You jest, but that is not necessarily an entirely bad idea. Certainly if I hire this guy to do work for me while he is in school, the school does not own what I hired him to do. If he were to make a shell company that he can assign copyright/patents to, the school should not be able to get their hands on them, as they are not the students. They are the independent corporate entities 'property'. The fact that the company is whole owned by the student should make a huge difference.
I think the worry of employees taking data is overblown. After all, they can get data out of the building through non-computer means, and we don't want to fall into the "it's on a computer so that makes it totally different than the same thing done on paper." mindset.
That being said, I agree that your solution of giving them a reasonable amount of drive space for personal files with a drive quota is generally going to be better. I only suggested an external drive because the other admin suggested that it was beyond his capabilities to perform the simple task that you suggest.
My point is that work environment is part of the cost/benefit ratio for employees. At ~$0.10/GB it is a very small price for companies to supply employees 50GB or so if that makes their work environment better. It is a real disservice to the company when an admin takes such an inexpensive way of making the company more valuable, and go out of their way to destroy that value.
By recognizing that the cost is small, and that it doesn't take much effort on the front end to mitigate any problems with disk space, you add value to the company, and show that you recognize that your roll as admin is to add value to the company by supplying computer services. If you do as you suggest, your company should be hyping that as one of the company benefits.
While I telecommute, so I have TBs of storage here for personal use, if I had to work every day in the office, I would rather have 50GB of personal disk space available all year than a Christmas party at the end of the year. The disk space would give greater value to me and cost the company less money to supply it.
Since this chunk of thread is based off the "Tell that to someone making $500 a month" comment. Yes. The vast majority of people that are living off of $500 a month have a huge amount of time that is free.
OMG? What did places do before MP3's and computer speakers and CD-audio in computers was common? Cd players, walkmans, and AM/FM radios. Nothing's changed, move on. He's making an intelligent policy, one I happen to agree with. If you let people store their music, soon it's their photo collection, and eventually videos.
Really? Really??? What they did was run on IBM XTs, or more often, didn't have computers at all. Is that really what your suggesting? Or are you suggesting that because it might take the slightest bit of effort on your part, the company should not use the equipment that it already pays for to make the work environment more appealing?
I once had a user filling up a 100G network drive with 25G of home movies he wanted to share with people.
I once had a user spill coffee on their keyboard. So what! Sometimes people make mistakes. Banning music on PCs because one user put 25G of home movies on a network drive makes about as much sense as banning drinks because a user spilled coffee on a keyboard.
Well, do it the way your parents did, rent a projector, cook some dinner and invite your friends to your house.
Are you seriously suggesting that we all start acting like it's the 60's or 70's again? Are you seriously suggesting that we all join in on an honest to goodness neo-luddite movement? Or did you say that because it makes a good sound bite, even though the statement is patently ridiculous.
Seriously, you comments simply validate mine.
I would say that you are discribing yourself as the boss from 9 to 5. Work does not have to suck, and you are saying that if you have to put in any effort, you are going to block them from enjoying being at work. If you wanted to, you could easily find a solution to allow people to have music on their machines AND prevent big problems. Heck, you could go so far as to tell them that music must be on an external hard drive. Then your issue (which doesn't sound real plausible) that you are constantly having machines break due to too many music files, would not be an issue. Even ripped as waves, it is unusual for a CD to take up 500MB. So even if they had 100 albums on their drive, it would be less than 50GB. By today's standards, that is nothing.
Even worse, you place draconian policies, then turn around and only enforce it on your whim. You tell your users that following the rules makes them a chump, and that you are a petty kingdom builder. It doesn't matter whether you are or not, that is what you are telling your users, and the expectations that you are setting is that the rules are about politics and not about security.
You have divided your music loving users into two camps. Those that unnecessarily see their jobs as a place they don't want to be, and another that thinks connecting to P2P networks is just fine as long as they don't get caught. Neither is in the best interest of the company. The people in charge might not realize what you have done, but you have harmed the company. Of course, perhaps you work for a company that WANTS their employees to hate being at work. If that is the case, you are probably doing the right thing.
I agree, and by allowing them to use their own music, and even going so far as allowing them to stream from legitimate sources, you legitimize your decision to not allow P2P.
Solar taking space is a total red herring. Given the land mass that is already covered by man made materials that the solar panels could cover, it is simply is not an issue. This is not a comment on the rest of your post though.
Re:So much for free!
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Ubuntu Kung Fu
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, since you can buy books on millions of free things ranging from American Freedom to Zen. Why not have books on a fee operating system.
