I went to Canonical and "bought" (put in cart) a year of Ubuntu Desktop Support... $293!!!! [...] That's about as bad as Vista Ultimate!
Server Support was $881!! THAT IS MORE THAN W2K3!
What you're buying is support -- i.e. a voice on the telephone and expertise to get your system running, repaired, upgraded, etc. You're not buying software, and you're certainly not buying licenses.
Canonical support, much like similar arrangements from Red Hat et al, is not on a per seat or per processor basis.
Yes, paying $293 per year for support of a single desktop may seem as exorbitant as the cost of Vista. But what if you roll out 20 machines? If you go the Vista route that's thousands just for the OS, and additional thousands or tens of thousands for the software you actually need.
But with 20 machines, your Canonical support costs are now less than $15 per machine-year. And the support contract comes with an SLA. How much does MS support cost? How much is a seat license for MS Exchange-related products?
How do these costs compare when you move from 20 systems to 100? Or 1,000?
Do you still think you can compare support costs to license costs?
On which note, Amazon, get a bloody move on sending me my Linux 901. It was supposed to be out last month, now you say August 11th?
For what it's worth (if you're in the US), I started looking around for a 901 two weeks ago. From what I could tell from the user forum the Linux 901s were held up at customs in San Francisco until early last week.
You should be getting yours soon. I'll be ordering mine as soon as I can convince my company to pay for it.
Well, hasn't it? The Roads, Libraries, and Utilities seem to be working just fine under government regulation, at least here in California. Schools are uneven -- some are very good (e.g. most public colleges and universities, and some elementary schools and high schools).
Government regulation and funding can be a hit or miss proposition, depending largely on what level of government is running the institution.
With roads, for example, the funding and management can be federal, as in the case of Interstate Highways, state, as in state routes, county, city, etc, or can be public-private parterships, as with some toll roads.
Libraries are almost always managed at the county or city level, and quality varies widely. In Arlington County, VA, for example, the library system is top notch -- libraries carry not just books but a huge collection of CDs and a pretty good collection of DVDs with a searchable online catalog and reservation system. You can reserve anything in the system online and have it sent to the branch of your choice for pickup. You can also extend the borrowing term online (except for DVDs) without worrying about late fees (which are trivial anyway).
The Chicago Public Library system, on the other hand, has only recently put its catalog online, and I don't think there is an automated reservation system yet. After moving from Arlington, where I was a very active library patron, to Chicago in 2006 I found the library here practically useless. I hope things have improved and someone can tell me I'm wrong.
State universities and colleges are of course state-funded and -managed, but they get massive financial resources from their endowments and philanthropic fundraising activities. The University of California system in particular has one of the most efficient and sophisticated fundraising operations in the country.
As an aside, it's easy to assume that the richest and most famous schools -- your Harvards and Yales -- have the most effective fundraising, but that's not really true. When you're at Harvard and can raise a couple hundred grand in a week just by opening the mail there's not much pressure to increase your efficiency or sophistication. If you want to see the state of the art in higher-ed fundraising, have a look at Stanford.
It's not that government run enterprises don't work, it's just that they tend to work better when there's a public-private partnership going on. Most projects in general live or die on the strength of the management. It's much easier for a completely public project to suffer complete managerial incompetence. There are a lot more agonizingly inefficient DMVs than smoothly functioning ones (hats off to IL in this case, at least in my experience). Have a look some time, for example, at the University of the District of Columbia.
There's no question in my mind that the government has to step into healthcare at least to control the spiraling costs. But neither is there a question that the private medical sector will and needs to continue to exist. Universal state medical systems elsewhere, e.g. Cuba and Canada, do a great job of achieving quality relative to the cost, but they also benefit greatly from advancements made in the US. And those advancements are purely down to the private medical sector.
All the same, I'm a college educated professional, I have a good job with insurance, and I know that I simply can't afford to get sick. I know I'm not alone. And that is a problem that will likely need government regulation and/or ownership to solve.
They could take off the critic's hat and -fix- the things that they complain about.
Better yet, they could take off the smart-ass hat (or ass-hat) and make some criticisms that are actually valid.
After reading TFA I figured the blog would at least be a bit amusing and perhaps a bit insightful.
Instead it comes off like someone who has just been spent a 12-week exchange program in France and now fancies himself an expert not just on France but on Europe.
There's nothing insightful here, nothing useful, and nothing even really funny except for an almost comical misunderstanding of basic ideas.
What on earth makes this guy think he needs to update his kernel every time there is a minor revision or a new rc? What on earth makes him think that he needs NFS on a desktop? What on earth makes him think that NFS is either difficult to set up with the gui tools included in most distros or that it's somehow unstable?
What on earth makes him think that the latest, bleeding betas of applications are automatically better for him than the stable versions already packaged?
Have a look at the blog if you must, but there really isn't much there that makes any sense. I mean the kid seems to be implying that because Vista can do defragmenting on a schedule it is somehow better than a filesystem that doesn't get fragmented in the first place.
Don't feed him, and don't worry about him. One of these days he'll grow up.
Are those sneaky Reds still trying to use their communism-infused cigars to persuade people to become socialists? Are we still angry over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion? Or do we just have a raging hard on for the nostalgic cold war?
It would be nice if there were a compelling political, ideological, economic, moral, or logical reason for maintaining the embargo.
But I think the real reason is that Bob Dole wants his damn banana plantation back.
But honestly, if you are going to control people, the internet would be an excellent tool to have. Think about it, educate people in public schools that you go to *insert government controlled website here* to search for everything. Use that to give people propaganda, and replace popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo with Cuba-controlled ones that look like Google and act like Google but only searches the government sites.
Yeah. That might work. Just because Cubans are clever enough to set up and run samizdat thumb drive networks doesn't mean that they'll find out about the onion net.
And cesnsorship and state control of media worked pretty much flawlessly in the old Soviet bloc. I mean everybody there was pretty well convinced that Soviet communism was the greatest thing ever, Moscow was the center of the universe, and that they had absolutely the highest living standard on earth. That's why it was such a shock to everyone in 1989 when Reagan singlehandedly punched through Berlin Wall and gave everyone a case of Coke and a two-year subscription to Playboy.
We all know how solid China's great firewall is. No way around that puppy, you'd better believe it.
And of course the real goal of the US isn't to prevent companies from doing business in Cuba in contravention of the law (however stupid you think that law may be), but to actually prevent Cubans from getting any information at all. That's probably why there are honking big transmitters in Florida broadcasting news 24-7 towards Cuba.
Castro's done a great job of blocking all that information. Nobody in Cuba has ever heard of El Duque, for example, or Alexei Ramirez. Both of their families still believe the official explanation that they accidentally drowned themselves while shaving.
