You make some good points, but I think one of mine may have been overlooked. Eating crap has not always been so deadly. These days it is, due to the changes in the "processed food" supply.
Love that show, but never saw the one on the food supply. My info comes from many books and news reports and magazine articles over the years 25. My PROOF comes from what happened to me when I stopped eating man-made food.
Finally, Organically Grown fruits & veggies contain far fewer chemicals than the regular stuff. so organic is what I try to buy. When you become fat and sick and stuck on prescription medicine like I was, you too may decide this way of eating is vastly superior.
I stopped eating man-made food on in January, when I weighed 215 pounds. I now weigh 185 pounds, and feel like I'm 35 instead off 75 (I'm actually 45). The relentless drive of market forces has caused food manufactures to squeeze every last penny out of their operations - replacing "real" ingredients with chemicals for cost reasons as they go.
You're not eating what you ate 20 years ago - that's no longer available. And that's why America is getting fatter and sicker faster than any other nation.
I'd also like to agree with the point that a mass migration to any other operating system would be fruitless, since the virus writers would follow. However, if we could get ourselves spread out over 5 or six operating systems (check back in 15 years?), folks would have a choice about which classes of viruses they want to get;-)
OpenVMS on the desktop has been a long time coming, but hey, maybe it's time?
$25 to infect 10,000 pc's sure is cheap. If this guy can get only 25 bucks per 10,000, he must have competitors (read: there's a lot of people doing this), and it must be easy to do. These, of course, are not good signs.
However, it occurs to me that the best measure of Microsoft's success in security is the market price for 10,000 infections. For example, if Vista turns out to be an inpenatrible tank, we should see the price go up to 50 or 100 bucks, maybe more.
At the end of the day, until we all stop using the same operating system, we're doomed to a continual barrage of large-scale infections (remember the Irish potato famine?)
Thanks for the translation WWWWolf - you have successfully stenched the flow of blood from my ears.
But it raises perhaps two salient questions:
1) Why does this guy write in a style that is clearly imprecise (and therefore, somewhat unhelpful), and 2) Since the stated qualities apparently apply to so many other forms of applications, is this guy really communicating anything at all?
When I think of answers to these questions, I'm somewhat disinclined to ever read another word from this guy.
I must be thick (come guys, tell me), but this article strikes me as falling into the "meaningless bubble diagrams connecting unconnectable things" category. I did like the graphs at the end that give you some numbers on ajax traffic.
But all that other crap? Like (and I quote):
Key Aspects of Web 2.0: - The Web and all its connected devices as one global platform of reusable services and data - Data consumption and remixing from all sources, particularly user generated data - Continuous and seamless update of software and data, often very rapidly - Rich and interactive user interfaces - Architecture of participation that encourages user contribution
Good God where does this dross emanate from? These are the engineering principles that bind together Web 2.0 concepts? It's notable that these attributes can also describe a client/server or 3-tier application, if you hold head just right. They could also describe how my grandmother's recipee book worked. Very interactive... encouraged user participation and contribution (that's what the pencil dangling from it was for).
If you're the hard-core engineering type, spare yourself a disorienting tour of pseduo-engineering psycho-babble and skip to the graphs at the end.
I get crapped on every time I approach this subject, but apparently I'm too thick to heed such lessons. NT, within it's boundaries - ok - it's fine. But let's also be honest about where it isn't. For instance, it uses two rings of protection rather than the four available, which translates into more possibilities for errant drivers and such to bring down the kernel. Also, it was designed for a single-user environment, and although improved over the years, lacks certain security facilities that other operating systems such as OpenVMS have. And finally, it may have disk quotas and a few other quotas to protect from processes consuming the system, but many other quotas would have to be implemented to match process isolation provided by MVS, OpenVMS and other big-tin OS's. Such facilities translate into operating system up-time.
Sure, NT is a fine kernel. But there's clearly more here to be considered.
The rootkits sneaking around today are going to be a problem for Vista too. MS has decided to use the NT kernel in Vista. A rootkit, pretty well by definition, has to corrupt the kernel in some way to be effective. I'd rather see the NT kernel retired (with honors) and replaced with a significantly different kernel implementation that provides a darn steeper upgrade path for today's rootkits.
Not sure how you'll wiggle out of this, but your project scope is too big for the patience of your organization. Chop the thing into smaller, more frequent deliverables over a longer period if you can. It's less efficient to be sure, but if you get shut down, well that's 0% efficiency.