Sometimes employees even go through a lot of trouble to pierce their company's security (for example, in order to get Kazaa working inside the firewall) and effectively open a hole to potential hackers, too.
Companies could go a long way in avoiding this kind of behavior if they didn't fall for the false dichotomy of "Access to everything" and "Work is supposed to suck". I know you didn't say it, but these kinds of articles always bring out the admins that recommend that every machine should be locked down to the point of basically being a kiosk often actually preventing people from doing their job, and rationalize that since "it's the companies" computer, it cannot be used to make work a place people want to go.
This always gives me images of the bad boss from 9 to 5. After all, how much different is it for a real live admin to tell an office worker that they can't have a picture of their family on their desktop than the fictional manager who told the characters in the movie that they cannot have pictures of their family on their... desktop?
Businesses regularly spend money to try to make their business a 'good place to work'. There is a huge amount of safe area between "full access to anything" and "treat it like a bank vault". The PC is one of the least expensive ways to improve a work environment. A $2 set of headphones, or even just making sure that the CD drive can play music and let the employee bring their own headphones goes a long way to improving a work environment. Heck, have the admins 'certify' a safe CD ripping app, and you are less likely to have people downloading random rippers from who knows where.
Most people are going to respect "Music must be ripped using THIS easy to use software so that we can secure against viruses." a lot more than "Music is not allowed in our company". If you take the later route, you have a much higher risk of employees just ignoring the rules and going with Kazaa. Heck, the people that feel they MUST get music from Kazaa will still be safer in that they are more likely to do the downloading from home, and sanitize the files by first converting them to standard CD format, before bringing them to work and re-ripping them.
Instead of trying to prevent employees from accessing the internet, give them access to virtual machines that have no access to the company network. This makes the path of least resistance be not being a security risk, instead of encouraging people to try and circumvent the companies security AND making work a crappy place to be.
It seems like seamless backwards compatibility is a feature that doesn't require a detailed defense:).
And what we currently have isn't giving us that. It cannot give us that without leaving known security holes.
Bear in mind that being able to run ancient, crufty, no-source-available line-of-business apps is pretty darn important for many Windows customers.
You do realize that giving Windows customers the ability to run old code is EXACTLY what I suggested right? That I was suggesting a way to give them BETTER compatibility as well as BETTER security while running that old code?
There's lots of ways to handle this other than full virtualization that offer a better user experience.
Great, then bring them up, because what MS has been doing isn't it.
Well, according to this article the 3GB limit is on a per PROCESS basis. Now, I am fully aware that many, or even most applications run in a single process, but they don't ALL run in a single process. And even if they did, You would STILL get full memory access for 2 or more applications that are each using 3GB of ram instead of having half of that memory shunted off to an extremely slow hard drives. So, simply put. You are wrong.
Of course, this means that the rest of what you said is bullshit, too.
Can you imagine if the parent poster was right, and they really were going to just shift the budget from the Middle East wars to pushing our space program? The advances we could make would be mind shattering!
You seem to have fallen for the 'businesses are ruling class, people are servant class' line. By the same rational that the University can claim ownership if anything, even the floor is used, the student should be able to claim ownership of anything the university does that uses student property. So if the student even touches any project, it should become their property.
Now, I happen to think that line of reasoning is stupid, but unless you are going to give greater rights to businesses than citizens, the logic must flow both ways.
Then there is drag-and-drop, and other cross-procedure calls
These are pretty trivial in the scope of things, and virtualization would improve security in current applications since you could the MP3 converter "No, you can't have access to my Quicken". Whereas right now, you wouldn't even know it was happening.
shared memory
I assume you mean things like shared dlls. These were devised as a shitty hack to deal with the fact that memory was EXTREMELY expensive. That is simply not the case anymore. You don't actually want your MP3 converter accessing the same memory as your Quicken. Let each app load it's own dlls in it's own memory space, which would happen automatically because they are in VMs.
library installation and replacement
You don't actually want your MP3 converter replacing the libraries that your Quicken uses. The primary reason that shared libraries exist in Windows is to save on the EXTREMELY expensive disk space that is no longer expensive. For $100 you can get a terabyte drive. Worrying that you might be wasting even 100 megs on duplicate libraries in different applictions is tripping over dollars to pick up dimes. The other reason for shared libraries is so that a fix to the library itself could fix the same bug in a dozen applications. When you are running a closed source application that you don't want to lose (the reason for wanting backward compatibility), you don't want libraries changed globally since the application may be exploiting the bug as a feature. Either the application developer is fixing bugs, or you cannot count on bugs getting fixed. Very simply, in a closed source environment, having application by application control of file updates is a good thing.
access to users documents, Direct X, OpenGL, screenshots (GIMP)
These issues have already been resolved with current VMs.
keylogging (hot key manager)
Hot keys are already handled in current VMs. But presumably with a new OS that is not trying to be "backward compatible", the host OS would be more secure from malicious keylogging. While the VM wouldn't be secure from current keylogging, current keyloggers would be limited to the single application which would be more secure than letting the legacy keyloggers run in the base OS.
