IM clients, doodling packages, and all the other assorted knicknacks I expect from my copy of a Windows OS. It also contained a multitude of development tools, website hosting software, and various other specialised programs worth thousands of dollars!
Furthermore, not only did I recieve the software at low, low prices ($0.00-$60), all MicroSoft branding had been removed and was replaced by penguins, feet, red hats, cogs, some sort of cow and an orange fox.
The name of the fraudulants sellers were Redhat, Mandrake, Novell and Debian!
I hope you will take appropriate action against these charletans for providing what must be counterfeit quality products at such shamelessly low prices!
Slashdot Mirror
Sir! The breathtaking splendour of your Troll, the mastery of its inception, the subtlety of its exectution, shall be remembered forever in the anals of Slashdot hostory.
Do your bit for the destruction of md5 by adding to the database using this simple script!
/usr/bin/perl
#!
system 'apg -n 5 > okpasswords';
open(passfile, "okpasswords");
while($password = ){
chop $password;
print $password.";";
}
print "\n";
Then just paste 'em in.
Farewell Md5. Thou hast served us surprisingly well.
Because of those FS advocates. It's no different if a friend (and I use the term loosely) tells you not to buy a new Ford Mustang, and then steals it when you do. That's what we call fucked up.
No. Bitkeeper was a ticking time bomb, waiting to explode. Sooner or later, it would have come right back to bite everyone in the ass.
The situation is analagous to Linus accepting a booby trapped Ford Mustang, gratis from McVoy, and then getting irritated when Tridgell safely detonates the device while he's in the store buying supplies for an offroad camping trip.
It's said that the Palestinians are simply too backward and dysfunctional to understand this concept. It's said that the Palestinians 'never miss an opportunity to ''miss an opportunity.'' Well, that is their problem, not ours.
Hell, you could take all the Palestinians and put them in the middle of the endless slums of Lagos or Nairobi or Abidjan or Kinshasa and they would just -disappear- as if they never existed.
The Palestinians don't realize how lucky they are to have the Israelis as the occupying force in their land.
Your views sir, are to be frank, extremely odious and an anethema to decent human compassion. You need to take history lessons. Fast.
You forgot the number one reason people resort to terrorism.
7) It's the only political voice they (think they) have.
People don't just wake up one morning and decide, "Hmmm, I think... I'll blow myself up." It take years of social and political supression to create the kind of pressure necessary to get precipitate terrorism, paticularly suicide terrorism.
In a recent study, it was found that the majority of suicide bombers were actually quite intelligent and affluent by comparision, and generally had no previous record of violence. Strange but true.
The moral of the story is that terrorists are trying to say something. Their message is usually lost amid the shrapnel, but if you look into it you'll find most have quite legitimate grievences. Does this justify killing other people? Well you'll find that the repression they're subject to has a way of twisting peoples views on that too.
Bottom line. Terrorism doesn't "happen". It's created. The solution is to find the cause, not treat the symptoms.
TFA says it all:
"I don't use IE at all, but I'll test on it because I have to," said Web designer Donna Donohue...."We code to standards to be compliant with Firefox, and then hack for IE."
So if MS is standards compliant with IE7, there should be nothing to worry about. Of course we all know that that is NOT going to happen. IE7 might be standards based, but expect sweet and fattening IE7 only extentions in HTML pages that will break other browsers rendering.
I suppose this is why MS is calling for developers to pay attention to the new IE UA. IE7 might be rendering in a totally different way to IE5/6 and so will need to be treated differently to other browsers. In other words, MS wouldn't need to bother to mention this if IE7 was standards compliant. I'm smelling a hoard of compatability problems in the near future dragging us all back to the dark ages similar to the following.
However, Champeon added that he builds sites from the ground up to work in any Web browser, by following the set of principles known as "progressive enhancement."
Uhhhgghh!! I've met "progressive enhancement" once before. You've never seen such ugly, malformed, duplicitous code. Non standards compliant web site code that tries to be cross-browser is most of the reason I decided not to get into web development.