The question burning in my mind, and I'm sure yours, is "What DRM is used on this?"
I'm very disappointed that CNN would run an article like this - devoid of the single salient point most everyone is focused on. It's not like CNN just regurgitates press releases for quick profit, is it? They're not in the pocket of big media & the film studios, are they?
IE has grown gangrene, and MS doesn't know it. This is where I voice personal opinion, right? Global standards continue to attract followers, except MS. (Their occassional self-serving nod in the standards direction notwithstanding). They continue to play the lock-in card, which the rest of the industry had to get over when "disruptive" MS showed up on the scene in the first place. I also want to say that MS has played an important role in shaking up the big vendors over the last 15 years, but now they're a big vendor too, and their prices (high) and products (paralyzed) reflect that.
Announcing a browser that is pretty well furthest from acid-2 compliance is one of their stupider moves (from a notable pallate of other lock-in tactics). And coming from a company that continually protests their "right to innovate" must be protected (at the expense, of course, of other companies' right to innovate), this lack of standards adherance must clearly be spun as "innovation". Congratulations MS, you're innovating your way right off the web. You've earned it through greed.
Microsoft's marketing department has historically been light-years ahead of their actual products. Anyone aware of any reason why this might be different?
It certainly sounds exciting - all that new stuff. And ExtremeTech has once again proven their ability to quote press releases.
Now that I think about it, Windows 95, Windows 2000, and Windows XP sounded almost as exciting at the time of their release. It's what they didn't tell us about those OS's that sucked.
I wonder what were're going to eventually find out about Vista? It's a shame extremeBlech didn't did deeper than the varnish. Is it a DRM nightmare? Will the improved security turn out to have some gaping oversight that can't easily be fixed?
Stop focussing on the shiny bobbles folks (espcially those drawing their paycheck from Micro^h^h^h^h^hExtremeTech) - let's get to the real issues.
Intel is clearly a train off it's tracks. They canabalized the 3rd party chipset makers in the last couple of years (see article in today's theinquirer.co.uk) doing untold damage to their image, screwed up their inventory in the process (they're currently in "shortage" mode) as a result, fracked up the Intanic a dozen times, and fell off the sanity plane thinking that x86-64 wouldn't go anywhere. Most industry pundits say they're two years behind in desktop chips now.
Quarter-to-quarter-thinking mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging middle managers ought not play in the processor industry - it requires longer term thinking than they're capable of, and a level of honesty and humility we haven't seen in this industry since all the money showed up.
I think you're taking "fix" a little too literally. One good fix would be to toss out the new stuff in Vista, leave the secure stuff, and stive for good backwardwards compatiblity. (In fact, I hear they're striving for this already). Then GIVE THE OPERATING SYSTEM AWAY to all licensed windows customers. Admit they fucked up their design decisions along the way and do something helpful for their customers.
This, in my opinion, would be a fix. It would also help fix their diminishing customer good will.
And I think it could be done for a lot less than 40 billion, athough admittedly, I haven't done the math. I hear you need a special computer for that anyway.
Correct - they must charge for it or they will be sued on anti-trust grounds.
But there's third option, which they have declined to take - fix Windows. Why not choose this? Because following such a path is not how you accumulate 40 billion in the bank, or become the richest man in the world.
Microsoft could clearly fix this situation at their own expense (40 billion fixes a lot of holes). Instead they've chosen to patch it - at ours.
One day we'll have a decent choice between operating systems and the applications that run on them. I hope customers, on that day, remember how they have been treated by Microsoft.
Making one chunk of software (Windows) more secure by adding another chunk (Norton) is not as effective as it might seem. By adding the second chunk, you increase the overall potential vulnerability footprint of the box, by virtue of the fact you're got more lines of code running. More code means more potential bugs, holes, etc. Symantec has previously had to patch holes in their code (as has most everyone else, of course).
Assuming that Symantec code is about as good/bad as Microsoft code, how much of the potential benefit of Symantec's proprosed security is nullified by the increased vulnerability footprint?
This is an old ploy. I'll bet they scrap the chip within 24 months. With Alpha, Compaq did the same - went public with huge statements of commitment to test the waters. In less than 12 months, they announced the death of Alpha.
