Last Q/A in the article: Q: There is talk of a Google browser. Internet Explorer has had its security woes. How do you keep users?
Gates:More has been invested in making IE secure than any browser on the planet by a long shot. Nothing is going to change. That's the one over 90% of people are going to keep using. [Italics and bolded sentence my own markup]
So let me get this straight, Mr. Gates. You have thousands of people working just on Internet Explorer, and yet...a thousand or two thousand people working on Mozilla have bested you?
Nothing is going to change, indeed, Mr. Gates. You're going to keep spewing the same old story, ignoring obvious holes in your own logic (third-party software is to blame for all security problems, true...but that doesn't mean your software should allow third-party software to install itself without the user doing a thing), denying any obvious falsehoods in your own statements (" We feel like we are pioneering an experience that to us is a clear thing most households will want." - Gates, regarding Windows Media Center PCs...I'm sorry, I didn't know you pioneered multicasting from a set-top box...I presume Linksys is paying you licensing fees for their video broadcast device, to name one alternative?), and hoping people will be stupid enough to follow it.
The saddest part of the above discourse is, Gates is probably right. People are, until told otherwise, going to keep using bug-ridden products, until they are shown that there are alternatives...I know many users who have never clicked Windows Update in their lives, and not because they've never used Windows.
I could be wrong, but I'm sensing a downward spiral, when M$ can announce things such as they did in their article, and not get negative feedback from the interviewer. Just my $0.05.
This past summer, a friend of mine took it into his head to build a caseless PC.
This plan was to have two modes; a mode for work (IE: throwing it in his backpack), and a mode for play (mounting it on an RC car he built himself).
He began finished the latter while I watched him, utilizing his own hacked together power setup to provide rechargable battery power to the device for a period of time he has yet to test fully. He then proceeded to install Linux on a 128 MB CF card, using an IDECF converter [I was amazed it existed, but there you go], and a few small utilities for run. A 500 MHz processor powered it.
Now, the relevant part of this is the RC car it was on. He wanted to control the car using the motherboard mounted on its back. He wrote a simple program to send pulses along a parallel converter of his own design to the various wheels, as they responded to pulse frequency by operating specific ways...pretty standard.
Then, he wanted to use a GPS to make it drive around the campus. He wrote his own software for the GPS device another friend of ours provided, NMEA-0182 with a few vendor extensions, IIRC. The device sent over serial, and it was a fairly simple bit of work to make it interpret the coordinates properly...the hard part was mapping the area. =)
The point of all that is, good GPS devices usually use a standard output interface, and protocol. And it is, honestly, not that hard to write your own program to interface with it. I still have the source code to the program he wrote...it's easily under 1000 lines, and possibly under 500.
So, if you'd like to use a GPS device to steer your projects...write your own software. =)
Whenever I go anywhere, and I'm not driving, I bring my laptop with onboard 802.11bg, and when I see an unprotected wireless AP, I connect, see if the router is on a default password, and rename the AP to "insecure".
I've always been fascinated by the possibilities provided by old laptops...I mean, heck, you don't need a 2 GHz P4 laptop to wardrive, word process [ignoring the huge requirements of certain solutions...*cough* MSWord *cough* KOffice *cough*], code [note that I didn't say COMPILE!], act as an MP3 player [assuming you use a decent MP3 decoder, and not a piece of crap], or any of the lovely uses for laptops that people are now marketing in self-contained devices for several hundred dollars a pop.
Honestly, though, I'm curious where you're getting yours...neighbors and coworkers? Or is there some online stash somewhere that nobody told me about?
I'm typing this to you from, surprise surprise, Linux.
In the BIOS, and in the Windows control panel for the ThinkPad, the hotly contested security chip is listed as off.
The interesting question, for me, is...can it be enabled by software, without my permission?
The relevant question, given that almost anything is possible with properly written software, is...will the Microsoft Fairy be coming to my house at night and leaving me a DRM-locked PoS in exchange for my highly functional laptop?
Is it just me, or does this sound like a revenue service waiting to happen?
I submit that Microsoft will only judge as spyware products which either install themselves without explicit permission, or products which are not owned by companies who pay Microsoft.
I hate to be so cynical, but I've been burned by too many Microsoft "features" [in recent memory: IE upgrades only available to XP users, and a Windows ME setup CD refusing to install to a FAT16 partition formatted by its own boot disk] to believe much of what they say.