Not to sound condecending, but I long ago became too irritated by the sound of hard disks churning and clanking as they swaped or virtual memory was being allocated.
Memory is cheap now. Some of it is slow, but it is cheap, and at least it's faster than swapping. Do yourself a favour if your system is swapping and go out and buy yourself half a gig of cheap memory. It'll cost about $100, yes, but think of the time you'll save.
I'm running FC3 at the moment with, 1GB of memory(the decadance). I don't think the swap has ever been used. Ever.
OK extreme example, but I guessing at lot of 512MB machines + $100 = a lot less swapping.
All that said the whole cache memory thing bothers me. if nothing is using the cache memory, then why does it go out to swap?
As for laptops. Yes laptop memory is more expensive. On top of that, CPU usage comes with battery time cost. There should be a laptop install, along with the workstation, desktop and server installs. This would be a lower memory, lower performance install for laptops and older machines, with candy services turned off. That is, if there isn't one already.
All this said, cheap memory is still no excuse for bloat. Packages should learn to slim. It's no good adding extra features if the users system is slowing to a craw. Linux will only be a lot more competative with Longhorn if it is using less resources than both Longhorn AND the current gen Windows, as Linux will be replacing a lot of old Win XP and 2000 machines. Distros should support more compact installations supporting 128MB RAM machines.
Great, now I can look forward to €45 titles instead of €60 ones. This despite the favourable US/Euro exchange rate.
So instead of paying ~$71 for my games, I'll now be paying ~$53 dollars, which is still more than the $50 that is paid for games in the States!!!
Arrgghh!!
Thank you Sony. Thanks for nothing!!
You forget.
Here at the USPTO we grant patents without predjudice to trivial matters like gross obviousness, prior art and indeed patentability iteslf.
EU citizens can shortly talk with our overseas partners in the EUPTO for a range of multilingual computer implemented inventions.
Ahh! But just think of of the amount of money they have saved by artifically inflating the price of their goods in the digital age.
Without their anti-piracy belligerence, the cost of music and films would be dramatically lower, closer to their true worth value. ~5c per song.
I would just like to say that Halo is^H^H 2 is still the pinacle and greatest shining example of what first person shooters strive to be. It is a work or surpassing excellence, unmatched in brilliance. I give thanks daily for it's creation, knowing that without it my life would not have been worth living. Playing on Xbox live is the most immesive and rewarding.... ...Oh... this is about just Bungie?
Ummmm... ummmmm.....
I'm sick of this, there is only one solution.
There should be a public enquiry, Macarthy style into the USPTO. It's directors should be jailed, the people who granted the patents should follow.
Too extreme? These people are crippling the economy of the world! They have broken their mandate and gone out of their way to turn the whole patent system into a joke.
I think jail time for those responsible for issuing patents like this isn't out of the question,
Better is... better.
Yes. But Better graphics != Better
But the GT1 - GT4 hop is unbelievable.
Graphically yes, but you are in fact playing almost exactly the same game, just with different and more shiny cars. When is the innovation.(I am aware that shinier cars are in fact the primary reason people buy GT games)
Now use the above analogy with any of your favorite games. Final Fantasy VII vs. Final Fantasy X-2? Huge.
Indeed. However I will still submit, as will many others, that FFVII is a better game than FFX-2, or indeed FFX itself.
Grand Theft Auto 1 vs. Vice City/San Andreas? Unbelievably huge difference.
Exactly. The GTA series has gone up and up. Are graphics the reason for this. No. Sure the move to 3D was nessesary, but beyond that what rockstar have done is add more and more content. they have innovated, not rennovated graphics.
In 2 or 3 years when the best of the best come out for the next gen consoles, it will blow the pants off whatever came out in the early months of the current generation consoles, IMHO.
Great, better graphics. Then why do I have the feeling that the lineup on next-gen consoles will be less impressive than the current offerings?