Various kernel experts beat me up here a few weaks ago when I complained that Vista will have the NT Kernel at its core. There's new features and some other improvements, but it's the NT Kernel. So the SAME ROOTKITS that give us today's botnets, DOS attacks, spam, etc. will require little, if any, tweaking to do their stealthy evil deads on Vista.
Homogeneity of the planet's operating systems fabric is the life-blood of viruses and rootkits. By releasing Vista with the NT kernel, Microsoft has blown a huge opportunity to isolate Vista from existing rootkits. Security has clearly taken a back seat to some other motivation, and I would venture to guess it is somehow, however distant and unlikley, related to Microsoft's bottom line, rather than that of its customers'.
Is MS *really* going to comply with this remedy, and its spirit? Or are they just retreating to the next defensible high-ground: The license terms and costs?
Given their past history, they seem more likely to poison the well (with anti-FOSS licensing terms or high license costs) than to comply with the spirit and intent of the ruling. Some are surprised the EU is so patient with a convicted monopolist.
Windows drivers run in ring 1. I'm not sure about Linux, but I think they do too.
Pretty sure this is wrong. Ring 0 and ring 3 are the only rings used.
That's because the x86 chips lacked the capability until recently. You can't fault the OS for what the hardware doesn't allow.
Actually, my mom told me I was allowed to do this. And I'm doing it because in the stuff I design (applications), I try to look forward to the next step and design the current one accordindly. Not to expend great effort on features that might never be implemented, but to make potential future implementation at least feasible, and perhaps easy (depending on cost). What period of time elapsed between the hardware availability of "no execute", and the windows implementation? 2 years was it?
What's wrong with the driver system? NT is and always has been a microkernel design. Drivers were heavily layered around it to provide all the functionality.
I'm not sure I know. But if MS keeps re-designing the architecture, they must have a reason (other than giving hardware makers new API challenges). Vista's redesign of drivers seems focused on reliability and error reporting. Shame these weren't considerations last design go-round - perhaps we wouldn't have this go-round.
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You make some good points, but I think one of mine may have been overlooked. Eating crap has not always been so deadly. These days it is, due to the changes in the "processed food" supply.
Love that show, but never saw the one on the food supply. My info comes from many books and news reports and magazine articles over the years 25. My PROOF comes from what happened to me when I stopped eating man-made food.
Finally, Organically Grown fruits & veggies contain far fewer chemicals than the regular stuff. so organic is what I try to buy. When you become fat and sick and stuck on prescription medicine like I was, you too may decide this way of eating is vastly superior.
I stopped eating man-made food on in January, when I weighed 215 pounds. I now weigh 185 pounds, and feel like I'm 35 instead off 75 (I'm actually 45). The relentless drive of market forces has caused food manufactures to squeeze every last penny out of their operations - replacing "real" ingredients with chemicals for cost reasons as they go.
You're not eating what you ate 20 years ago - that's no longer available. And that's why America is getting fatter and sicker faster than any other nation.
Thanks for the pointer - very interesting!
;-)
I'd also like to agree with the point that a mass migration to any other operating system would be fruitless, since the virus writers would follow. However, if we could get ourselves spread out over 5 or six operating systems (check back in 15 years?), folks would have a choice about which classes of viruses they want to get
OpenVMS on the desktop has been a long time coming, but hey, maybe it's time?
$25 to infect 10,000 pc's sure is cheap. If this guy can get only 25 bucks per 10,000, he must have competitors (read: there's a lot of people doing this), and it must be easy to do. These, of course, are not good signs.
However, it occurs to me that the best measure of Microsoft's success in security is the market price for 10,000 infections. For example, if Vista turns out to be an inpenatrible tank, we should see the price go up to 50 or 100 bucks, maybe more.
At the end of the day, until we all stop using the same operating system, we're doomed to a continual barrage of large-scale infections (remember the Irish potato famine?)
I think the guy from Ikea is now the richest man on earth - BG is #2. Can anyone confirm?
Thanks for the translation WWWWolf - you have successfully stenched the flow of blood from my ears.
But it raises perhaps two salient questions:
1) Why does this guy write in a style that is clearly imprecise (and therefore, somewhat unhelpful), and
2) Since the stated qualities apparently apply to so many other forms of applications, is this guy really communicating anything at all?
When I think of answers to these questions, I'm somewhat disinclined to ever read another word from this guy.