Failing to support any of these things *could* prevent a legitimate application from interacting with the system the way a user expects.
And it would STILL be more compatible than what we currently get passed off as "backward compatibility" trying to fix or upgrade functionality in the new OS while keeping all the bugs that current applications have exploited as functionality means that you end up both leaving huge security holes AND don't achieve 100% backward compatibility.
If you implement all of these you really aren't gaining that much security.
That is a truly bizarre statement. When that MP3 converter that installs a root kit and key logs everything typed trying to get your back passwords, having it only root itself certainly sounds like a big security gain to me.
Particularly if you run all your 64bit code outside the VM.
Without a VM: Security holes in the old 32 bit code are system wide and security holes in the new 64 bit code are system wide.
With a VM: Security holes in the old 32 bit code are limited to the specific application and security holes in the new 64 bit code are system wide
By my math, that is a security gain. Really, it is well known that Windows has not traditionally been a secure OS. This has been widely accepted as being due to it's non-network attached single user history. Taking all of that insecurity and sandboxing it, and releasing a new secure OS with network and multi-user in mind from the get go is just going to be WAY more secure. Unl
Drivers to share the clipboard: Sure. Of course, you'd also need drivers to handle OLE stuff (drag-and-drop, for example). I'm sure it could be done, but don't make the mistake of assuming it's trivial. It takes a bit of work (made utterly painless, but still required) just to allow near-seamless mouse movement in and out of the virtual window.
This stuff is already done by their competitors. So, even if it isn't 'trivial', it is something they will have to do anyway.
Virtually 100% all current software would work: Except, you know, anything that needs 3d hardware acceleration. Or direct driver access. Or more than two COM ports (yes, such programs exist, and VPC's limitation to 2 COM ports is an issue for the one program we have that won't quite work right in Vista. The problem could be worked around, but it's indicative of the greater issue).
So, your saying that MS sucks too much and does not have the resources to bring their product up the match their competitors who are already on the market? I'm not buying it.
Sandboxed by default. How sandboxed? Windows supports an incredible number of forms of inter-process communication. Some programs rely quite heavily on such things. You could allow the VPC to run one process and all the programs that it spawns, perhaps, but there would still be problems.
MOST applications don't share data via inter-process with other applications beyond a simple clip board. But even for the ones that do, you would at least know what applications were trying to access what. Even if you had the simple choices of "No Access", "Clipboard Access", and "Full Access", you would be head and shoulders above what we have now because even if some users just always said "Full Access", they wouldn't be worse off, and anybody that has any concern for security isn't going to do that. I know that I would certainly click "No Access" when my freeware Falangy Counting software asked for access to Quicken.
Hell, this sort of excessive sandboxing is supposedly the reason the iPhone can't even handle simple cut/copy/paste!
That is total BS. Cut/Copy/Paste does not work because while the iPhone interface is neat, it has some serious problems, and Apple simply chose not to implement cut/copy/paste. Likely because they felt it would make the interface too complicated.
How much RAM do these virtual systems have? Each virtual machine would need a good chunk of RAM, especially with the overhead of running all those excess copies of Windows. However, they would also compete with native apps for physical RAM. What do you do when some process that runs on Windows 2000 starts demanding 2GB of working set? Is VPC supposed to automatically enlarge the physical RAM allocated to that machine? Is it supposed to use its own pagefile? Perhaps you'd like to somehow get it to use the global pagefile instead?
Memory actually gets BETTER if you had them running in a virtual machine. Currently an XP application can only access 3 gigs of ram, and anything beyond that must swap to a physical disk. You see, back in the days before dirt was invented and the memory that an OS would use could be counted in bytes, we had this thing called a "RAM Disk". It was a chunk of memory that the OS saw as a physical disk, even though it was in RAM. Since a 64-bit OS could access 16 exabytes of RAM, the RAM disk starts to make sense again. If the machine were virtualized over a 64 bit OS, the swap file could be set to run from the disk, or it could be set to run from a ram disk which would mean that you could get far more real memory to the 32 bit application virtualized than you could from running it natively on a 32-bit OS.
I hope this is enough to help you realize that, noble though your end goal is, your method simply would not work.