Indeed we all know that controlling information is much like building a dam: It's very cheap and easy to do, it takes hardly any effort to maintain, and it's virtually indestructible. And the best way to control the flow of water through a dam, much like controlling the flow of information, is to drill a very small hole and use a finger to carefully control how much gets through. Information, like water, tends to stay put and hates to travel.
I cannot possibly see any problems with your plans for CubaNet. Sure, the richest and most ruthless software company on the planet has spent 10 years and billions of dollars trying and utterly failing to come up with something "that look[s] like Google and act[s] like Google". But with a decent project manager Cuba should have the whole thing up and running within about six weeks or so. That'll show those yanqui bastards what's what.
I've actually got that graphic along with the wonderful Black Flag Hair Timeline hanging on my wall as examples of truly great data graphics.
It usually takes some explaining as to why they're so great. Especially the Black Flag one. But by my calculations, it would take at least 355 data elements to express what's in the Black flag chart. I always pull this one out whenever someone wants to take up an entire page with a pie chart showing two data elements.
In contrast, I like showing this graphic demonstrating the number of DJs and MCs in the Beastie Boys
Step 2: Buy all new hardware because your current hardware isn't supported.
Depends what hardware you have and what you want. Your CPU is most certainly supported but it may not be strong enough for HD playback no matter what system you're using.
Your HDDs are certainly supported, as is your RAM. Your on-board sound is supported (although this is often worth the upgrade since it's so cheap -- ~$25-30 for a TB card).
You may want or need a better video card, but again this is a cheap piece. Nvidia fx5200 is still the gold standard for Myth and you can get one of those for $25-30.
Your cheap POS framegrabber capture card may or may not work but that's not really Myth's fault. Buy a good card with solid support -- Hauppage PVR -x50/500 series, or the HDHomerun.
But seriously.. Why does it need at least one full computer running all the time: backend, if you want to record shows while you're away.
How is it going to record if it's not running? But also note the distributed architecture -- you don't need your backend to be a dedicated machine. But it does have to be on in order to operate.
You can put frontend on the same machine, or a lower power machine, but that doesn't remove the need for the full box.
Actually, your backend is the lower-powered machine. All it needs to run is the backend process and the MySQL server (MySQL can actually run elsewhere but it generally runs on the backend). Not a lot of juice required. Other than that, for recording Myth just dumps a stream to disk. Pretty much anything P3 700 and up is capable of being a backend.
It's the playback on the frontend that needs muscle, particularly if you want HD
Tivo comes in one box that's quiet enough to put under the TV. My cable company's DVR is in one box that's quiet enough if you're watching a show at moderate volume.
If all you want is an appliance, then those options are probably better for you. Myth is as much about the process as the product, and the fact that you are truly the owner. If you want Myth to work in a different way, then you make it work differently. This doesn't necessarily require any great expertise -- changing the menu structure or remapping remote buttons, for example, is just a matter of editing xml files.
Why does myth require so much hardware?
It doesn't -- at least not necessarily. The user's requirements determine how much and what kind of hardware is needed.
There are some folks running systems with 8+ tuners and TB+ RAID arrays in rackmount servers, and there are folks running full backend/frontend systems on microATX boards in Shuttle cases. And just about every possibility in between.
And why does it require you to understand MySQL server?
It doesn't. The backend runs on MySQL, but you don't actually have to do anything in SQL or even understand it. If you're installing from scratch, you'll need to run a command (cut and paste from documentation) to set up the table structure, and another command (cut and paste from documentation) to give the Myth user necessary permissions but that's it. The push-button Myth distros like Mythdora, Knoppmyth, and Mythbuntu do all that for you. There's no rel reason why you'd ever need to even see a SQL prompt if you don't want to.
Well I've got a project I'm working right now that I'd love everyone to know the details of. It's really super.
It will be the most secure and robust thing you've ever seen. In fact it will be the BEST thing you've ever seen.
We've got it in the works right now. I've seen the early betas, and it's AWESOME.
It's sort of open-source but not really if you read the fine print. But who reads that?
This will do everything you've always wanted it to do and more. It will literally blow you away.
When we release this thing, everyone will be crapping their trousers about how cool it is and how we managed to sit on it for so long. You really will be so amazed that you will soil yourselves.
Hell YEAH! It's that awesome. Just don't ask us too many detailed questions about what it is or what it does.
Just stick around and wait for the press releases. They'll tell you how incredibly cool our new product is.
Having worked with a great number of scientists in my life, I would not note them for lack of bias or neutrality. In fact, I'd say scientists are noted for their strong opinions and personal bias'.
Of course scientists have strong opinions, and of course they have biases. This isn't a problem. Einstein, for example, was a fierce opponent of quantum mechanics -- the 'spooky action at a distance' doesn't fit with c as a speed limit.
But the fact is that one of the primary goals of just about every scientist is to challenge or overturn the conventional wisdom. And to so in a way that is observable and disprovable. You don't get a ticket to Stockholm by echoing the community.
Similarly, every true scientist values being proven wrong, because that is what advances our collective knowledge. A scientist who who has never been wrong, or who doesn't appreciate being proven wrong, is a poor scientist indeed.
But on the same note, challenges to established scientific principles must themselves be scientific, and that is the problem here. This creationist doctrine, whatever term proponents choose to call it, is fundamentally non-scientific -- even anti-science. If a theory can't produce hypotheses, can't be tested, can't be disproven, and can't make predictions, then it's not a theory and certainly not science.
But in the large business market this may well succeed. Businesses are accustomed to budgeting and depreciation and all sorts of accounting practices that people don't have to do at home.
Businesses assume that it costs X dollars a month for a computer, and as long as the subscription costs fits in nicely with whatever cycle they buy upgrades on, they won't mind the rent/buy dichotomy.
Maybe. It's certainly true that business operate on a much different and much more complex accounting and budgeting framework than households, and maybe monthly/yearly payments for software better fit into the whole budgeting/life-cycle/depreciation system. But I rather suspect not.
Businesses are much more concerned with reliability than with novelty. Businesses are also very concerned about having control over where, when, and on what their money is spent. A CIO may buy something like MS Office figuring on a three-year lifecycle, but then realize that there's nothing to be gained by upgrading. Thus running the software longer than the three-year term originally planned represents a savings, and money in the budget for other things.
If this were not the case, most businesses would be running MS Vista and MS Office 2007. In fact very few are, and a significant number of businesses still have a significant number of MS Windows 2000 machines running.
The fact is that a word processor/spreadsheet package is much more like a typewriter than like a telephone line. It's a product that you buy and create documents with, not a service that needs the constant attention and maintenance like a phone network with a huge company behind it. And no business would welcome the possibility of being held hostage by one of their vendors. It's becoming increasingly clear that while applications may be proprietary, there is no reason for data formats to be. It's worth paying for a product for the features it delivers, but not worth the liability if what you create is worthless outside of the application.