Primary example of how better graphics != better gameplay. Spiderman 2. Bravo to the developers. they toned down the graphics and in return gave us a far superior game than the original on the PS2. if they had fallen into the rut of, "games MUST have better graphics or they won't sell" we'd never have gotten the genius that was swinging across manhatten, from rooftop to street, with no loading times. Kudos.
I for one, will take better gameplay over better graphics 10 times out of 10. Graphics are like good look. It's nice for your lover to be stunning, but most of us are ultimately happier with an average looking person with a great personality.
I know that this is exactly the type of thing the patent system was designed for, and that this guy should get his patents at the drop of a hat.
But having listened to the amount for rubbish software patents and the arguments against them, I found myself thinking, on first reading the article, that he shouldn't get a patent, because it will be abused. He'll monopolise, it's not really innovative(fish do ity), he'll over price the technology, stifle innovation, etc, etc....
Wow. Software patents have really twisted my view of the whole patent system.
I hope that ideas like this will save innocence until they are of age.
And what age is that? 14? 16? 18? 21? The day after they're married? For that matter, what the hell is this innocence of which you speak?
Children should be taught about sex from the age of two onwards. It should be a continuous educational process, like talking, walking, reading and playing. Those who think that this is somehow "wrong", "dirty" or takes away "innocence" are poster children for this to be done for every single child.
The idea that children grow up not knowing what sex is, or worse learning all they know from smut jokes and pop up porn is absolutely ridiculous and if parents are too embarrassed about sex, for whatever reason, to teach them, then, ridiculous as it sounds, the state will have to provide, once again.
If my eight years old is subjected to a pop up porn ad, I'll expect them to know exactly whats going on, rather than sit there gawk eyed, blush and later pretend like it never happened.
To be honest with you, someone has at last made a TCO argument that makes sense to be. You have shown that considering that software was such a small percentage of your IT budget, savings to be made by using Linux were small in comparison to the project as a whole. You also appear to have gotton the bulk licencing deal of the century, which was probably a good incentive to go with windows.
I would agree, that in 2001 Linux was not a viable option for your network as it still too immature. Your point about Oracle is also significant as at the time again, no alternative existed. Also at the time, apps in Linux were lacking, so it would not have been a good idea to use it. By the time 2007/2008 comes around, then yes, naturally Linux will be on the list of alternatives. And I would say that even now, and certainly by 2007/8, it will be a significantly more inticing solution than an XP pro based network. I don't know why you dismiss the "free" distros on the workstations. I am aware of at least one medium sized (~150 PCs) network where this is the case.
Everything you are doing with windows is more doable now in Linux. It clearly wasn't in 2001. Also in 2001, all other *nix based solutions were probably more expensive than windows solutions, so your choice to go with windows in 2001, was probably a good one. And as I recall in 2001 the windows security situation had not become as outrageous as it is today. So your solution at that time, was both a fairly cost effective and secure one.
On the matter of your "zero" security problems. I would say your true rate is somewhat higher than this. Yes, a monday morning audit on the wiped machines will reveal "zero" problems, but I feel a friday evening audit would tell a different story. Again, the keystone of your security is the OS imaging and reinstallation on weekends. If you stopped reimaging, for whatever reason, would your network remain secure? Imaging OSes is a luxury a great many admins simply cannot afford. Is this really a solution, or a workaround? And is this what has to be put up with to run an efficient windows network.
2. The CEO of the privately held company helped design parts of the IT policy. A very, very saavy man. Him and the old CIO that I replaced (after he dropped dead) designed the IT policy from the ground up.
As I said before, good management is probobly the only reason your solution has lasted this long. One quarter with a PHB type CEO and your solution will be biting the dust.
3. Contrary to your claims of the extremely time consuming nature of the process, it was only time consuming for the machines. As I mentioned, the IT department here was very small. Myself, four full timers, a handful of part timers on the help desk, and that's it. For managing 50,000 machines and 100,000 users, with 80 servers in the mix. Thats a good ratio, and depending on your industry, probably 5 times better than anyone else.