No, this does not help me realize that the method would not work. It just shows that you are being short sighted about OSes, and don't really understand how computers work. Or have just drank the "MS said so, so it must be true" Cool-Aid concerning backward compatibility.
A shared clipboard is trivial. You certainly are not going to lose as much security as just running the app with complete rights to your host OS. It would be expected that MOST applications would not be legacy. Only the ones you cannot get in the new OS so bloat would not be that big of a problem and every year it would become less of a problem. A single application running on DOS could generally be run in 1 meg of memory. That is nothing today. An instance of XP will generally be able to run in half a gig. Literally at worst your XP application would require 3 gigs of ram. Now consider that you now have an OS that cleanly could access up to 16 exabytes of RAM, the memory limitation would be far worse on the 32 bit native than it would be on the clean 64-bit system running virtual machines as they could load more programs, and each program could have more memory than if it ran native on a 32-bit machine. So, for the "I load every application I have into memory... 5 times." crowd, they would be better off. For the "I have one application that I cannot live without" they would be WAY better off. Especially since there is no telling if the current "backward compatibility" will let it work anyway. And for the rest of us, who are using 100% relatively new software, we are the best off.
I wouldn't mind seeing some of that here in Santa Rosa, CA. AT&T just informed me that they will not sell me internet access because the second unit on this property has one of their competitors as their ISP. If I get the other unit to cancel their internet, then they will sell me a fiber connection. They graciously informed me of this by standing me up for the install time and making me sit on hold for half an hour before telling me that they had decided not to show up 3 days earlier, and just didn't bother to let me know that I didn't have to be home waiting for them in the middle of a business day.
No, it isn't. What is a problem is that MS has not integrated VirtualPC into Windows, and included a virtual environment to run your 16-bit apps in a 16-bit environment. I know it may sound like splitting hairs, but it is long past the time that MS should be leaving bad code in new OSes just to claim 'Backward Compatibility' when it is totally unnecessary.
There is no excuse for MS supporting any legacy code in Win7. None. Zero. Zip.
If they were halfway competent, they would port VirtualPC to Win7, include a modified copy of XP that will only run 1 program at a time, and include drivers to share the clipboard between the host and the guest. A little configuration magic so that launching the virtual machine also launches the application instead of a desktop, and virtually 100% all current software would not only work, but could be sandboxed by default. If they really wanted to do things right, they would include images for every version of Windows and MS-DOS ever released. This would not only improve security, clean up the API DRAMATICALLY and keep only one code base which would be fully 64-bit but it would also make Win7 by far the MOST backward compatible version of Windows ever released. Hell, they could make even make it XBox 1 compatible and let all of their partners re-release all of their XBox 1 games as "XBox Classic".
Of course, this would have the negative side effect of not letting them claim that backward compatibility was the reason for all of the crap in Windows.
What AT&T did when they made the brief switch to Cingular that dropped coverage is irrelevant. The service that was contracted for with AT&T stopped being supplied. Personally, I knew that they were lying which is why I put "not repaired" in quotes, and specifically said "an obvious lie". That doesn't change the fact that phones that previously worked and were under contract stopped working as a direct result of AT&T/Cingular's actions, and "not being repaired due to not getting the passwords" was what the AT&T's customer line tried to pass off on me as a reason that it was perfectly OK for them to not fulfill their contract.
How complex the switchover was is totally irrelevant to AT&T not fulfilling their contract.
As for the "blue" SIM vs. "orange" SIM. You are wrong. They were not handing them out to anyone that asked, and anyone couldn't just go pay $20 for a new SIM with no contract extension necessary. The AT&T customer line was absolutely clear about that. If AT&T/Cingular wasn't pulling a scam, and all it took was popping in a new SIM, AT&T would have just done a mass migration. Either the new SIM would have just come in the mail, or there would have at least been a notice in with the bill indicating how to restore service. That didn't happen. AT&T KNEW that they were cutting off peoples service. To try to argue that they were not knowingly and intentionally disrupting contract customers service would be ridiculous.
I agree. I expect that disease or war will have to be the final solution to reducing our worlds population. While I think that getting off the planet is a step in the right direction to our species survival, even in the best case scenario, I don't think we would ever have enough of an exodus to save the planet. We pretty much will have to either have a horrible pandemic, or a supervision to solve the problem.
That doesn't mean that people who claim to be "environmentalists", and are not talking about population reduction, are posers who are just sticking their heads in the sand. Conservation without population reduction is a failure before it gets started. Population reduction without conservation works just fine if you reduce the population enough.