If there's so much as a single remote code exploit found in the DS, it won't be long before someone writes code to forcibly propagate itself and do something to your DS...something like the PSO bug for GameCube would be lethal on the DS, if it were wirelessly exploitable.
I can just see someone writing a virus that forcibly installs a miniature Linux distro on your DS and propagates.
I'm not sure if that would be horrible or awesome, personally.
It wouldn't necessarily be that hard, from what little I know...the processors aren't custom-built, from what I've read...but I'm not an expert.
If only the DS had a permanent memory storage device, like an internal flash chip...I bet someone would have Linux and Kismet/Airsnort/[choose your favorite] running on it within six months.
Re:Reimnds me of that other thing..
on
Nintendo DS Network
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You're thinking of the Cybiko.
I had one of those. It was crap. The keyboard was too small to do anything comfortably, the battery only worked until about a month after I got it, and the AC input port physically broke a month after that.
Several friends had them too, and they all had the same problems.
Does gotmail still work on free accounts? =)
But seriously. You couldn't make stories this ludicrous up. Microsoft, on their capped-sends-per-day free e-mail service, declares that they want to cut down on spammers, so they eliminate the one feature that most Hotmail lusers love...being able to use it from the comfort of their home, ad-free.
Meanwhile, they declared over a month ago that they would upgrade free account sizes [carrot and stick, anyone?], but now, when it comes into effect, only some accounts received the increase in space, and Microsoft cites unexpected capacity utilization.
Let me get this straight. Microsoft offers you more space as A) an incentive to not switch services and B) to attract more customers, and then they A) cut off the convenient client interface to Hotmail and B) declare that there have been unexpected usage levels in space, and so have delayed the upgrades.
In other words...Microsoft punishes their customers for staying with them and believing them about their upgraded features.
Honest. I've seen more financially feasible situations in the Weekly World News.
I notice that a lot of people believe they need faster computers, when they really don't. Take my school, for instance.
We have everything from Pentium 200s running WinME to 2.5 GHz P4s running XP [I didn't choose this setup.], and they all complain to me that their computer is too slow. Always. The only time I ever heard them cease to complain was when I, as an experiment, threw a Knoppix 3.1 bootdisk into one of the Pentium II 400s. It booted, wrote a swap file, and everyone used it comfortably for a week, until they forced me to switch it back because I hadn't configured Thunderbird.
The point of the observation above is, as machines increase in speed, the software tends to become bloated with it. I know that KDE 3.3 is more demanding than 3.1 is more demanding than 3.0 and so on...but Linux in general seems to get more bang for the buck out of systems. I mean, Word now is bloated to several dozen MB, minimum...I know Abiword works rather nicely on every system I've tested it on, and with plugins, it takes up under 30 MB.
Observation addendum: I took an old Pentium 200 off the hands of someone who had just gotten an upgrade, threw in a 6 GB HD, and now I have a fully functional SMB/CUPS/Apache server for internal use. It's quite functional, and well appreciated and used by all, including those of the staff who were too paranoid to use floppies.
Moral of the story: Linux runs better on older hardware, and can often do most of what the newer boxen can do.
Doom didn't use any 3D acceleration. Nor did Doom II, if memory serves. Quake [or possibly Hexen or Heretic, I forget] was the first of id's games to use 3D acceleration.
Doom III may use DirectX, or it may use OpenGL. I don't know, offhand. *checks*
Well, nobody seems to have it offhand. Suffice it to say that there are 3D rendering libraries for each OS, and some are quite portable. As such, it's not more than rewriting the engine itself to make use of the calls...^_^
So in short, it's not easy, unless they planned it from the get-go.
Slashdot Mirror
Last Q/A in the article:
Q: There is talk of a Google browser. Internet Explorer has had its security woes. How do you keep users?
Gates: More has been invested in making IE secure than any browser on the planet by a long shot. Nothing is going to change. That's the one over 90% of people are going to keep using.
[Italics and bolded sentence my own markup]
So let me get this straight, Mr. Gates. You have thousands of people working just on Internet Explorer, and yet...a thousand or two thousand people working on Mozilla have bested you?