I cannot for the life of me see how a handful of IT staff handled 100,000 users. I worked in a company with 200 users and the five helpdesk personel spent most of their time running about, setting up email clients, installing new hardware and finding lost files. What are you doing to the clueless lusers who lose their files or forget their training? Who installs new PCs? Are you delegating duties? If you are then you need to revise your estimates of helpdesk personel.
How? See, we had dozens of you guys show up, take a tour, and tell us how linux would be much better! Save us a million bucks a year! It's like the long distance guy who calls up and says he can save me $50 a month on my phone bill, not knowing my phone bill is only $25 to start with.
How is it going to be more manageable? We had complete control of every workstation. We had neatly divided groups of policies that were handed out to users. Machines were evenly and routinely updated. Making large changes was as easy as small changes. We were able to quickly and easily deploy large changes as needed.
The fact is, you have no basis for your assertion. You assume that *nix would have been better, because you can't believe that a Windows network would work well. But I am telling you this: it did.
To begin. Windows licencing. I haven't looked at this in a long time, but I'm going to hazard a lowest possible estimate of $50 per machine, not user, per annum. Times 50,000 machines. Bang. $2.5 million big ones.
Are you using office? Lets pretend you've got the lisencing agreement of the century. $100, per user, per annum. Boom! $10 million dollars. Down the toilet. And I mean down the toilet. No organisation should be paying $10 million for office. No one.
Lets not even mention the servers. I shudder to think of the fodders of money you are forking over for the privilage of ADT and Exchange.
This is my basis for lower cost. Let the TCO waving legions come and get me. They are full of it. We are talking 50,000 machines here. User licencing costs are $0 total for linux. Zero dollars!
Server? There's always RedHat to buy from if you wanted to buy. That's expensive, but seriously, for a network this size, your server should be your own, rather than Redhat's.
How is it going to be more manageable? Where do I begin? For a start, do you even want PC's anymore? You could go for thin-clients on NX or the like and save yourself millions by the time the next upgrade cycle comes up.
Every single thing about Linux is customisable. Everything. There is nothing you cannot manage. Right down to chroot to keep clever users in check. You say you can manage windows. Not half so well as you could manage *nix.
Updating. Can you say auto-rpm. Every app updates itself. Every app, thousands of apps. Not that you need many apps anyway if your migrating from windows.
Everything that you have described doing in windows can be done in Linux, and I would imagine to a greater level of customisability.
At least you won't have to image anymore. Training is obviously an issue, but a lot of apps are similar to the MS apps anyway. Migration of custom solutions could give troub
That's utter bullocks. I should disregard the rest of your post, but you are entirely incorrect. Win32 API does not bypass file system permissions, registry permissions, etc. Yes, if there is an exploit/bug those restrictions *could* be bypassed.
I have personally witnessed a knowladgeable hacker use win32 API calls to gain admin privilages on a PC so he could install firefox on the PC. That said, your restriction to trusted binaries might cope with this, but exploits in trusted binaries are still a problem in this regard.
False. Very easy. Boot each image once a week on a test machine/VMware. Update all apps, the OS, anything else you want to do. Then that image is pushed out to the clients. Very, very efficent delivery method.
The lynchpin of your solution appears to be the OS reinstallation on login.
You have basically given up on any attempt to secure the OS itself and simply wipe it regardless. While some might regard this as an effective solution(and indeed it is the only solution when rootkits are the problem) it isn't really a security solution. It is a security workaround to the inherent insecurity of windows. A very extreme one at that. You admit it takes 6 minutes for each reinstallation on login. Think of the network traffic alone!
And the reinstallation is not a good solution. If so much as one vendor decides not to support it, or worse becomes belligerent enough to ask more money to give you the privilage of the extra copies this entails, your careful plan is blown sky high. Microsoft support it NOW. What about in the future? What about other vendors? What happens when the company's newly bought solution just won't play nice with this and the vendor just won't budge? Trouble. No wonder your not using AV software.