Of course, if it were not for the monopoly strangle hold that the telecom/cable companies have on last mile internet access, you could just buy a purpose dedicated box and host the darn thing yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
You jest, but that is not necessarily an entirely bad idea. Certainly if I hire this guy to do work for me while he is in school, the school does not own what I hired him to do. If he were to make a shell company that he can assign copyright/patents to, the school should not be able to get their hands on them, as they are not the students. They are the independent corporate entities 'property'. The fact that the company is whole owned by the student should make a huge difference.
I think the worry of employees taking data is overblown. After all, they can get data out of the building through non-computer means, and we don't want to fall into the "it's on a computer so that makes it totally different than the same thing done on paper." mindset.
That being said, I agree that your solution of giving them a reasonable amount of drive space for personal files with a drive quota is generally going to be better. I only suggested an external drive because the other admin suggested that it was beyond his capabilities to perform the simple task that you suggest.
My point is that work environment is part of the cost/benefit ratio for employees. At ~$0.10/GB it is a very small price for companies to supply employees 50GB or so if that makes their work environment better. It is a real disservice to the company when an admin takes such an inexpensive way of making the company more valuable, and go out of their way to destroy that value.
By recognizing that the cost is small, and that it doesn't take much effort on the front end to mitigate any problems with disk space, you add value to the company, and show that you recognize that your roll as admin is to add value to the company by supplying computer services. If you do as you suggest, your company should be hyping that as one of the company benefits.
While I telecommute, so I have TBs of storage here for personal use, if I had to work every day in the office, I would rather have 50GB of personal disk space available all year than a Christmas party at the end of the year. The disk space would give greater value to me and cost the company less money to supply it.
Verizon is evil, no doubt, but Sprint is much more evil by far.
I assume that they will do what they have done for generations. Have it printed in a newspaper.
Since this chunk of thread is based off the "Tell that to someone making $500 a month" comment. Yes. The vast majority of people that are living off of $500 a month have a huge amount of time that is free.
OMG? What did places do before MP3's and computer speakers and CD-audio in computers was common? Cd players, walkmans, and AM/FM radios. Nothing's changed, move on. He's making an intelligent policy, one I happen to agree with. If you let people store their music, soon it's their photo collection, and eventually videos.
Really? Really??? What they did was run on IBM XTs, or more often, didn't have computers at all. Is that really what your suggesting? Or are you suggesting that because it might take the slightest bit of effort on your part, the company should not use the equipment that it already pays for to make the work environment more appealing?
I once had a user filling up a 100G network drive with 25G of home movies he wanted to share with people.
I once had a user spill coffee on their keyboard. So what! Sometimes people make mistakes. Banning music on PCs because one user put 25G of home movies on a network drive makes about as much sense as banning drinks because a user spilled coffee on a keyboard.
Well, do it the way your parents did, rent a projector, cook some dinner and invite your friends to your house.
Are you seriously suggesting that we all start acting like it's the 60's or 70's again? Are you seriously suggesting that we all join in on an honest to goodness neo-luddite movement? Or did you say that because it makes a good sound bite, even though the statement is patently ridiculous. Seriously, you comments simply validate mine.
Your comment completely validate mine. Thanks.
I would say that you are discribing yourself as the boss from 9 to 5. Work does not have to suck, and you are saying that if you have to put in any effort, you are going to block them from enjoying being at work. If you wanted to, you could easily find a solution to allow people to have music on their machines AND prevent big problems. Heck, you could go so far as to tell them that music must be on an external hard drive. Then your issue (which doesn't sound real plausible) that you are constantly having machines break due to too many music files, would not be an issue. Even ripped as waves, it is unusual for a CD to take up 500MB. So even if they had 100 albums on their drive, it would be less than 50GB. By today's standards, that is nothing.
Even worse, you place draconian policies, then turn around and only enforce it on your whim. You tell your users that following the rules makes them a chump, and that you are a petty kingdom builder. It doesn't matter whether you are or not, that is what you are telling your users, and the expectations that you are setting is that the rules are about politics and not about security.
You have divided your music loving users into two camps. Those that unnecessarily see their jobs as a place they don't want to be, and another that thinks connecting to P2P networks is just fine as long as they don't get caught. Neither is in the best interest of the company. The people in charge might not realize what you have done, but you have harmed the company. Of course, perhaps you work for a company that WANTS their employees to hate being at work. If that is the case, you are probably doing the right thing.
I agree, and by allowing them to use their own music, and even going so far as allowing them to stream from legitimate sources, you legitimize your decision to not allow P2P.
Solar taking space is a total red herring. Given the land mass that is already covered by man made materials that the solar panels could cover, it is simply is not an issue. This is not a comment on the rest of your post though.
