Well, I'm not fully qualified to really implement this stuff, but I'll give random stabs at what I think.
1. This is tricky, and involves identifying portions of an OS that shouldn't change(be written to) in normal operations.(Ie, except for updating, is there really a reason to replace/modify the kernel, or explorer.exe under windows, etc? That kind of thing) Probably OS specific, and would involve modifying Operating Systems to support this kind of division. In linux, this probably wouldn't be a big deal, as there's already a separation via access controls over what a user can and cannot do be default. Windows is running in admin mode a lot of the time to function for lots of apps, so probably would be more hairy.
2. Meh, honestly a 4 gig flash drive is enough to store a ton of OS data, so I'm not so worried about the limits here. Something suitably large, and something that can be interchanged for bigger or smaller storage mediums would be fine. Then the limits would be changeable, so no worries. The trick is the separation of the core OS, and the user space via hardware.
3. It should probably be possible to say to the bios 'next boot enter update mode'. This wouldn't cause security issues, as all that would happen would be the trigger of a update mode boot, and would turn itself off afterwords. (Assuming you're relying entirely on the BIOS to handle the switching)
4. Nod, probably something along those lines.
5. Similar, just dealing with a larger amount of flash mem perhaps, if that's your storage medium.
You're correct this is simply good theory, and possibly impractical in many situations. I think it's a design that should be investigated for future hardware/software collusions. Of course, this may just be me daydreaming, but it's a fun mental exercise I think.
So, while I'm not entirely qualified to implement this, I have thought about something in the wake of the 'sony evil'. Basically, I've often wondered if it would be possible to physically separate all core OS files in a separate storage medium. This separate space would be, on the hardware level, read only most of the time. In order to install/update/patch the core OS portions, one would have to exit the running of the OS, and 'boot' into a specific mode that has permission(again on the hardware level) to write to the OS data space.
Using a physical switch or key on the machine to set this mode would work, and wouldn't be possible to boot the OS if write mode was enabled. A form of automation would also work, in that you could have it unset this switch upon exiting the update mode of the system. Something along these lines, neh? Then you would be limited to user space corruption/exploitation/etc. True, this is a fine line to care much about, but at least you couldn't exploit a buffer overflow or some such to modify system files.
An IT/programming job in about a 1000 person company did the same thing to me also. Was kind of strange really at the time.
Then again, my boss was a bit paranoid too. I didn't realise until it was too late that he had no sense of humour. I suppose joking that a good way to force the company to upgrade the servers was to set fire to them wasn't exactly a brilliant move on my part:) Oh well.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I was a linux user. However, I had not used it recently, due to just not having enough games support, and having to write win32 apps for work related things. Recently I had the opportunity to download/install Fedora Core 4(Redhat).
First off, it's actually much, much better then it used to be with linux, desktop wise. Most every bit of hardware was autodetected. The various apps that got installed all work togther, and I didn't notice any of the dependency problems that used to plague the OS. It multitasks better, has a nice security model, and the huge apt get/yum style repositories mean that installing new apps has become a snap. The autoupdate feature is quite nice too.
However, the thing I noticed the most that was lacking was... hardware support/driver issues.
For example, using a Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS sound card, you do get sound. But it's the barest minimum of sound support. None of creative's various cool software utils that make the creative cards rock, are available. This might not seem like much, but it's something I missed.
The biggest driver issue though, was with ATI. I have a Radeon X800 XL video card. It's a little newer, and xorg didn't automatically detect it, or have a driver built in for it.(Falls back on the generic vesa driver) Basically, ATI's drivers on linux leave something to be desired. Skipping over the lockup issues with certain kinds of 3d accel.(Cedega for example) which are only repaired with an obscure option to be disabled in the xorg.conf file(by hand mind you!)... Well you get the idea. What is the real killer, is just the terrible performance gap. The binary native version of ut2004 for linux run's far worse on linux, then it's win32 equivalent. This is not to say it's unplayable. Just that the gap is noticeable.
At any rate, there are still a few quirks like those that still hold it back in my opinion. The learning curve, while less then it was, is still way higher then a windows system. It's *so* close though. I'm really, really dying to switch permanently.As it is, I'll keep it as a dual boot for my own tinkering.
I have to say that I'm actually disappointed in newegg. One of the things I really used to like was their customer reviews. I had always found them to be a broad spectrum of user reviews and experiences with the various products.