I tend to think instead that this move by MS is fairly insignificant play in what is becoming a very significant battle that will determine the future of the company. They're being forced to shift the whole direction of the firm into an area where they have never had any success, and in which there are already very formidable players.
This isn't about software subscriptions, it's about hosted services. MS has seen the future and doesn't like what it sees -- systems, applications, databases, communications, etc all living on the network and available anywhere there is a connection (and in many cases where there is not), regardless of platform.
I work in a middling consultancy that is almost exclusively an MS shop, and I've already seen folks at my firm excited about the Salesforce/Google Apps pairing. We recently migrated our CRM system to Salesforce and the consultants we have on the road are very interested in the ability to review and edit contracts and proposals on the fly, from their Blackberries. They also really like the idea of how chat/mail/calendars can be integrated into particular account records without the clumsiness endemic to Outlook.
We've only just begun looking into an official use of the Google Apps, but there is much interest. I certainly think we'll be moving in this direction well before we start planning a Vista rollout, or even an Office 2007 rollout. And I don't believe that we are in a unique position.
MS is terrified of this because their entire existence depends upon the platform -- primarily Windows but also MS Office and the supporting systems that businesses require, like Exchange and MS SQL. Salesforce plus Google Apps chips away at the need for an MS platform, and certainly is a direct attack on the whole one-user/one-system model that MS has always used. I can get to my Saleforce account, company mail, company calendar, company documents, etc. from anywhere, on anyone's system.
That's a bit of a stretch. It's been about two years since (Ubuntu) Linux did not play nice with my M-Audio fancy-pants digital/analog/MIDI in/out card.
Interestingly enough, I bought an M-Audio Delta 1010LT card in January and it works flawlessly in Ubuntu Studio with Jack. I don't use the digital channels but all 8 analog ins and out work as well as MIDI.
I should also mention that I can get a 192kHZ sample rate in Ubuntu Studio, whereas when I tried it in XP it would max out at 96kHz. Granted, you'll never be able to hear the difference between 192 vs 96 kHz, but the higher sample rate means lower latency. The RT kernel in Ubuntu Studio blows the hell out of anything MS can do in terms of latency.
Wireless may still be spotty, I don't really know. I do know that it was super easy to set up a supported (atheros) card last time I tried. I also recall Ubuntu making it very easy to run a wireless card with ndiswrapper, but that's an ugly hack at best.
It is really annoying, however, to keep seeing the same myths trotted out over and over again -- namely that Linux has poor device support, or that it's hard to find and install drivers, or that a person needs some kind of arcane knowledge to add simple hardware. It's been my experience that the exact opposite is true -- most hardware just works, without the need to find or install drivers.
And, has the non-existent webcam support been put there, working OOTB, already?
Yup. OTOB, without driver installation -- they're already there.
And what about TV tuners?
Yup. Hauppage-type MPEG hardware decoding cards are supported OTOB with ivtv. Framegrabber cards are supported through v4l. Again, included or an apt-get away. There may be some cards that don't work with the standard drivers but that's a matter to take up with the card manufacturers. Even HD capture cards like the pcHDTV series and the HDHomerun work OTOB, no extra drivers required.
And what about "exotic" resolutions that everyuone and theirdog uses since over three years, like 1440x90 and 1280x800?
What the hell kind of monitor does your dog have? I've had no problem at all with either Fedora or Ubuntu driving any number of resolutions on 4:3 and 16:9 monitors. Or on laptop monitors with different aspect ratios.
And what about temperature sensors? (Only SMART ever worked)
Yup. Lmsensors, hddtemp, etc, etc.
And what about supporting all the hardware out of the box?
It's been a long time since I've come across any hardware that doesn't work OTOB. That includes things like network adapters, printers, cameras, NASs, and other peripherals. OTOB as in no driver or driver disk or reboot required.
And what about sensible defaults in programs, so that their config files point to the right/dev node?
Is looking through a window with your eyes any different from using a camera on a pole. from a police helicopter of a blimp? Is taking a picture with a camera from an aircraft any different than looking and is doing something like taking a picture from a aircraft any different than takeing a picture from a spacecraft? Is taking a picture through the your window with visible light coming through really that much different from taking a multi-spectral image of the thermal IR pouring through your houses walls?
Don't they teach you knuckleheads anything in Civics class anymore?
Yes, using a multi-spectral image of the thermal IR pouring through one's houses walls is quite a bit different than looking in car windows for a handicapped sticker.
Here is the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This explicitly says that randomly peeking behind peoples walls and into private property or belongings, without probable cause, is neither legal nor acceptable. Not in the 18th century when the rules were written, and not now. The fact that there is technology to do now what wasn't possible in the 1780s makes no difference. This is not a right that the US government has, based on its own rules. Please also note that the Amendment refers to people, not to citizens.
Another bit of enlightenment is in the Tenth Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
There is nothing in this amendment, or the Constitution as a whole, that gives the Federal government the kind of surveillance rights you suggest. The Fourth Amendment prevents the Federal government and state governments from assuming these rights. Therefore, it is not legal, it is not something the government is permitted to do, it is not constitutional, and it is not acceptable.
If you really think you have nothing to hide, then why not invite me over to go poking through all your stuff?
Minor point, but the one thing you *don't* in this situation is to leave user rights management how Ubuntu configures it "by default"; since by default all users have sudoer rights, so can get admin access whether they want by typing in their own password!
Sort of. In Ubuntu, the first user you add (and any other users you add, I believe) at installation will have sudo. After the initial installation and boot, however, new users do not have sudo by default -- the option has to be checked in the Add User dialog. At least that's how I remember it.
On other distros, e.g. Fedora, no users have sudo until you explicitly add them to the sudoers list.
1) The kids don't know Ubuntu/Gnome like they do Windows. Once they figure it out, they'll continue trashing them and installing games.
The point is they can't trash Linux since they only have write access to/home/user. Neither can they install games except to/home/user. It's trivial to simply reset/home/user to a default state with every login. Like most changes on Linux, this does not require a reboot.
2) The morons should properly secure the computers in the first place. If user rights were properly limited in the first place, they wouldn't have had any issues with the Windows machines. And if they don't limit them properly on the Linux ones, they'll have the same problem.
Rights are properly configured on Linux by default. Your hypothetical kids in the library won't be able to touch anything system related, or anything not owned by the user. There is no configuration required to enforce this.
That is not how it works in Windows. Yes, you can enforce user levels in XP but some apps will not work, and it is pretty easy to bypass anyway. Maybe Vista is better, but I certainly don't expect to see Vista on a public terminal anytime soon.
Hardware is one thing. Software, and the BSA, is another.