Well, since you can buy books on millions of free things ranging from American Freedom to Zen. Why not have books on a fee operating system.
Sometimes employees even go through a lot of trouble to pierce their company's security (for example, in order to get Kazaa working inside the firewall) and effectively open a hole to potential hackers, too.
Companies could go a long way in avoiding this kind of behavior if they didn't fall for the false dichotomy of "Access to everything" and "Work is supposed to suck". I know you didn't say it, but these kinds of articles always bring out the admins that recommend that every machine should be locked down to the point of basically being a kiosk often actually preventing people from doing their job, and rationalize that since "it's the companies" computer, it cannot be used to make work a place people want to go.
This always gives me images of the bad boss from 9 to 5. After all, how much different is it for a real live admin to tell an office worker that they can't have a picture of their family on their desktop than the fictional manager who told the characters in the movie that they cannot have pictures of their family on their... desktop?
Businesses regularly spend money to try to make their business a 'good place to work'. There is a huge amount of safe area between "full access to anything" and "treat it like a bank vault". The PC is one of the least expensive ways to improve a work environment. A $2 set of headphones, or even just making sure that the CD drive can play music and let the employee bring their own headphones goes a long way to improving a work environment. Heck, have the admins 'certify' a safe CD ripping app, and you are less likely to have people downloading random rippers from who knows where.
Most people are going to respect "Music must be ripped using THIS easy to use software so that we can secure against viruses." a lot more than "Music is not allowed in our company". If you take the later route, you have a much higher risk of employees just ignoring the rules and going with Kazaa. Heck, the people that feel they MUST get music from Kazaa will still be safer in that they are more likely to do the downloading from home, and sanitize the files by first converting them to standard CD format, before bringing them to work and re-ripping them.
Instead of trying to prevent employees from accessing the internet, give them access to virtual machines that have no access to the company network. This makes the path of least resistance be not being a security risk, instead of encouraging people to try and circumvent the companies security AND making work a crappy place to be.
It seems like seamless backwards compatibility is a feature that doesn't require a detailed defense :).
And what we currently have isn't giving us that. It cannot give us that without leaving known security holes.
Bear in mind that being able to run ancient, crufty, no-source-available line-of-business apps is pretty darn important for many Windows customers.
You do realize that giving Windows customers the ability to run old code is EXACTLY what I suggested right? That I was suggesting a way to give them BETTER compatibility as well as BETTER security while running that old code?
There's lots of ways to handle this other than full virtualization that offer a better user experience.
Great, then bring them up, because what MS has been doing isn't it.
Of course, this means that the rest of what you said is bullshit, too.
That is an incredibly stupid thing to say.
Can you imagine if the parent poster was right, and they really were going to just shift the budget from the Middle East wars to pushing our space program? The advances we could make would be mind shattering!
You seem to have fallen for the 'businesses are ruling class, people are servant class' line. By the same rational that the University can claim ownership if anything, even the floor is used, the student should be able to claim ownership of anything the university does that uses student property. So if the student even touches any project, it should become their property.
Now, I happen to think that line of reasoning is stupid, but unless you are going to give greater rights to businesses than citizens, the logic must flow both ways.
Then there is drag-and-drop, and other cross-procedure calls
These are pretty trivial in the scope of things, and virtualization would improve security in current applications since you could the MP3 converter "No, you can't have access to my Quicken". Whereas right now, you wouldn't even know it was happening.
shared memory
I assume you mean things like shared dlls. These were devised as a shitty hack to deal with the fact that memory was EXTREMELY expensive. That is simply not the case anymore. You don't actually want your MP3 converter accessing the same memory as your Quicken. Let each app load it's own dlls in it's own memory space, which would happen automatically because they are in VMs.
library installation and replacement
You don't actually want your MP3 converter replacing the libraries that your Quicken uses. The primary reason that shared libraries exist in Windows is to save on the EXTREMELY expensive disk space that is no longer expensive. For $100 you can get a terabyte drive. Worrying that you might be wasting even 100 megs on duplicate libraries in different applictions is tripping over dollars to pick up dimes. The other reason for shared libraries is so that a fix to the library itself could fix the same bug in a dozen applications. When you are running a closed source application that you don't want to lose (the reason for wanting backward compatibility), you don't want libraries changed globally since the application may be exploiting the bug as a feature. Either the application developer is fixing bugs, or you cannot count on bugs getting fixed. Very simply, in a closed source environment, having application by application control of file updates is a good thing.
access to users documents, Direct X, OpenGL, screenshots (GIMP)
These issues have already been resolved with current VMs.
keylogging (hot key manager)
Hot keys are already handled in current VMs. But presumably with a new OS that is not trying to be "backward compatible", the host OS would be more secure from malicious keylogging. While the VM wouldn't be secure from current keylogging, current keyloggers would be limited to the single application which would be more secure than letting the legacy keyloggers run in the base OS.