However, I just went to their site today, and read several different sections at random. I find an interesting discrepancy.. A product can, on the main search listing have a score of say... 2 out of five stars. If you go read all the reviews, none of them will be below 4 stars.(out of 5). Fun neh?
This is especially telling with a category of products like say.. hard drives, which *always* have at least a few people talking about how their new drive was toast on arrival, or after a few weeks. No such reviews can be found now.
Highly disapppointed. I plan to find a new vendor for my parts.
In some ways this would impede hardware sales, and in some ways, no. For example, I worked for a company in 2001/2 that was still using 386s, running dos. There had not changed, because the software used for them was still used in their industry. It was only after I started working for them, that a newer version of the software came out, and they contemplated moving to windows98 to run the new version. Let's just say they were slow adopters of new things, neh? And not really in a bad way.
However, the down side of such older machines, was that they tended to fail fairly often. Perhaps not as much as could be expected, but enough not to call them 'reliable machines'. Computers are subject to the failure of moving parts, and the effects of heat on the rest of the machine itself. This means that hardware sales will always be around.
Of course, this doesn't mean that companies will be changing out their entire stock of machines every couple of years, so I suppose it depends on what is considered 'slow hardware sales', neh? I'm sure the hardware manufacturers would love it if we got new machines every 3 months:P
Just my 2 coppers.
This is probably very true. I mean, recently I was looking into partition/harddrive/virtual drive encryption programs. There are a number of identical looking commercial apps available. However, TrueCrypt(sourceforge) offers the same or better features really. Honestly, if you have to choose between the free solution, which is a mature stable choice, and one that will cost your company hundreds of dollars per license.... well, it's not much of a choice, is it?
Don't buy cheap ram. You almost always end up paying for it in the end, and an OS corrupted slowly over time by faulty memory is a nightmare, not to mention what it does to your data. You get what you pay for.
I went through, like many others thinking of the nice story setup. I even ignored insane scripting bugs, pathfinding problems, and the occasion fps or crash. Then I get to the end of the game, and it immediately falls to pieces. I just stopped playing, it was the most disappointing game in years, with such a great beginning. Honestly, regardless of whether or not it's obsidian's fault directly, you won't see me purchase anything of theirs in the next few years. Voting with your wallet is the best way, frankly.
So, I don't think that filesharing writers should really be prosecutable for the content random people send along their networks. This gets too close to trying to nail ISPs for the content on their networks. That would be A Bad Thing I think, as the ISPs would incur heavy costs in the monitoring of it, and such.
However, it amazes me how many people believe that copying various copyrighted works is a 'right', that they are sticking it to 'the man', and so and so forth. First off, you are getting something for nothing, that otherwise costs money. That's kind of the crux of the situation right there. Despite what you might think of those to had a hand in bringing it to market, stealing it is not exactly the most honorable way of going about such a protest.
Of course, on the flip side, the numbers that the RIAA/MPAA spout out about losses... well, they should be taken with a large grain a salt. Often times, those who steal things had no way to pay for them in the first place. That's one reason why they did it:P So, counting that as a 'loss' is somewhat misleading.
Anyway, just trying to toss a bit of logic into the situation. Should be an interesting court case I'm sure.
Truly fascinating:) Even in non gpl-form, it would be a welcome addition to the linux system. That combined with some decent raid, would make a truly kick butt file server.
I'm am highly hopeful that Novell will incorporate Netware's "SALVAGE" feature into their linux release. I have worked at several companies where this was the sole reason for not switching to linux. They literally lived and died by the ability to salvage any version of a file that had been erased or overwritten. Just my 2 coppers on that.
Okay, so I code win32 apps for a living. Asking my work to switch to an OS X platform for everything won't happen, since all their clients are using win32 platforms. I can't play the majority of my games on OS X. The only thing I can use it for is misc. recreational stuff, like web browsing, email, and music/video. While that would be cool... in order to change/buy anything, I have to be able to use it in a practical way, either for work, or for games. I agree that everything I've seen about OS X, and used about it(in a limited fashion) seems really, really cool. I'm tempted to buy a Mac just for kicks. However, I'm afraid it would be a toy that I would use for a bit, and then not be able to use in my day to day operations. Which basically means it's worthless to buy in the first place.