I must be thick (come guys, tell me), but this article strikes me as falling into the "meaningless bubble diagrams connecting unconnectable things" category. I did like the graphs at the end that give you some numbers on ajax traffic.
But all that other crap? Like (and I quote):
Key Aspects of Web 2.0:
- The Web and all its connected devices as one global platform of reusable services and data
- Data consumption and remixing from all sources, particularly user generated data
- Continuous and seamless update of software and data, often very rapidly
- Rich and interactive user interfaces
- Architecture of participation that encourages user contribution
Good God where does this dross emanate from? These are the engineering principles that bind together Web 2.0 concepts? It's notable that these attributes can also describe a client/server or 3-tier application, if you hold head just right. They could also describe how my grandmother's recipee book worked. Very interactive... encouraged user participation and contribution (that's what the pencil dangling from it was for).
If you're the hard-core engineering type, spare yourself a disorienting tour of pseduo-engineering psycho-babble and skip to the graphs at the end.
Was I too harsh?
If a light saber was, in fact, hot enough to slice through a steel bar like the proverbial hot knife through butter, Jedi would have no eyebrows.
I get crapped on every time I approach this subject, but apparently I'm too thick to heed such lessons. NT, within it's boundaries - ok - it's fine. But let's also be honest about where it isn't. For instance, it uses two rings of protection rather than the four available, which translates into more possibilities for errant drivers and such to bring down the kernel. Also, it was designed for a single-user environment, and although improved over the years, lacks certain security facilities that other operating systems such as OpenVMS have. And finally, it may have disk quotas and a few other quotas to protect from processes consuming the system, but many other quotas would have to be implemented to match process isolation provided by MVS, OpenVMS and other big-tin OS's. Such facilities translate into operating system up-time.
Sure, NT is a fine kernel. But there's clearly more here to be considered.
The rootkits sneaking around today are going to be a problem for Vista too. MS has decided to use the NT kernel in Vista. A rootkit, pretty well by definition, has to corrupt the kernel in some way to be effective. I'd rather see the NT kernel retired (with honors) and replaced with a significantly different kernel implementation that provides a darn steeper upgrade path for today's rootkits.
Not sure how you'll wiggle out of this, but your project scope is too big for the patience of your organization. Chop the thing into smaller, more frequent deliverables over a longer period if you can. It's less efficient to be sure, but if you get shut down, well that's 0% efficiency.
The question burning in my mind, and I'm sure yours, is "What DRM is used on this?"
I'm very disappointed that CNN would run an article like this - devoid of the single salient point most everyone is focused on. It's not like CNN just regurgitates press releases for quick profit, is it? They're not in the pocket of big media & the film studios, are they?
IE has grown gangrene, and MS doesn't know it. This is where I voice personal opinion, right? Global standards continue to attract followers, except MS. (Their occassional self-serving nod in the standards direction notwithstanding). They continue to play the lock-in card, which the rest of the industry had to get over when "disruptive" MS showed up on the scene in the first place. I also want to say that MS has played an important role in shaking up the big vendors over the last 15 years, but now they're a big vendor too, and their prices (high) and products (paralyzed) reflect that.
Announcing a browser that is pretty well furthest from acid-2 compliance is one of their stupider moves (from a notable pallate of other lock-in tactics). And coming from a company that continually protests their "right to innovate" must be protected (at the expense, of course, of other companies' right to innovate), this lack of standards adherance must clearly be spun as "innovation". Congratulations MS, you're innovating your way right off the web. You've earned it through greed.
Being a developer, I've often thought Microsoft's documentation sucked. It's nice to see the EU (and their advisors) agree.
Microsoft's marketing department has historically been light-years ahead of their actual products. Anyone aware of any reason why this might be different?
It certainly sounds exciting - all that new stuff. And ExtremeTech has once again proven their ability to quote press releases.
Now that I think about it, Windows 95, Windows 2000, and Windows XP sounded almost as exciting at the time of their release. It's what they didn't tell us about those OS's that sucked.
I wonder what were're going to eventually find out about Vista? It's a shame extremeBlech didn't did deeper than the varnish. Is it a DRM nightmare? Will the improved security turn out to have some gaping oversight that can't easily be fixed?
Stop focussing on the shiny bobbles folks (espcially those drawing their paycheck from Micro^h^h^h^h^hExtremeTech) - let's get to the real issues.