Failing to support any of these things *could* prevent a legitimate application from interacting with the system the way a user expects.
And it would STILL be more compatible than what we currently get passed off as "backward compatibility" trying to fix or upgrade functionality in the new OS while keeping all the bugs that current applications have exploited as functionality means that you end up both leaving huge security holes AND don't achieve 100% backward compatibility.
If you implement all of these you really aren't gaining that much security.
That is a truly bizarre statement. When that MP3 converter that installs a root kit and key logs everything typed trying to get your back passwords, having it only root itself certainly sounds like a big security gain to me.
Particularly if you run all your 64bit code outside the VM.
Without a VM: Security holes in the old 32 bit code are system wide and security holes in the new 64 bit code are system wide.
With a VM: Security holes in the old 32 bit code are limited to the specific application and security holes in the new 64 bit code are system wide
By my math, that is a security gain. Really, it is well known that Windows has not traditionally been a secure OS. This has been widely accepted as being due to it's non-network attached single user history. Taking all of that insecurity and sandboxing it, and releasing a new secure OS with network and multi-user in mind from the get go is just going to be WAY more secure. Unl
Drivers to share the clipboard: Sure. Of course, you'd also need drivers to handle OLE stuff (drag-and-drop, for example). I'm sure it could be done, but don't make the mistake of assuming it's trivial. It takes a bit of work (made utterly painless, but still required) just to allow near-seamless mouse movement in and out of the virtual window.
This stuff is already done by their competitors. So, even if it isn't 'trivial', it is something they will have to do anyway.
Virtually 100% all current software would work: Except, you know, anything that needs 3d hardware acceleration. Or direct driver access. Or more than two COM ports (yes, such programs exist, and VPC's limitation to 2 COM ports is an issue for the one program we have that won't quite work right in Vista. The problem could be worked around, but it's indicative of the greater issue).
So, your saying that MS sucks too much and does not have the resources to bring their product up the match their competitors who are already on the market? I'm not buying it.
Sandboxed by default. How sandboxed? Windows supports an incredible number of forms of inter-process communication. Some programs rely quite heavily on such things. You could allow the VPC to run one process and all the programs that it spawns, perhaps, but there would still be problems.
MOST applications don't share data via inter-process with other applications beyond a simple clip board. But even for the ones that do, you would at least know what applications were trying to access what. Even if you had the simple choices of "No Access", "Clipboard Access", and "Full Access", you would be head and shoulders above what we have now because even if some users just always said "Full Access", they wouldn't be worse off, and anybody that has any concern for security isn't going to do that. I know that I would certainly click "No Access" when my freeware Falangy Counting software asked for access to Quicken.
Hell, this sort of excessive sandboxing is supposedly the reason the iPhone can't even handle simple cut/copy/paste!
That is total BS. Cut/Copy/Paste does not work because while the iPhone interface is neat, it has some serious problems, and Apple simply chose not to implement cut/copy/paste. Likely because they felt it would make the interface too complicated.
How much RAM do these virtual systems have? Each virtual machine would need a good chunk of RAM, especially with the overhead of running all those excess copies of Windows. However, they would also compete with native apps for physical RAM. What do you do when some process that runs on Windows 2000 starts demanding 2GB of working set? Is VPC supposed to automatically enlarge the physical RAM allocated to that machine? Is it supposed to use its own pagefile? Perhaps you'd like to somehow get it to use the global pagefile instead?
Memory actually gets BETTER if you had them running in a virtual machine. Currently an XP application can only access 3 gigs of ram, and anything beyond that must swap to a physical disk. You see, back in the days before dirt was invented and the memory that an OS would use could be counted in bytes, we had this thing called a "RAM Disk". It was a chunk of memory that the OS saw as a physical disk, even though it was in RAM. Since a 64-bit OS could access 16 exabytes of RAM, the RAM disk starts to make sense again. If the machine were virtualized over a 64 bit OS, the swap file could be set to run from the disk, or it could be set to run from a ram disk which would mean that you could get far more real memory to the 32 bit application virtualized than you could from running it natively on a 32-bit OS.
I hope this is enough to help you realize that, noble though your end goal is, your method simply would not work.
No, this does not help me realize that the method would not work. It just shows that you are being short sighted about OSes, and don't really understand how computers work. Or have just drank the "MS said so, so it must be true" Cool-Aid concerning backward compatibility.