So, without these things, I cannot switch:(
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Well, I'm not fully qualified to really implement this stuff, but I'll give random stabs at what I think. 1. This is tricky, and involves identifying portions of an OS that shouldn't change(be written to) in normal operations.(Ie, except for updating, is there really a reason to replace/modify the kernel, or explorer.exe under windows, etc? That kind of thing) Probably OS specific, and would involve modifying Operating Systems to support this kind of division. In linux, this probably wouldn't be a big deal, as there's already a separation via access controls over what a user can and cannot do be default. Windows is running in admin mode a lot of the time to function for lots of apps, so probably would be more hairy. 2. Meh, honestly a 4 gig flash drive is enough to store a ton of OS data, so I'm not so worried about the limits here. Something suitably large, and something that can be interchanged for bigger or smaller storage mediums would be fine. Then the limits would be changeable, so no worries. The trick is the separation of the core OS, and the user space via hardware. 3. It should probably be possible to say to the bios 'next boot enter update mode'. This wouldn't cause security issues, as all that would happen would be the trigger of a update mode boot, and would turn itself off afterwords. (Assuming you're relying entirely on the BIOS to handle the switching) 4. Nod, probably something along those lines. 5. Similar, just dealing with a larger amount of flash mem perhaps, if that's your storage medium. You're correct this is simply good theory, and possibly impractical in many situations. I think it's a design that should be investigated for future hardware/software collusions. Of course, this may just be me daydreaming, but it's a fun mental exercise I think.
So, while I'm not entirely qualified to implement this, I have thought about something in the wake of the 'sony evil'. Basically, I've often wondered if it would be possible to physically separate all core OS files in a separate storage medium. This separate space would be, on the hardware level, read only most of the time. In order to install/update/patch the core OS portions, one would have to exit the running of the OS, and 'boot' into a specific mode that has permission(again on the hardware level) to write to the OS data space.
Using a physical switch or key on the machine to set this mode would work, and wouldn't be possible to boot the OS if write mode was enabled. A form of automation would also work, in that you could have it unset this switch upon exiting the update mode of the system. Something along these lines, neh? Then you would be limited to user space corruption/exploitation/etc. True, this is a fine line to care much about, but at least you couldn't exploit a buffer overflow or some such to modify system files.
Just my 2 coppers.
An IT/programming job in about a 1000 person company did the same thing to me also. Was kind of strange really at the time. Then again, my boss was a bit paranoid too. I didn't realise until it was too late that he had no sense of humour. I suppose joking that a good way to force the company to upgrade the servers was to set fire to them wasn't exactly a brilliant move on my part :) Oh well.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I was a linux user. However, I had not used it recently, due to just not having enough games support, and having to write win32 apps for work related things. Recently I had the opportunity to download/install Fedora Core 4(Redhat).
First off, it's actually much, much better then it used to be with linux, desktop wise. Most every bit of hardware was autodetected. The various apps that got installed all work togther, and I didn't notice any of the dependency problems that used to plague the OS. It multitasks better, has a nice security model, and the huge apt get/yum style repositories mean that installing new apps has become a snap. The autoupdate feature is quite nice too.
However, the thing I noticed the most that was lacking was... hardware support/driver issues.
For example, using a Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS sound card, you do get sound. But it's the barest minimum of sound support. None of creative's various cool software utils that make the creative cards rock, are available. This might not seem like much, but it's something I missed.
The biggest driver issue though, was with ATI. I have a Radeon X800 XL video card. It's a little newer, and xorg didn't automatically detect it, or have a driver built in for it.(Falls back on the generic vesa driver) Basically, ATI's drivers on linux leave something to be desired. Skipping over the lockup issues with certain kinds of 3d accel.(Cedega for example) which are only repaired with an obscure option to be disabled in the xorg.conf file(by hand mind you!)... Well you get the idea. What is the real killer, is just the terrible performance gap. The binary native version of ut2004 for linux run's far worse on linux, then it's win32 equivalent. This is not to say it's unplayable. Just that the gap is noticeable.
At any rate, there are still a few quirks like those that still hold it back in my opinion. The learning curve, while less then it was, is still way higher then a windows system. It's *so* close though. I'm really, really dying to switch permanently.As it is, I'll keep it as a dual boot for my own tinkering.
'Hi, would you like some toast?'
I have to say that I'm actually disappointed in newegg. One of the things I really used to like was their customer reviews. I had always found them to be a broad spectrum of user reviews and experiences with the various products.
