I wouldn't go so far as to shift the blame for poor OS design on end-users. The problem may partly be with the end users, but I wouldn't think mostly or completely so. Furthermore, I would state that the lack of change in OS design is something we can blame end-users for largely. Fact is, people generally do not like change, and are too often far too short-sighted and unreceptive to improvements that may significantly benefit them long term.
If people were perfectly peaceful, we wouldn't need laws or governance
If everybody washed their bums correctly and cooked meat well every time, nobody would have to worry about butt-worms
If people were perfectly courteous and attentive on the road, there would be no need for auto-insurance
So now let us imagine what it would take to get to a point where we no longer need people specialized in securing and maintaining the integrity of data. Do We Really Need a Security Industry? YES! We most definitely do, and always will! Is there room for improvement? Yes, vasts, and there always will be!
I own 2 legitimately, untampered-with DVD players, several computers with DVD drives, and an old XBox. When I rent or purchase a DVD that I am unable to play on any of these devices, nothing makes me more livid (especially when I'm already moody because I'm hungry and planned to eat while watching the DVD). It's actually to the point now where I look at the back of the DVD to see who the publisher is before renting or purchasing it, because I've found my devices especially have trouble with Sony DVDs, of course. I've never even made a copy of a DVD or pirated any DVDs, but I can honestly say that as it becomes more painful for me to legitimately watch my DVDs, I will eventually be driven to circumvent their DRM entirely as that would be less painful of a process. It just pisses me off, but there are some movies I would really enjoy watching and owning a legitimate copy of, but I simply won't spend a penny of mine if Sony's name is on it. Furthermore, Sony's BS about hardware manufacturers needing to keep up-to-date with their latest DRM mechanisms doesn't bode well either - I'm not replacing any of these devices which work perfectly fine with the exception of their purposely fouled media.
If I could buy a retail copy of OSX and install it on my AMD machine. I can't justify the cost of a Mac because you really don't get a whole lot of bang-for-your-buck in terms of the hardware your buying as opposed to if you just built your own PC off of quality parts from a service such as NewEgg. I love the OS - I really do, but I'm not crazy about the hardware. I know I might be able to do this once Leopard is released, but now I have to wait till October for that, and I'll just have to deal with not knowing that much longer.:-( I don't care about support or anything like that - I just want to be able to run Linux, Windows, and OSX on any PC I own.
Somebody wake me up when they've put their prices out there. The bottom line to me is, how does it compare/contrast with the competition? Can I get more bang for my buck from Dell than I could from System76?
This was utterly disappointing to have come across. While I certainly agree that Linux is indeed a kernel, what is so wrong about summing up variations of Linux as simply being Linux? The beauty of Linux and GNU is the fundamental freedoms provided, of course. I believe that people should be free to call it what they will, and if for no other reason, the greater summation of programs, distributions, and contributions referred to as Linux is deserving to the project (the kernel, of course) that is at the root of it all. And let us take this a step further. How many average users have you heard say something like, "I need to install Microsoft." Do you really think Microsoft cares that what they say is horribly inaccurate? Of course, I suspect they only care that the vast majority of people in this constituent group are purchasing their software.
...are known to suffer from a long list of social pathologies: naked aggression, credit hogging, micromanaging, bullying, you name it. Leadership research shows that subtle nasty moves like glaring and condescending comments, explicit moves like insults or put-downs, and even physical intimidation can be effective paths to power.
It sounds to me like their making boss synonymous to "ladies man" or "pimp" as well. Either way you look at it, the result is supposed to be a crack team providing services. ^_^
The truth of this is that the ebay mod sends garbage data to your ECU to try to trick it in some way (i.e. the infamous "resistor" mod on the MAF). 99 times out of 100. sending crap data to your car's computer either has no effect (because it may be smart enough to compensate for that error elsewhere), or has a negative effect (making your car run like crap). Re-tuning your car using the example of something like the SCT chip tuner mentioned above means the computer reacts differently to accurate data. This can and will make your car perform better. The difference is $9.00 for the quack solution, and about $300.00 for the solution that works well.
Here it is. Sometimes you'll see some really cheap "car mods" on ebay that advertise they could give you an additional 20hp while only costing you $5.00. Let's be real here - we all know that's a load of crap, and that you get what you pay for 99.9% of the time.
Recently, we had one of our customers outsource the implementation of our SDK to another company (this happened to be outsourced to an Indian company, though we've seen this same type of thing happen with domestic companies as well, of course). Our customer contacted us complaining his software was behaving quite strangely. Of course, our reply was that we didn't do the implementation, and we had never heard of that kind of behavior before (and the software has been in the market for about 15 years now and we have thousands of customers). So we offered to look at his source code, and of course, we found some horribly atrocious code which was the root of the problem - not our SDK, of course. The point is; any time you outsource a project to anybody, you need to be extraordinarily careful that the job is done correctly, and that you have everything you need to pick up where the company you outsourced to left off (coughs Mack-Truck syndrome under breath). That's just my $0.02, and it seems like common sense to me...