Then someone should immediately report me to the BSA. Quite contrary to company policy, and without the express written consent of the IT department, I've installed a whole host of questionable software with no auditable license paper trail.
Unfortunately, I'd have a much harder time doing my job without Vim, Firefox, GIMP, OpenOffice.org, MySQL, and Scribus. I also run a very questionable program called VLC, but that's more of a time waster than a productivity tool.
Besides, Jesus can't hit a curve ball so he'd never make it anyway.
The curve he's alright with, and can manage a bit of opposite field power. It's the backdoor slider that gives him trouble. And the knuckleball.
Those pitches are a bit too deceitful. I heard that after 40 days of batting practice he was offered some kind of deal that would let him see the pitches before they were thrown but he turned it down. Oh well. I guess that's why he's still playing in Iowa.
Are you suggesting that software bugs are in some way a phenomenon unique to Microsoft ?
Not at all. What I'm suggesting is that when someone says that X is not possible because it isn't supposed to happen, it doesn't mean that it can't happen or won't happen. The Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable. AACS was supposed to be unbreakable. The four-minute mile was supposed to be unachievable.
I'm not foolish enough to claim that *nix cannot be rooted or cracked. Just that because of its design it is inherently more secure and more difficult to crack than a system that still allows apps to run in rootspace.
What "baggage" ?
The baggage of supporting legacy apps that require(d) administrator access. Because Windows had been designed for so long to be run by a single user-administrator, there are plenty of apps that simply won't run without admin-level privileges.
No, it addresses the same problem that exists on all multiuser OSes, which is why all multiuser OSes address it (with varying degrees of user friendliness). Windows "compartmentalises users" at least as well as other platforms (and possibly better, depending on exactly what those OSes are, due to extensive use of ACLs and the lack of a superuser).
Not exactly. When an OS is designed from the ground up as a multiuser system (such as *nix), it is very easy to restrict access to system resources. If I want to install a piece of software on Linux, for example, I cannot make the installation system-wide (by writing to/usr/bin, for example) without admin privileges. I cannot install libraries to/lib,/usr/lib, etc. I cannot write settings to/etc. Even when installed and executed, that program will only have a restricted set of rights based on the user/group that executes it. I can, however, compile and run executables as a user without needing admin access and without write access to system files and/or directories. I can put whatever libraries, modules, settings etc are required in my home directory without needing access to restricted areas.
Yes, I do run the risk of hosing my/home/user directory and everything inside of it, but I cannot touch any other user's files, and cannot touch system files.
Windows, on the other hand, has a hybrid model where a multi user model is tacked onto a single user-admin model, or rather support for a single user-admin model is bolted onto a basic multiuser model. Basic, because a true multi-user system would never have a single repository for all settings, like the Windows registry.
Your logic is worthless.
Please explain.
You are saying that because an (apparently ignorant) Exchange Administrator misconfigured her server, there might be bugs in Windows.
No. What I'm saying is that the my sysadmin's argument is very similar to the OP's argument. The OP said that because IE7 isn't supposed to allow a system level exploit via something like Flash, then therefore it isn't possible. My sysadmin said that because she configured Exchange to block autoforwarding to public webmail then it isn't possible. It is clearly possible to to autoforward my mail to gmail, and I did it and showed her to prove a point. She seems to think I manually forwarded the messages and somehow spoofed the reply-to field, and that autoforwarding is impossible because it shouldn't happen.
It's the same point I'm making now, and am running out of ways to say: Just because something shouldn't happen doesn't mean it won't or can't.
More on topic, if an app has elevated rights, then exploiting a vulnerability in that app will give the exploit/exploiter elevated rights. There are very few apps on *nix (none that I can think of) that run or need to run with elevated rights. There are a lot of apps on Windows that expect to have admin rights, regardless of whether or not such access is needed. This is why the problem is structural, and why I used the example of the incomplete wall.
You're suggesting that I came to my conclusion because I assume that Microsoft's software is perfect.
That's not at all what I'm suggesting. I'm saying that just because MS says their software should behave in a certain way doesn't at all mean that it won't behave in an entirely unpredicted way given the right circumstances, nor does it mean that the software can't be made to behave in a way completely contrary to how it was designed.
The fact that they specifically stated the exploit was in Flash, and did not mention any major compromise of protected mode or privilege escalations, suggests that there were none.
No. The fact that they specifically stated the exploit was in Flash suggests the exploit, or exploit vector, was in Flash. Everything else you mention is purely assumption.
So what is more likely: the people running a high profile hacking contest didn't mention that the Vista machine was compromised not due to a single Flash buffer overflow, but instead a series of huge exploits in both Protected Mode and the Windows security subsystems. Or that the people running the high profile hacking contest neglected to mention that were using Firefox.
Again, I'm not going to make assumptions about what was not said. I'm only pointing out that it is irrelevant whether the vulnerability was in Flash or in Windows, or even in Firefox, since the problem is the same: Windows is still carrying the baggage of a single-user system and as long as that is the case it will be easier to exploit. UAC does raise the barrier, but addresses a problem that only exists on Windows, since that OS still does not properly compartmentalize users the way other OSs do.
So next time you feel like talking down to the poor deluded Microsoft defender, try examining your own logic a bit first.
My own logic is sound. But I suggest that next time you feel like discussing such things, you rely on facts and leave assumptions at the door.
If the person on the Vista laptop was running IE 7 with the default configuration (protected mode / UAC on), this should not have happened.
This logic reminds me of the sysadmin where I work. She (not a typo) apparently doesn't know how to properly configure an Exchange server, so she's limited everybody's email boxes to 250 MB. Since I regularly have to deal with attachments -- large spreadsheets, presentations, csv lists, etc, and often have to go back months to find a specific mail to answer client questions, 250 MB is not sufficient.
I pointed all this out to her, as well as the fact that I haven't seen limits like this anywhere since the early 2000s. I also suggested, not seriously, that I should store all my mail on the unused part of my ipod, or autoforward it all to my gmail account.
Rather than seeing the absurdity, she responded that it was "not possible" to forward mail to gmail (or yahoo, hotmail, hushmail, etc) because she had set up rules preventing this. It took all of five minutes to set up a new gmail account and begin forwarding, complete with properly configured reply-to headers.
I sent her screenshots. She still says it's not possible because that's not how it's supposed to work.
The moral is that with most MS software, what it is supposed to do or not do has little bearing on what it will do when you know how to ask. Just because something should not happen -- e.g. your assumption that IE7 would not allow an exploit in its standard, protected mode, does not mean that it can't happen or won't happen.
It seems to me that the entire UAC model is little more than a bolt-on that does nothing to address the structural insecurity of Windows. It's like a house with an iron gate and stone wall along the street. But the wall only extends 15m in either direction. Walk around the wall and there's nothing. With *nix, you get a wall around the whole yard by default. Along with the option to put it a moat filled with sharks. With lasers strapped to their heads. Now that's the kind of 'fishy' poppa likes.