Intel is clearly a train off it's tracks. They canabalized the 3rd party chipset makers in the last couple of years (see article in today's theinquirer.co.uk) doing untold damage to their image, screwed up their inventory in the process (they're currently in "shortage" mode) as a result, fracked up the Intanic a dozen times, and fell off the sanity plane thinking that x86-64 wouldn't go anywhere. Most industry pundits say they're two years behind in desktop chips now.
Quarter-to-quarter-thinking mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging middle managers ought not play in the processor industry - it requires longer term thinking than they're capable of, and a level of honesty and humility we haven't seen in this industry since all the money showed up.
I think you're taking "fix" a little too literally. One good fix would be to toss out the new stuff in Vista, leave the secure stuff, and stive for good backwardwards compatiblity. (In fact, I hear they're striving for this already). Then GIVE THE OPERATING SYSTEM AWAY to all licensed windows customers. Admit they fucked up their design decisions along the way and do something helpful for their customers.
This, in my opinion, would be a fix. It would also help fix their diminishing customer good will.
And I think it could be done for a lot less than 40 billion, athough admittedly, I haven't done the math. I hear you need a special computer for that anyway.
Correct - they must charge for it or they will be sued on anti-trust grounds.
But there's third option, which they have declined to take - fix Windows. Why not choose this? Because following such a path is not how you accumulate 40 billion in the bank, or become the richest man in the world.
Microsoft could clearly fix this situation at their own expense (40 billion fixes a lot of holes). Instead they've chosen to patch it - at ours.
One day we'll have a decent choice between operating systems and the applications that run on them. I hope customers, on that day, remember how they have been treated by Microsoft.
Making one chunk of software (Windows) more secure by adding another chunk (Norton) is not as effective as it might seem. By adding the second chunk, you increase the overall potential vulnerability footprint of the box, by virtue of the fact you're got more lines of code running. More code means more potential bugs, holes, etc. Symantec has previously had to patch holes in their code (as has most everyone else, of course).
Assuming that Symantec code is about as good/bad as Microsoft code, how much of the potential benefit of Symantec's proprosed security is nullified by the increased vulnerability footprint?
I believe some group of ambitious folks booted the Solaris kernel (as opposed to the entire OS) on Power 4 sometime last week.
This is an old ploy. I'll bet they scrap the chip within 24 months. With Alpha, Compaq did the same - went public with huge statements of commitment to test the waters. In less than 12 months, they announced the death of Alpha.
Various kernel experts beat me up here a few weaks ago when I complained that Vista will have the NT Kernel at its core. There's new features and some other improvements, but it's the NT Kernel. So the SAME ROOTKITS that give us today's botnets, DOS attacks, spam, etc. will require little, if any, tweaking to do their stealthy evil deads on Vista.
Homogeneity of the planet's operating systems fabric is the life-blood of viruses and rootkits. By releasing Vista with the NT kernel, Microsoft has blown a huge opportunity to isolate Vista from existing rootkits. Security has clearly taken a back seat to some other motivation, and I would venture to guess it is somehow, however distant and unlikley, related to Microsoft's bottom line, rather than that of its customers'.
Is MS *really* going to comply with this remedy, and its spirit? Or are they just retreating to the next defensible high-ground: The license terms and costs?
Given their past history, they seem more likely to poison the well (with anti-FOSS licensing terms or high license costs) than to comply with the spirit and intent of the ruling. Some are surprised the EU is so patient with a convicted monopolist.
Windows drivers run in ring 1. I'm not sure about Linux, but I think they do too.
Pretty sure this is wrong. Ring 0 and ring 3 are the only rings used.
That's because the x86 chips lacked the capability until recently. You can't fault the OS for what the hardware doesn't allow.
Actually, my mom told me I was allowed to do this. And I'm doing it because in the stuff I design (applications), I try to look forward to the next step and design the current one accordindly. Not to expend great effort on features that might never be implemented, but to make potential future implementation at least feasible, and perhaps easy (depending on cost). What period of time elapsed between the hardware availability of "no execute", and the windows implementation? 2 years was it?
What's wrong with the driver system? NT is and always has been a microkernel design. Drivers were heavily layered around it to provide all the functionality.
I'm not sure I know. But if MS keeps re-designing the architecture, they must have a reason (other than giving hardware makers new API challenges). Vista's redesign of drivers seems focused on reliability and error reporting. Shame these weren't considerations last design go-round - perhaps we wouldn't have this go-round.