OS reinstallation on login is not a solution. At best, it's a declaration of the unmanagbility of windows. If this is what it takes to run a windows network, what the hell are you running a windows network for. With so many locked down apps and OS images, I doubt most of your clients are using custom built solutions or anything other than Office and web browsing, so OS migration should be a lot easier.
Though your tribulations in securing the network are impressive, your whole network is a prime example of the need to move off windows. It's a poster child for a switch, not a reason to stay. If this is the level of time and resources it takes to keep a windows network clean, I'm better off elsewhere.
You can throw any professional at it you want, the thing is tight. You don't think our IDS was going off with attempted crackings at all hours, practically every day? You don't think we didnt have malicious users trying to cause trouble?
How about I throw new company management at it(read Pointy-Haired Boss)? Management that's easily swayed by a slick vendor who's product won't fit into your model, and who persuades the boss that it's your model that's at fault. "Our app needs admin privilages", "We don't support imaging", "Imaging costs extra"
Your solution is working because you have an unusual amount of power for an IT director. You have enough control over the network to implement this. The arrival of a Pointy-Haired Boss will torpedo all your carefully laid plans and bring ruination to your boxen. Admittedly a PHB wouldn't look to kindly on a network of mac, bsd or linux boxen, but at least you could argue an OS migration would be too difficult.
Though valient, your efforts are all ultimately unnessesary. You have labouriously pounded out a windows shaped hole in the wall of secure networking, something that few other managers could ever dream of doing. A 50K user, unix based solution would be more efficient, more manageable and more flexible than what you've set up. Why didn't you take this option?
Close, but no. They had full access that was heavily filtered through a proxy, and aggressively tracked for nasty things.
Filtering? 50K users? What's wrong with this picture? Is this proxy in the Top 10 supercomputer lists?
Not true, my friend! Lock it down! Lock down the registry, disable ActiveX, filter out drive-by installs at the proxy. Run the user as a user, not an administrator.
What about the win32 APIs. They allow admin privilages even if the user is running a reduced privilage.
Users are unable by permission to mount removable media.
So you have effectively banned removeable media. Actually, I agree with this, but your users a probobly p/o'ed
False! 100K users, 50k machines, no infections, no spyware, never, not once!
Now I know something is wrong with your network. I suggest you audit it, immediately.
Yu are buying into a victim culture of IT! Its too hard! MS ruins it for me! It's all those baddies against me!
The baddies are out there man. They are pros. Spammers, marketers, DDOSers who spend their days finding and exploiting holes in windows boxes. Malware doesn't happen by accident. it happens because very determined people want your boxen for their twisted money making schemes. People blame user stupidity and ignorence for malware issues, but in truth it is the cunning and ingenuity of ruthless crackers which is to blame.
1. No users ran with admin privelages, ever. That is huge, huge, huge. Even when I was logged in to a dev box, I was was not an administrator of anything. We heavily used RunAs techniques for slightly privelaged operations.
...We used no anti-spyware packages!...
...outgoing ports were watched but not restricted (we let them have an IM package installed...
...there was nothing stopping them from trying to visit any old dark corner.
Users aren't admins you say? Tough luck sonny. It's called win32 API programming and it gets past all such restrictions. Malware will most likely run as admin whether your user is one or not. user mode will not save you.
2. We used group policies to specify exactly which binaries a specific user or group of users could run. This is also huge.
I hope iexplore.exe and outlook.exe were in there, cause if they wern't.... msnmessenger too.
3. ActiveX completely disabled.
Naturally. However a better step would be to ensure ActiveX is never used by switching to alternate browsers. Also, the users(malware) may, for whatever reason, find a way to turn ActiveX back on, or worse, request it! Getting rid of IE altogether is a better step.