Yes, ndiswrapper exists. However, if it's so reasonable to expect MS to provide a compatibility layer, where are the wrappers for other kinds of drivers? Where's the wrapper that lets me run my TV Tuner card in Linux?
Chances are there is no wrapper because the tuner is already supported natively by ivtv (for hardware-encoding MPEG-2 cards) or v4l (for framegrabber cards).
If your card isn't supported, blame the manufacturer and get a supported card instead. I recommend the Hauppage PVR-x50/500 series for SD and the HDHomerun for HD -- QAM or ATSC.
I think the biggest disconnect with MS Word is what it's capable of compared to what it's good at. I constantly see people trying to make MS Word do things it doesn't do particularly well and getting frustrated in the process.
Credit where it's due: MS Word is a good word processing engine. You can type things, check your spelling (it's often right), check your grammar (it's often wrong), and print. These are good things that MS Word does well, as long as your document isn't too long.
MS Word is capable of tracking changes in a document so you can know who made what edits and when. This does not make it a document versioning system, yet that is often how I see it used. It's a nice feature for a writer or a small workgroup but entirely ineffective for a larger group or over a longer time. And it will bite you hard if you send documents externally in native MS Office formats without killing all the evidence of previous edits.
MS Word is capable of generating tables and embedding graphics or spreadsheet objects. It's just not very good at it. Between different users on different systems (or the same user on the same system) it seems to have its own mind about how things should be displayed. Anything embedded can change on a whim, and will change provided you open the document often enough. Which feeds right into the next point.
MS Word is capable of doing document layout. But it's a complete nightmare. Lines disappear and reappear; text boxes change size and shape for no apparent reason; fonts randomly switch from 10-pt sans to 12-pt serif because they feel like it; auto-numbering decides it knows better than you what numbers go where; and objects resize and replace themselves entirely according to their own rules (which are confidential and proprietary).
MS Word knows better than you what you want to do with it, and if you want to something else, well, you're obviously mistaken. It really makes me miss the days of WordPerfect 5. I appreciated and made good use of the fact that I could see the codes embedded in the text, could tell from the codes when something would be bold or italic and not have to worry about text randomly changing format later
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What you're buying is support -- i.e. a voice on the telephone and expertise to get your system running, repaired, upgraded, etc. You're not buying software, and you're certainly not buying licenses.
Canonical support, much like similar arrangements from Red Hat et al, is not on a per seat or per processor basis.
Yes, paying $293 per year for support of a single desktop may seem as exorbitant as the cost of Vista. But what if you roll out 20 machines? If you go the Vista route that's thousands just for the OS, and additional thousands or tens of thousands for the software you actually need.
But with 20 machines, your Canonical support costs are now less than $15 per machine-year. And the support contract comes with an SLA. How much does MS support cost? How much is a seat license for MS Exchange-related products?
How do these costs compare when you move from 20 systems to 100? Or 1,000?
Do you still think you can compare support costs to license costs?
What's a 'c:'?
For what it's worth (if you're in the US), I started looking around for a 901 two weeks ago. From what I could tell from the user forum the Linux 901s were held up at customs in San Francisco until early last week.
You should be getting yours soon. I'll be ordering mine as soon as I can convince my company to pay for it.
Government regulation and funding can be a hit or miss proposition, depending largely on what level of government is running the institution.
With roads, for example, the funding and management can be federal, as in the case of Interstate Highways, state, as in state routes, county, city, etc, or can be public-private parterships, as with some toll roads.
Libraries are almost always managed at the county or city level, and quality varies widely. In Arlington County, VA, for example, the library system is top notch -- libraries carry not just books but a huge collection of CDs and a pretty good collection of DVDs with a searchable online catalog and reservation system. You can reserve anything in the system online and have it sent to the branch of your choice for pickup. You can also extend the borrowing term online (except for DVDs) without worrying about late fees (which are trivial anyway).
The Chicago Public Library system, on the other hand, has only recently put its catalog online, and I don't think there is an automated reservation system yet. After moving from Arlington, where I was a very active library patron, to Chicago in 2006 I found the library here practically useless. I hope things have improved and someone can tell me I'm wrong.
State universities and colleges are of course state-funded and -managed, but they get massive financial resources from their endowments and philanthropic fundraising activities. The University of California system in particular has one of the most efficient and sophisticated fundraising operations in the country.
As an aside, it's easy to assume that the richest and most famous schools -- your Harvards and Yales -- have the most effective fundraising, but that's not really true. When you're at Harvard and can raise a couple hundred grand in a week just by opening the mail there's not much pressure to increase your efficiency or sophistication. If you want to see the state of the art in higher-ed fundraising, have a look at Stanford.
It's not that government run enterprises don't work, it's just that they tend to work better when there's a public-private partnership going on. Most projects in general live or die on the strength of the management. It's much easier for a completely public project to suffer complete managerial incompetence. There are a lot more agonizingly inefficient DMVs than smoothly functioning ones (hats off to IL in this case, at least in my experience). Have a look some time, for example, at the University of the District of Columbia.
There's no question in my mind that the government has to step into healthcare at least to control the spiraling costs. But neither is there a question that the private medical sector will and needs to continue to exist. Universal state medical systems elsewhere, e.g. Cuba and Canada, do a great job of achieving quality relative to the cost, but they also benefit greatly from advancements made in the US. And those advancements are purely down to the private medical sector.
All the same, I'm a college educated professional, I have a good job with insurance, and I know that I simply can't afford to get sick. I know I'm not alone. And that is a problem that will likely need government regulation and/or ownership to solve.
Better yet, they could take off the smart-ass hat (or ass-hat) and make some criticisms that are actually valid.
After reading TFA I figured the blog would at least be a bit amusing and perhaps a bit insightful.
Instead it comes off like someone who has just been spent a 12-week exchange program in France and now fancies himself an expert not just on France but on Europe.
There's nothing insightful here, nothing useful, and nothing even really funny except for an almost comical misunderstanding of basic ideas.
What on earth makes this guy think he needs to update his kernel every time there is a minor revision or a new rc? What on earth makes him think that he needs NFS on a desktop? What on earth makes him think that NFS is either difficult to set up with the gui tools included in most distros or that it's somehow unstable?
What on earth makes him think that the latest, bleeding betas of applications are automatically better for him than the stable versions already packaged?
Have a look at the blog if you must, but there really isn't much there that makes any sense. I mean the kid seems to be implying that because Vista can do defragmenting on a schedule it is somehow better than a filesystem that doesn't get fragmented in the first place.
Don't feed him, and don't worry about him. One of these days he'll grow up.