Nothing is going to change, indeed, Mr. Gates. You're going to keep spewing the same old story, ignoring obvious holes in your own logic (third-party software is to blame for all security problems, true...but that doesn't mean your software should allow third-party software to install itself without the user doing a thing), denying any obvious falsehoods in your own statements (" We feel like we are pioneering an experience that to us is a clear thing most households will want." - Gates, regarding Windows Media Center PCs...I'm sorry, I didn't know you pioneered multicasting from a set-top box...I presume Linksys is paying you licensing fees for their video broadcast device, to name one alternative?), and hoping people will be stupid enough to follow it.
The saddest part of the above discourse is, Gates is probably right. People are, until told otherwise, going to keep using bug-ridden products, until they are shown that there are alternatives...I know many users who have never clicked Windows Update in their lives, and not because they've never used Windows.
I could be wrong, but I'm sensing a downward spiral, when M$ can announce things such as they did in their article, and not get negative feedback from the interviewer. Just my $0.05.
This past summer, a friend of mine took it into his head to build a caseless PC.
This plan was to have two modes; a mode for work (IE: throwing it in his backpack), and a mode for play (mounting it on an RC car he built himself).
He began finished the latter while I watched him, utilizing his own hacked together power setup to provide rechargable battery power to the device for a period of time he has yet to test fully. He then proceeded to install Linux on a 128 MB CF card, using an IDECF converter [I was amazed it existed, but there you go], and a few small utilities for run. A 500 MHz processor powered it.
Now, the relevant part of this is the RC car it was on. He wanted to control the car using the motherboard mounted on its back. He wrote a simple program to send pulses along a parallel converter of his own design to the various wheels, as they responded to pulse frequency by operating specific ways...pretty standard.
Then, he wanted to use a GPS to make it drive around the campus. He wrote his own software for the GPS device another friend of ours provided, NMEA-0182 with a few vendor extensions, IIRC. The device sent over serial, and it was a fairly simple bit of work to make it interpret the coordinates properly...the hard part was mapping the area. =)
The point of all that is, good GPS devices usually use a standard output interface, and protocol. And it is, honestly, not that hard to write your own program to interface with it. I still have the source code to the program he wrote...it's easily under 1000 lines, and possibly under 500.
So, if you'd like to use a GPS device to steer your projects...write your own software. =)
Whenever I go anywhere, and I'm not driving, I bring my laptop with onboard 802.11bg, and when I see an unprotected wireless AP, I connect, see if the router is on a default password, and rename the AP to "insecure".
Quick, fairly painless, and fairly obvious, no?
Just my $0.02
Abiword.
KOffice seems a bit bloated to me. I don't, personally, like any word processor that I have to count to ten before it opens a native document.
I've always been fascinated by the possibilities provided by old laptops...I mean, heck, you don't need a 2 GHz P4 laptop to wardrive, word process [ignoring the huge requirements of certain solutions...*cough* MSWord *cough* KOffice *cough*], code [note that I didn't say COMPILE!], act as an MP3 player [assuming you use a decent MP3 decoder, and not a piece of crap], or any of the lovely uses for laptops that people are now marketing in self-contained devices for several hundred dollars a pop.
Honestly, though, I'm curious where you're getting yours...neighbors and coworkers? Or is there some online stash somewhere that nobody told me about?
But what if SCO gets involved?
Then they'll claim Linux is pirated!
But seriously, if it were implemented properly, none of us would be that worried about it. =)
I have one of those laptops, an R51.
I'm typing this to you from, surprise surprise, Linux.
In the BIOS, and in the Windows control panel for the ThinkPad, the hotly contested security chip is listed as off.
The interesting question, for me, is...can it be enabled by software, without my permission?
The relevant question, given that almost anything is possible with properly written software, is...will the Microsoft Fairy be coming to my house at night and leaving me a DRM-locked PoS in exchange for my highly functional laptop?
Submit one meeellion dollars, USD.
Duh.
Is it just me, or does this sound like a revenue service waiting to happen?
I submit that Microsoft will only judge as spyware products which either install themselves without explicit permission, or products which are not owned by companies who pay Microsoft.
I hate to be so cynical, but I've been burned by too many Microsoft "features" [in recent memory: IE upgrades only available to XP users, and a Windows ME setup CD refusing to install to a FAT16 partition formatted by its own boot disk] to believe much of what they say.
Just my $0.02 USD.
As I said, I was unaware whether the DS had any permanent storage, though I suspected not.
Which is why that was mostly an exercise in wishful thinking.
Dual Screen, I believe.