A shared clipboard is trivial. You certainly are not going to lose as much security as just running the app with complete rights to your host OS. It would be expected that MOST applications would not be legacy. Only the ones you cannot get in the new OS so bloat would not be that big of a problem and every year it would become less of a problem. A single application running on DOS could generally be run in 1 meg of memory. That is nothing today. An instance of XP will generally be able to run in half a gig. Literally at worst your XP application would require 3 gigs of ram. Now consider that you now have an OS that cleanly could access up to 16 exabytes of RAM, the memory limitation would be far worse on the 32 bit native than it would be on the clean 64-bit system running virtual machines as they could load more programs, and each program could have more memory than if it ran native on a 32-bit machine. So, for the "I load every application I have into memory... 5 times." crowd, they would be better off. For the "I have one application that I cannot live without" they would be WAY better off. Especially since there is no telling if the current "backward compatibility" will let it work anyway. And for the rest of us, who are using 100% relatively new software, we are the best off.
I wouldn't mind seeing some of that here in Santa Rosa, CA. AT&T just informed me that they will not sell me internet access because the second unit on this property has one of their competitors as their ISP. If I get the other unit to cancel their internet, then they will sell me a fiber connection. They graciously informed me of this by standing me up for the install time and making me sit on hold for half an hour before telling me that they had decided not to show up 3 days earlier, and just didn't bother to let me know that I didn't have to be home waiting for them in the middle of a business day.
No, it isn't. What is a problem is that MS has not integrated VirtualPC into Windows, and included a virtual environment to run your 16-bit apps in a 16-bit environment. I know it may sound like splitting hairs, but it is long past the time that MS should be leaving bad code in new OSes just to claim 'Backward Compatibility' when it is totally unnecessary.
There is no excuse for MS supporting any legacy code in Win7. None. Zero. Zip.
If they were halfway competent, they would port VirtualPC to Win7, include a modified copy of XP that will only run 1 program at a time, and include drivers to share the clipboard between the host and the guest. A little configuration magic so that launching the virtual machine also launches the application instead of a desktop, and virtually 100% all current software would not only work, but could be sandboxed by default. If they really wanted to do things right, they would include images for every version of Windows and MS-DOS ever released. This would not only improve security, clean up the API DRAMATICALLY and keep only one code base which would be fully 64-bit but it would also make Win7 by far the MOST backward compatible version of Windows ever released. Hell, they could make even make it XBox 1 compatible and let all of their partners re-release all of their XBox 1 games as "XBox Classic".
Of course, this would have the negative side effect of not letting them claim that backward compatibility was the reason for all of the crap in Windows.
No, it is not incorrect.
What AT&T did when they made the brief switch to Cingular that dropped coverage is irrelevant. The service that was contracted for with AT&T stopped being supplied. Personally, I knew that they were lying which is why I put "not repaired" in quotes, and specifically said "an obvious lie". That doesn't change the fact that phones that previously worked and were under contract stopped working as a direct result of AT&T/Cingular's actions, and "not being repaired due to not getting the passwords" was what the AT&T's customer line tried to pass off on me as a reason that it was perfectly OK for them to not fulfill their contract.
How complex the switchover was is totally irrelevant to AT&T not fulfilling their contract.
As for the "blue" SIM vs. "orange" SIM. You are wrong. They were not handing them out to anyone that asked, and anyone couldn't just go pay $20 for a new SIM with no contract extension necessary. The AT&T customer line was absolutely clear about that. If AT&T/Cingular wasn't pulling a scam, and all it took was popping in a new SIM, AT&T would have just done a mass migration. Either the new SIM would have just come in the mail, or there would have at least been a notice in with the bill indicating how to restore service. That didn't happen. AT&T KNEW that they were cutting off peoples service. To try to argue that they were not knowingly and intentionally disrupting contract customers service would be ridiculous.
I agree. I expect that disease or war will have to be the final solution to reducing our worlds population. While I think that getting off the planet is a step in the right direction to our species survival, even in the best case scenario, I don't think we would ever have enough of an exodus to save the planet. We pretty much will have to either have a horrible pandemic, or a supervision to solve the problem.
That doesn't mean that people who claim to be "environmentalists", and are not talking about population reduction, are posers who are just sticking their heads in the sand. Conservation without population reduction is a failure before it gets started. Population reduction without conservation works just fine if you reduce the population enough.
Of course, if it were not for the monopoly strangle hold that the telecom/cable companies have on last mile internet access, you could just buy a purpose dedicated box and host the darn thing yourself.