It would be nice if there were a compelling political, ideological, economic, moral, or logical reason for maintaining the embargo.
But I think the real reason is that Bob Dole wants his damn banana plantation back.
Yeah. That might work. Just because Cubans are clever enough to set up and run samizdat thumb drive networks doesn't mean that they'll find out about the onion net.
And cesnsorship and state control of media worked pretty much flawlessly in the old Soviet bloc. I mean everybody there was pretty well convinced that Soviet communism was the greatest thing ever, Moscow was the center of the universe, and that they had absolutely the highest living standard on earth. That's why it was such a shock to everyone in 1989 when Reagan singlehandedly punched through Berlin Wall and gave everyone a case of Coke and a two-year subscription to Playboy.
We all know how solid China's great firewall is. No way around that puppy, you'd better believe it.
And of course the real goal of the US isn't to prevent companies from doing business in Cuba in contravention of the law (however stupid you think that law may be), but to actually prevent Cubans from getting any information at all. That's probably why there are honking big transmitters in Florida broadcasting news 24-7 towards Cuba.
Castro's done a great job of blocking all that information. Nobody in Cuba has ever heard of El Duque, for example, or Alexei Ramirez. Both of their families still believe the official explanation that they accidentally drowned themselves while shaving.
Indeed we all know that controlling information is much like building a dam: It's very cheap and easy to do, it takes hardly any effort to maintain, and it's virtually indestructible. And the best way to control the flow of water through a dam, much like controlling the flow of information, is to drill a very small hole and use a finger to carefully control how much gets through. Information, like water, tends to stay put and hates to travel.
I cannot possibly see any problems with your plans for CubaNet. Sure, the richest and most ruthless software company on the planet has spent 10 years and billions of dollars trying and utterly failing to come up with something "that look[s] like Google and act[s] like Google". But with a decent project manager Cuba should have the whole thing up and running within about six weeks or so. That'll show those yanqui bastards what's what.
Big shout out for Tufte!
I've actually got that graphic along with the wonderful Black Flag Hair Timeline hanging on my wall as examples of truly great data graphics.
It usually takes some explaining as to why they're so great. Especially the Black Flag one. But by my calculations, it would take at least 355 data elements to express what's in the Black flag chart. I always pull this one out whenever someone wants to take up an entire page with a pie chart showing two data elements.
In contrast, I like showing this graphic demonstrating the number of DJs and MCs in the Beastie Boys
Depends what hardware you have and what you want. Your CPU is most certainly supported but it may not be strong enough for HD playback no matter what system you're using.
Your HDDs are certainly supported, as is your RAM. Your on-board sound is supported (although this is often worth the upgrade since it's so cheap -- ~$25-30 for a TB card).
You may want or need a better video card, but again this is a cheap piece. Nvidia fx5200 is still the gold standard for Myth and you can get one of those for $25-30.
Your cheap POS framegrabber capture card may or may not work but that's not really Myth's fault. Buy a good card with solid support -- Hauppage PVR -x50/500 series, or the HDHomerun.
How is it going to record if it's not running? But also note the distributed architecture -- you don't need your backend to be a dedicated machine. But it does have to be on in order to operate.
Actually, your backend is the lower-powered machine. All it needs to run is the backend process and the MySQL server (MySQL can actually run elsewhere but it generally runs on the backend). Not a lot of juice required. Other than that, for recording Myth just dumps a stream to disk. Pretty much anything P3 700 and up is capable of being a backend.
It's the playback on the frontend that needs muscle, particularly if you want HD
If all you want is an appliance, then those options are probably better for you. Myth is as much about the process as the product, and the fact that you are truly the owner. If you want Myth to work in a different way, then you make it work differently. This doesn't necessarily require any great expertise -- changing the menu structure or remapping remote buttons, for example, is just a matter of editing xml files.
It doesn't -- at least not necessarily. The user's requirements determine how much and what kind of hardware is needed.
There are some folks running systems with 8+ tuners and TB+ RAID arrays in rackmount servers, and there are folks running full backend/frontend systems on microATX boards in Shuttle cases. And just about every possibility in between.
It doesn't. The backend runs on MySQL, but you don't actually have to do anything in SQL or even understand it. If you're installing from scratch, you'll need to run a command (cut and paste from documentation) to set up the table structure, and another command (cut and paste from documentation) to give the Myth user necessary permissions but that's it. The push-button Myth distros like Mythdora, Knoppmyth, and Mythbuntu do all that for you. There's no rel reason why you'd ever need to even see a SQL prompt if you don't want to.
Well I've got a project I'm working right now that I'd love everyone to know the details of. It's really super.
It will be the most secure and robust thing you've ever seen. In fact it will be the BEST thing you've ever seen.
We've got it in the works right now. I've seen the early betas, and it's AWESOME.
It's sort of open-source but not really if you read the fine print. But who reads that?
This will do everything you've always wanted it to do and more. It will literally blow you away.
When we release this thing, everyone will be crapping their trousers about how cool it is and how we managed to sit on it for so long. You really will be so amazed that you will soil yourselves.
Hell YEAH! It's that awesome. Just don't ask us too many detailed questions about what it is or what it does.
Just stick around and wait for the press releases. They'll tell you how incredibly cool our new product is.
Thanks,
Steve BallmerOf course scientists have strong opinions, and of course they have biases. This isn't a problem. Einstein, for example, was a fierce opponent of quantum mechanics -- the 'spooky action at a distance' doesn't fit with c as a speed limit.
But the fact is that one of the primary goals of just about every scientist is to challenge or overturn the conventional wisdom. And to so in a way that is observable and disprovable. You don't get a ticket to Stockholm by echoing the community.
Similarly, every true scientist values being proven wrong, because that is what advances our collective knowledge. A scientist who who has never been wrong, or who doesn't appreciate being proven wrong, is a poor scientist indeed.
But on the same note, challenges to established scientific principles must themselves be scientific, and that is the problem here. This creationist doctrine, whatever term proponents choose to call it, is fundamentally non-scientific -- even anti-science. If a theory can't produce hypotheses, can't be tested, can't be disproven, and can't make predictions, then it's not a theory and certainly not science.
Maybe. It's certainly true that business operate on a much different and much more complex accounting and budgeting framework than households, and maybe monthly/yearly payments for software better fit into the whole budgeting/life-cycle/depreciation system. But I rather suspect not.
Businesses are much more concerned with reliability than with novelty. Businesses are also very concerned about having control over where, when, and on what their money is spent. A CIO may buy something like MS Office figuring on a three-year lifecycle, but then realize that there's nothing to be gained by upgrading. Thus running the software longer than the three-year term originally planned represents a savings, and money in the budget for other things.
If this were not the case, most businesses would be running MS Vista and MS Office 2007. In fact very few are, and a significant number of businesses still have a significant number of MS Windows 2000 machines running.