4. All web content went through our web proxy, which aggresively filtered out potential problems.
Well i should hope it did go through a proxy, otherwise you'll have quite a large rental charge on your telephone bill. And your proxies "filtered" all web content? Are they supercomputers!?
5. Aggressive use of known good machine images. Each machine was literally one of 3 templates. We could log a user off remotely, reboot the box from the network RIS server, reload his/her machine image template, boot back up, log the user back in, and they'd never know that their entire hard drive had been erased, the OS and apps recopied, and reset. That process was an extreme measure, but it took about 6 minutes, start to finish. It was like a slightly longer version of a reboot to users.
So basically what you're saying is each boot was a throwaway OS image, which you simply wipe after each user logs off.
OK, I'm not even going to begin to describe how much hassle your solution is, especially when it comes to upgrade time. It's also most likely illegal and unsupported, as you aren't usually allowed to make such back ups of software. Good luck getting support.
On top of that, I patiently await the day one of your machines become infected at 09:05 and proceeds to infect the entire network. You'll have one hell of a day then. Do you expect to tell all 100K of your users to log off at the same time? Do you realise that the machines will be reinfected by those that wern't turned off? Even if you do get a company wide switch off, I doubt your servers will be able to handle the load. Good luck with that.
Your solution is extreme. If this is what it takes to run a windows network you should be asking yourself why you are running a windows network.
Finally, it's worth noting, we never had an anti-virus package on the workstations
Your network sir, is a disaster waiting to happen. The next sobig or sasser will cripple it quickly. I'd wager it is spending most of its life as a productive DDOS or spam botnet as we speak. it is a juicy plum, waiting to be picked by professional cracker gangs.
In my time, we never had (1) any problems with patching, (2) a single piece of spyware found on any machine, (3) a single virus or worm or other such outbreak of unauthorized software, (4) any data loss or corruption and (5) a single BSOD. I had a core group of 12 servers that were "mission critical", whose uptime from the day I started to the day my replacement came aboard was perfect.
OK. Either
a) Your machines and users are swamed with infections and you're just too self confident to see it.
or
b) Your network does not in fact have any access to the net(at all!)
You do realise that on most windows boxes a user so much as visiting a malicious site will infect the machine. This is not to mention the legions of suspect attachements they open everyday? Do you even run Spybot or equililents? Have you heard of USB drives? Do root kits ring a bell?
I'm not going to elaborate on all the things that can lead to infection on a windows box, or what an infection can result in. What I will say is that Anti-virus, firewalls and automatic updates cannot gaurantee security.
You've got users, on windows boxes. Face it. They will be infected within one week of clean install. There is nothing short of cutting your net connection and bolting shut media drives. Nothing.
You may feel you're still dealing with script kiddie written viruses and worms, written only for kicks. You're not. You're playing with the big boys now. Spammers and marketers whos 24/7 purpose in life is to get a hold of your machines and maintain that hold whether you like it or not.
But take a long hard look at what McVoy's licence was doing. It was placing a restriction on who could be a Linux programmer! Not groovy man!
Like it or not, there was a huge danger that McVoy could have extended the terms of his licence further down the road, when the Linux programmers were even more dependant on his "free" software.
This has little to do with philosophies, Tridgell's or otherwise.
Using Bitkeeper was not a bad decision.
Accepting McVoy's license was!
What would you say if I started an OSS project and then said you could only work on it if you wern't doing any XYZ programming. You'd laugh me off Sourceforge. Open source is about reducing restrictions on software. The Open Source movement sees restrictive licences as damage and routes around them, and that's what Tridgell did. This kind of action isn't a liability, it's an asset to the movement. OSS is not about shared source, cherry OS, or Larry McVoy saying who can or cannot work on the Linux kernel.
If you want to use BitKeeper on your OSS project, then pay for it. Don't sign your freedom, or that of your developers, away to some childish licence so you can save a few bucks.
McVoy was never Linux's "friend". He was a businessman, looking for Linus and crew as poster boys to sell his product.