However, I just went to their site today, and read several different sections at random. I find an interesting discrepancy.. A product can, on the main search listing have a score of say... 2 out of five stars. If you go read all the reviews, none of them will be below 4 stars.(out of 5). Fun neh?
This is especially telling with a category of products like say.. hard drives, which *always* have at least a few people talking about how their new drive was toast on arrival, or after a few weeks. No such reviews can be found now.
Highly disapppointed. I plan to find a new vendor for my parts.
In some ways this would impede hardware sales, and in some ways, no. For example, I worked for a company in 2001/2 that was still using 386s, running dos. There had not changed, because the software used for them was still used in their industry. It was only after I started working for them, that a newer version of the software came out, and they contemplated moving to windows98 to run the new version. Let's just say they were slow adopters of new things, neh? And not really in a bad way. However, the down side of such older machines, was that they tended to fail fairly often. Perhaps not as much as could be expected, but enough not to call them 'reliable machines'. Computers are subject to the failure of moving parts, and the effects of heat on the rest of the machine itself. This means that hardware sales will always be around. Of course, this doesn't mean that companies will be changing out their entire stock of machines every couple of years, so I suppose it depends on what is considered 'slow hardware sales', neh? I'm sure the hardware manufacturers would love it if we got new machines every 3 months :P
Just my 2 coppers.
Seriously, this is insane. Let's sell our products to the customer base, and then sue them for making use of said products. Brilliant /sarcasm.
This is probably very true. I mean, recently I was looking into partition/harddrive/virtual drive encryption programs. There are a number of identical looking commercial apps available. However, TrueCrypt(sourceforge) offers the same or better features really. Honestly, if you have to choose between the free solution, which is a mature stable choice, and one that will cost your company hundreds of dollars per license.... well, it's not much of a choice, is it?
Don't buy cheap ram. You almost always end up paying for it in the end, and an OS corrupted slowly over time by faulty memory is a nightmare, not to mention what it does to your data. You get what you pay for.
I went through, like many others thinking of the nice story setup. I even ignored insane scripting bugs, pathfinding problems, and the occasion fps or crash. Then I get to the end of the game, and it immediately falls to pieces. I just stopped playing, it was the most disappointing game in years, with such a great beginning. Honestly, regardless of whether or not it's obsidian's fault directly, you won't see me purchase anything of theirs in the next few years. Voting with your wallet is the best way, frankly.
No, actually you work from home, as a contractor with no medical. This is the MPAA/RIAA we are talking about here :)
So, I don't think that filesharing writers should really be prosecutable for the content random people send along their networks. This gets too close to trying to nail ISPs for the content on their networks. That would be A Bad Thing I think, as the ISPs would incur heavy costs in the monitoring of it, and such. However, it amazes me how many people believe that copying various copyrighted works is a 'right', that they are sticking it to 'the man', and so and so forth. First off, you are getting something for nothing, that otherwise costs money. That's kind of the crux of the situation right there. Despite what you might think of those to had a hand in bringing it to market, stealing it is not exactly the most honorable way of going about such a protest. Of course, on the flip side, the numbers that the RIAA/MPAA spout out about losses... well, they should be taken with a large grain a salt. Often times, those who steal things had no way to pay for them in the first place. That's one reason why they did it :P So, counting that as a 'loss' is somewhat misleading.
Anyway, just trying to toss a bit of logic into the situation. Should be an interesting court case I'm sure.
Truly fascinating :) Even in non gpl-form, it would be a welcome addition to the linux system. That combined with some decent raid, would make a truly kick butt file server.
I'm am highly hopeful that Novell will incorporate Netware's "SALVAGE" feature into their linux release. I have worked at several companies where this was the sole reason for not switching to linux. They literally lived and died by the ability to salvage any version of a file that had been erased or overwritten. Just my 2 coppers on that.
Okay, so I code win32 apps for a living. Asking my work to switch to an OS X platform for everything won't happen, since all their clients are using win32 platforms. I can't play the majority of my games on OS X. The only thing I can use it for is misc. recreational stuff, like web browsing, email, and music/video. While that would be cool... in order to change/buy anything, I have to be able to use it in a practical way, either for work, or for games. I agree that everything I've seen about OS X, and used about it(in a limited fashion) seems really, really cool. I'm tempted to buy a Mac just for kicks. However, I'm afraid it would be a toy that I would use for a bit, and then not be able to use in my day to day operations. Which basically means it's worthless to buy in the first place. So, without these things, I cannot switch :(