The fact is that a word processor/spreadsheet package is much more like a typewriter than like a telephone line. It's a product that you buy and create documents with, not a service that needs the constant attention and maintenance like a phone network with a huge company behind it. And no business would welcome the possibility of being held hostage by one of their vendors. It's becoming increasingly clear that while applications may be proprietary, there is no reason for data formats to be. It's worth paying for a product for the features it delivers, but not worth the liability if what you create is worthless outside of the application.
I tend to think instead that this move by MS is fairly insignificant play in what is becoming a very significant battle that will determine the future of the company. They're being forced to shift the whole direction of the firm into an area where they have never had any success, and in which there are already very formidable players.
This isn't about software subscriptions, it's about hosted services. MS has seen the future and doesn't like what it sees -- systems, applications, databases, communications, etc all living on the network and available anywhere there is a connection (and in many cases where there is not), regardless of platform.
I work in a middling consultancy that is almost exclusively an MS shop, and I've already seen folks at my firm excited about the Salesforce/Google Apps pairing. We recently migrated our CRM system to Salesforce and the consultants we have on the road are very interested in the ability to review and edit contracts and proposals on the fly, from their Blackberries. They also really like the idea of how chat/mail/calendars can be integrated into particular account records without the clumsiness endemic to Outlook.
We've only just begun looking into an official use of the Google Apps, but there is much interest. I certainly think we'll be moving in this direction well before we start planning a Vista rollout, or even an Office 2007 rollout. And I don't believe that we are in a unique position.
MS is terrified of this because their entire existence depends upon the platform -- primarily Windows but also MS Office and the supporting systems that businesses require, like Exchange and MS SQL. Salesforce plus Google Apps chips away at the need for an MS platform, and certainly is a direct attack on the whole one-user/one-system model that MS has always used. I can get to my Saleforce account, company mail, company calendar, company documents, etc. from anywhere, on anyone's system.
Basically, if
Interestingly enough, I bought an M-Audio Delta 1010LT card in January and it works flawlessly in Ubuntu Studio with Jack. I don't use the digital channels but all 8 analog ins and out work as well as MIDI.
I should also mention that I can get a 192kHZ sample rate in Ubuntu Studio, whereas when I tried it in XP it would max out at 96kHz. Granted, you'll never be able to hear the difference between 192 vs 96 kHz, but the higher sample rate means lower latency. The RT kernel in Ubuntu Studio blows the hell out of anything MS can do in terms of latency.
Wireless may still be spotty, I don't really know. I do know that it was super easy to set up a supported (atheros) card last time I tried. I also recall Ubuntu making it very easy to run a wireless card with ndiswrapper, but that's an ugly hack at best.
It is really annoying, however, to keep seeing the same myths trotted out over and over again -- namely that Linux has poor device support, or that it's hard to find and install drivers, or that a person needs some kind of arcane knowledge to add simple hardware. It's been my experience that the exact opposite is true -- most hardware just works, without the need to find or install drivers.
Yup. OTOB, without driver installation -- they're already there.
Yup. Hauppage-type MPEG hardware decoding cards are supported OTOB with ivtv. Framegrabber cards are supported through v4l. Again, included or an apt-get away. There may be some cards that don't work with the standard drivers but that's a matter to take up with the card manufacturers. Even HD capture cards like the pcHDTV series and the HDHomerun work OTOB, no extra drivers required.
What the hell kind of monitor does your dog have? I've had no problem at all with either Fedora or Ubuntu driving any number of resolutions on 4:3 and 16:9 monitors. Or on laptop monitors with different aspect ratios.
Yup. Lmsensors, hddtemp, etc, etc.
It's been a long time since I've come across any hardware that doesn't work OTOB. That includes things like network adapters, printers, cameras, NASs, and other peripherals. OTOB as in no driver or driver disk or reboot required.
When and for what has this ever been a problem?
Don't they teach you knuckleheads anything in Civics class anymore?
Yes, using a multi-spectral image of the thermal IR pouring through one's houses walls is quite a bit different than looking in car windows for a handicapped sticker.
Here is the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This explicitly says that randomly peeking behind peoples walls and into private property or belongings, without probable cause, is neither legal nor acceptable. Not in the 18th century when the rules were written, and not now. The fact that there is technology to do now what wasn't possible in the 1780s makes no difference. This is not a right that the US government has, based on its own rules. Please also note that the Amendment refers to people, not to citizens.
Another bit of enlightenment is in the Tenth Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
There is nothing in this amendment, or the Constitution as a whole, that gives the Federal government the kind of surveillance rights you suggest. The Fourth Amendment prevents the Federal government and state governments from assuming these rights. Therefore, it is not legal, it is not something the government is permitted to do, it is not constitutional, and it is not acceptable.
If you really think you have nothing to hide, then why not invite me over to go poking through all your stuff?
Sort of. In Ubuntu, the first user you add (and any other users you add, I believe) at installation will have sudo. After the initial installation and boot, however, new users do not have sudo by default -- the option has to be checked in the Add User dialog. At least that's how I remember it.
On other distros, e.g. Fedora, no users have sudo until you explicitly add them to the sudoers list.
The point is they can't trash Linux since they only have write access to /home/user. Neither can they install games except to /home/user. It's trivial to simply reset /home/user to a default state with every login. Like most changes on Linux, this does not require a reboot.
Rights are properly configured on Linux by default. Your hypothetical kids in the library won't be able to touch anything system related, or anything not owned by the user. There is no configuration required to enforce this.
That is not how it works in Windows. Yes, you can enforce user levels in XP but some apps will not work, and it is pretty easy to bypass anyway. Maybe Vista is better, but I certainly don't expect to see Vista on a public terminal anytime soon.
That would be a nice theory if it were at all true. It isn't.
Different sources put Google's share at around 2/3, and Yahoo and MS combined at around 25-27 percent.
So what's that theory again?
Then someone should immediately report me to the BSA. Quite contrary to company policy, and without the express written consent of the IT department, I've installed a whole host of questionable software with no auditable license paper trail.
Unfortunately, I'd have a much harder time doing my job without Vim, Firefox, GIMP, OpenOffice.org, MySQL, and Scribus. I also run a very questionable program called VLC, but that's more of a time waster than a productivity tool.
I sure hope the BSA don't come after me.
The curve he's alright with, and can manage a bit of opposite field power. It's the backdoor slider that gives him trouble. And the knuckleball.
Those pitches are a bit too deceitful. I heard that after 40 days of batting practice he was offered some kind of deal that would let him see the pitches before they were thrown but he turned it down. Oh well. I guess that's why he's still playing in Iowa.
Not at all. What I'm suggesting is that when someone says that X is not possible because it isn't supposed to happen, it doesn't mean that it can't happen or won't happen. The Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable. AACS was supposed to be unbreakable. The four-minute mile was supposed to be unachievable.