Linus was fooled. Sure Bitkeeper was a superior product, but the fact is that if the Linux developers really wanted it, they should have ponyed up the cash. McVoys ridiculous licence sounded like something you'd hear in junior high sleepover party. It's for free, but I control what you do.
Yes McVoy did not have a say over the Linux project, but he did in effect have a say of what the Linux developers did with their private lives. This was really asking too much. If I work for company X which develops an alternative to bitkeeper then I can't help write Linux. That not good karma man. That's exclusionary, not inclusionary. That's not what Linux is about!
The cost of accepting his agreement in my opinion, was more expensive for Linux than simply forking over $500,000. You can't put a price on cordial developer relations, and McVoy and his "free" product have really soured relations. I hope everyone is mature enough to realise this.
I don't know what McVoy is up to now. He's openly decieved everyone before, by saying he was "for" open source. He wasn't. He was for himself. Nothing wrong with that, it's telling other people you arn't that was wrong.
What's he doing now? Discrediting Linux. Why? We can quickly deduce it's for himself. How does he benefit? Lure away disgruntled developers? Hardly. Linux developers are a little above falling for this level of petulance. Maybe he's getting hard cash for voicing such opinions. He wouldn't be the first. Can you say Yankee?
The bitkeeper fiasco is an example of how you can't eat your cake and keep it too. If Linus wanted bitkeeper he should have paid the full licence fee. Anything less was fooling no one. If you want to play with proprierty sorftware, you have to pay the price, one way or the other.
In a way, this has benefited the whole OSS movement. We now have a perfect case study on how not to use proprietry solutions in an OSS product. In other words, don't give one vendor undeserved and unaccountable control over either your project or your developers.
The information was already freely available only the print was done by Elsevier ea which charge for the distribution cost (like GPL: Information is free, but someone is allowed to charge you for the distribution cost).
/.ed) is the ability to find all the articles which did not make it into the magazines, and it is better seachrable.
Incorrect. The information certainly was not free. The publisher retains the copyright.
True. I can obtain the information for a fee, usually of the order of $20~$50 for a single article, however once I have obtained the information, it is still not mine. I have obtained only a single user license. I cannot copy and distribute the material to other, with or with a distrobution fee, as the copyright has been transferred to the publisher, and remains there. I have rights only to read, not to write to or copy.
This may seem pedantic to some. What's the difference? Surely people photocopy articles anyway and get around this.
Well, consider the future of journal subscription. What happens when articles are locked up by DRM, and I have no rights to do anything except read the article on a single computer, or perhaps print one and only one hard copy. This is coming. For music and films, it is already here. What makes you think scientific articles are immune.
The real bad part about the magazine prints is that the distribution cost is very high.
No it isn't. In the digital age, the cost of information distrobution is effecitvely zero. Hence the old publishers business model is no longer applicable. Like the music industry, they need to change the way they do business.
The real advantage of a system like darenet (at moment when it is not being
No. That advantage could easily be conferred by a private publisher, and indeed has been, for the modest sum of $20~$50 per article. The REAL advantage of DAREnet is that the information is free as in freedom(I hope). Hence we all benefit from its ability to flow without restrictions from mind to mind, rather than only the publisher benefiting from the massive artificial restrictions on information flow they implement.
I believe I have been sold a counterfeit copy of my computer operating system.
The package contained an OS, Office Software, Games, Web browsers, Email clients, IM clients, doodling packages, and all the other assorted knicknacks I expect from my copy of a Windows OS. It also contained a multitude of development tools, website hosting software, and various other specialised programs worth thousands of dollars!
Furthermore, not only did I recieve the software at low, low prices ($0.00-$60), all MicroSoft branding had been removed and was replaced by penguins, feet, red hats, cogs, some sort of cow and an orange fox.
The name of the fraudulants sellers were Redhat, Mandrake, Novell and Debian!
I hope you will take appropriate action against these charletans for providing what must be counterfeit quality products at such shamelessly low prices!