If there's so much as a single remote code exploit found in the DS, it won't be long before someone writes code to forcibly propagate itself and do something to your DS...something like the PSO bug for GameCube would be lethal on the DS, if it were wirelessly exploitable.
I can just see someone writing a virus that forcibly installs a miniature Linux distro on your DS and propagates.
I'm not sure if that would be horrible or awesome, personally.
It wouldn't necessarily be that hard, from what little I know...the processors aren't custom-built, from what I've read...but I'm not an expert.
If only the DS had a permanent memory storage device, like an internal flash chip...I bet someone would have Linux and Kismet/Airsnort/[choose your favorite] running on it within six months.
You're thinking of the Cybiko.
I had one of those. It was crap. The keyboard was too small to do anything comfortably, the battery only worked until about a month after I got it, and the AC input port physically broke a month after that.
Several friends had them too, and they all had the same problems.
Excellent. Thanks for the informative post.
Does gotmail still work on free accounts? =) But seriously. You couldn't make stories this ludicrous up. Microsoft, on their capped-sends-per-day free e-mail service, declares that they want to cut down on spammers, so they eliminate the one feature that most Hotmail lusers love...being able to use it from the comfort of their home, ad-free. Meanwhile, they declared over a month ago that they would upgrade free account sizes [carrot and stick, anyone?], but now, when it comes into effect, only some accounts received the increase in space, and Microsoft cites unexpected capacity utilization. Let me get this straight. Microsoft offers you more space as A) an incentive to not switch services and B) to attract more customers, and then they A) cut off the convenient client interface to Hotmail and B) declare that there have been unexpected usage levels in space, and so have delayed the upgrades. In other words...Microsoft punishes their customers for staying with them and believing them about their upgraded features. Honest. I've seen more financially feasible situations in the Weekly World News.
Microsoft Mars!
$50 per acre, your plumbing is leaky and occasionally sprays everywhere, the electricity has brownouts, and eventually, you move to [the] Sun. =)
0%!? Oh no!
This must be horribly insecure!
*converts all of his oggs to wav*
Does it fix any buffer overflow bugs? ;-)
I've been looking for something like that, but the best I can come up with is my laptop, weighing in at under 7 pounds.
If you find anything, post; I'm sure many sysadmins would appreciate it.
I notice that a lot of people believe they need faster computers, when they really don't. Take my school, for instance.
We have everything from Pentium 200s running WinME to 2.5 GHz P4s running XP [I didn't choose this setup.], and they all complain to me that their computer is too slow. Always. The only time I ever heard them cease to complain was when I, as an experiment, threw a Knoppix 3.1 bootdisk into one of the Pentium II 400s. It booted, wrote a swap file, and everyone used it comfortably for a week, until they forced me to switch it back because I hadn't configured Thunderbird.
The point of the observation above is, as machines increase in speed, the software tends to become bloated with it. I know that KDE 3.3 is more demanding than 3.1 is more demanding than 3.0 and so on...but Linux in general seems to get more bang for the buck out of systems. I mean, Word now is bloated to several dozen MB, minimum...I know Abiword works rather nicely on every system I've tested it on, and with plugins, it takes up under 30 MB.
Observation addendum: I took an old Pentium 200 off the hands of someone who had just gotten an upgrade, threw in a 6 GB HD, and now I have a fully functional SMB/CUPS/Apache server for internal use. It's quite functional, and well appreciated and used by all, including those of the staff who were too paranoid to use floppies.
Moral of the story: Linux runs better on older hardware, and can often do most of what the newer boxen can do.
My apologies. I, ironically, had a copy of Masters of Doom not two feet to my right when I wrote that.
I guess I should have RTFBook first. >_
I thought that might be the case, but I had no evidence.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Doom didn't use any 3D acceleration. Nor did Doom II, if memory serves.
Quake [or possibly Hexen or Heretic, I forget] was the first of id's games to use 3D acceleration.
Doom III may use DirectX, or it may use OpenGL. I don't know, offhand. *checks*
Well, nobody seems to have it offhand. Suffice it to say that there are 3D rendering libraries for each OS, and some are quite portable. As such, it's not more than rewriting the engine itself to make use of the calls...^_^
So in short, it's not easy, unless they planned it from the get-go.
Yes. An open proxy server on a topic just mentioned by /.
I can't imagine that's abusable. I mean, nobody would embed ads in their IPv6 proxy if it became too popular, right?
Just a thought.