I'm not foolish enough to claim that *nix cannot be rooted or cracked. Just that because of its design it is inherently more secure and more difficult to crack than a system that still allows apps to run in rootspace.
The baggage of supporting legacy apps that require(d) administrator access. Because Windows had been designed for so long to be run by a single user-administrator, there are plenty of apps that simply won't run without admin-level privileges.
Not exactly. When an OS is designed from the ground up as a multiuser system (such as *nix), it is very easy to restrict access to system resources. If I want to install a piece of software on Linux, for example, I cannot make the installation system-wide (by writing to /usr/bin, for example) without admin privileges. I cannot install libraries to /lib, /usr/lib, etc. I cannot write settings to /etc. Even when installed and executed, that program will only have a restricted set of rights based on the user/group that executes it. I can, however, compile and run executables as a user without needing admin access and without write access to system files and/or directories. I can put whatever libraries, modules, settings etc are required in my home directory without needing access to restricted areas.
Yes, I do run the risk of hosing my /home/user directory and everything inside of it, but I cannot touch any other user's files, and cannot touch system files.
Windows, on the other hand, has a hybrid model where a multi user model is tacked onto a single user-admin model, or rather support for a single user-admin model is bolted onto a basic multiuser model. Basic, because a true multi-user system would never have a single repository for all settings, like the Windows registry.
Please explain.
No. What I'm saying is that the my sysadmin's argument is very similar to the OP's argument. The OP said that because IE7 isn't supposed to allow a system level exploit via something like Flash, then therefore it isn't possible. My sysadmin said that because she configured Exchange to block autoforwarding to public webmail then it isn't possible. It is clearly possible to to autoforward my mail to gmail, and I did it and showed her to prove a point. She seems to think I manually forwarded the messages and somehow spoofed the reply-to field, and that autoforwarding is impossible because it shouldn't happen.
It's the same point I'm making now, and am running out of ways to say: Just because something shouldn't happen doesn't mean it won't or can't.
More on topic, if an app has elevated rights, then exploiting a vulnerability in that app will give the exploit/exploiter elevated rights. There are very few apps on *nix (none that I can think of) that run or need to run with elevated rights. There are a lot of apps on Windows that expect to have admin rights, regardless of whether or not such access is needed. This is why the problem is structural, and why I used the example of the incomplete wall.
That's not at all what I'm suggesting. I'm saying that just because MS says their software should behave in a certain way doesn't at all mean that it won't behave in an entirely unpredicted way given the right circumstances, nor does it mean that the software can't be made to behave in a way completely contrary to how it was designed.
No. The fact that they specifically stated the exploit was in Flash suggests the exploit, or exploit vector, was in Flash. Everything else you mention is purely assumption.
Again, I'm not going to make assumptions about what was not said. I'm only pointing out that it is irrelevant whether the vulnerability was in Flash or in Windows, or even in Firefox, since the problem is the same: Windows is still carrying the baggage of a single-user system and as long as that is the case it will be easier to exploit. UAC does raise the barrier, but addresses a problem that only exists on Windows, since that OS still does not properly compartmentalize users the way other OSs do.
My own logic is sound. But I suggest that next time you feel like discussing such things, you rely on facts and leave assumptions at the door.
This logic reminds me of the sysadmin where I work. She (not a typo) apparently doesn't know how to properly configure an Exchange server, so she's limited everybody's email boxes to 250 MB. Since I regularly have to deal with attachments -- large spreadsheets, presentations, csv lists, etc, and often have to go back months to find a specific mail to answer client questions, 250 MB is not sufficient.
I pointed all this out to her, as well as the fact that I haven't seen limits like this anywhere since the early 2000s. I also suggested, not seriously, that I should store all my mail on the unused part of my ipod, or autoforward it all to my gmail account.
Rather than seeing the absurdity, she responded that it was "not possible" to forward mail to gmail (or yahoo, hotmail, hushmail, etc) because she had set up rules preventing this. It took all of five minutes to set up a new gmail account and begin forwarding, complete with properly configured reply-to headers.
I sent her screenshots. She still says it's not possible because that's not how it's supposed to work.
The moral is that with most MS software, what it is supposed to do or not do has little bearing on what it will do when you know how to ask. Just because something should not happen -- e.g. your assumption that IE7 would not allow an exploit in its standard, protected mode, does not mean that it can't happen or won't happen.
It seems to me that the entire UAC model is little more than a bolt-on that does nothing to address the structural insecurity of Windows. It's like a house with an iron gate and stone wall along the street. But the wall only extends 15m in either direction. Walk around the wall and there's nothing. With *nix, you get a wall around the whole yard by default. Along with the option to put it a moat filled with sharks. With lasers strapped to their heads. Now that's the kind of 'fishy' poppa likes.
Chances are there is no wrapper because the tuner is already supported natively by ivtv (for hardware-encoding MPEG-2 cards) or v4l (for framegrabber cards).
If your card isn't supported, blame the manufacturer and get a supported card instead. I recommend the Hauppage PVR-x50/500 series for SD and the HDHomerun for HD -- QAM or ATSC.
I think the biggest disconnect with MS Word is what it's capable of compared to what it's good at. I constantly see people trying to make MS Word do things it doesn't do particularly well and getting frustrated in the process.
Credit where it's due: MS Word is a good word processing engine. You can type things, check your spelling (it's often right), check your grammar (it's often wrong), and print. These are good things that MS Word does well, as long as your document isn't too long.
MS Word is capable of tracking changes in a document so you can know who made what edits and when. This does not make it a document versioning system, yet that is often how I see it used. It's a nice feature for a writer or a small workgroup but entirely ineffective for a larger group or over a longer time. And it will bite you hard if you send documents externally in native MS Office formats without killing all the evidence of previous edits.
MS Word is capable of generating tables and embedding graphics or spreadsheet objects. It's just not very good at it. Between different users on different systems (or the same user on the same system) it seems to have its own mind about how things should be displayed. Anything embedded can change on a whim, and will change provided you open the document often enough. Which feeds right into the next point.
MS Word is capable of doing document layout. But it's a complete nightmare. Lines disappear and reappear; text boxes change size and shape for no apparent reason; fonts randomly switch from 10-pt sans to 12-pt serif because they feel like it; auto-numbering decides it knows better than you what numbers go where; and objects resize and replace themselves entirely according to their own rules (which are confidential and proprietary).
MS Word knows better than you what you want to do with it, and if you want to something else, well, you're obviously mistaken. It really makes me miss the days of WordPerfect 5. I appreciated and made good use of the fact that I could see the codes embedded in the text, could tell from the codes when something would be bold or italic and not have to worry about text randomly changing format later