So what you're saying is we need some sort of rivalry between two large and powerful nations to punctuate the engineering and development of such technologies, right? Not that I mean to troll or anything of the sort, but it sometimes feels like lighting a big fire under everyones' asses seems to be the only thing that does the trick.:-(
While I definitely feel you should have your strong points, you should always do your best to learn as much about all these areas of IT as reasonably possible. I've been programming for only 6 1/2 years professionally now, but I've found that my interests and efforts towards other areas such as network administration, information security, database design, database administration, web development, web design, usability, accessibility, and so on have all been indefinitely helpful in augmenting my programming skills. For example, you could "know how to code" and write a horrible web application because it looks like crap and is too confusing for anyone to use, the database is unmaintainable because it is not properly normalized. Likewise, even if it were easy to use, aesthetically pleasing, and had a normalized database, if any sensitive information is not secure and your constituents find out, nobody will trust your program/service enough to use it. It's just my $0.02, but I strongly recommend learning a little bit about everything, and a lot about one thing in particular. There's always overlap with these things...
I know it's a bit late to reply now, but I'm not developing *for* Microsoft. I develop for the Windows platform because it pays the bills. I do, however, do my best to use open source for my side/contracting work where appropriate, as the licensing is much more convenient as an individual trying to make a few extra bucks here and there. I'm not sure why anyone would have modded this as a troll, but it's the truth that I saw this "hiddencheck.exe" crap. By the way, I now recall that it was from one of the articles from the RSS news on the "startup" tab of vs2005. Of course, that article is long gone and I can't recall exactly which one it is...
Personally, think it would be fun to use known cartoon characters instead. I would want to use Hoss Delgado.
The only downside to this technology is that I could only imagine that people would end up using sprites of celebrities everywhere, which could become quite annoying.
For example, if you are using the Visual Studio 2005 IDE and use the integrated access to the online MSDN documentation, you can copy the URL from the address bar in VS2005 and paste it into firefox. What you'll find, in many cases, is Firefox asking you if you would like to download "HiddenCheck.exe". Though I have not seen this for some time now, I have recently found that there are a few pages in the online MSDN docs that load fine with IE, yet say the "Resource is not available" in Firefox. Of course, while I'm sort-of whining a little, I may as well go on to complain about how several of the MSDN pages only render properly in IE.:-( I can't trust them enough to use their own browser without feeling like I'm being watched, and I can't use an alternative browser in an attempt to try to protect my privacy. Granted, I'm not doing anything wrong, but that feeling of always being watched is enough to make anybody feel uneasy.
My understanding is that JSE6 is not GPL'd because they did not want to delay its release. This means that the old licensing concerns with distributing Java on GPL'd platforms are still a concern. Though much if not most of the JVM has already been "open source," they were not GPL'd. JSE7 will be GPL'd if all goes according to plan, however, and Sun is now aiming to go straight to the GPL3. Here is JSE6's current license.
"But I don't want to eliminate in your minds the notions of risk of pricing that comes from competition with open source. We are higher priced, but we bring greater value," Ballmer added.
Maybe my interpretation is wrong, but I interpreted this as him clearly stating that Linux is cheaper than Windows. What ever happened to "Get the Facts?"
...The parent post brings up a very important point, however. I suspect the reason why they haven't already offered pre-installed Linux computers is because they have not figured out what additional commercial offerings they could provide on this platform to earn extra money. Though I'm sure this provides them some extra bucks, I imagine it may also have at least some part in lowering the overall cost of the computers they are trying to sell, which helps make them competitive. Imagine this scenario: 'Computer A' is bundled with Windows and a bunch of crap you and I don't want, and costs $399; however, 'Computer B' which consists of exactly the same hardware is bundled with Linux and no third-party programs is offered at $499. While us Slashdot folk may be willing to spend a few extra bucks not to have that "crap" pre-installed, the "average Joe/Jane" would most likely see the lower price as the bottom-line.
Yes, it is true that Vista assumes all installation/setup programs require elevated permissions. This is fair because setup programs will often (if not almost always) need access to create registry keys, system files and libraries, etc... One big piece of the puzzle that this article misses, however, is the ability to specify in your program's manifest that it requires elevated access. This means I could compile any executable and embed a manifest that the executable I compiled requires this elevated access. This is the one place I can say the UAC varies from such features in *nix operating systems. The next step is obvious: social engineering. If you can convince the user that allowing elevated access for a malicious program is instead a good/necessary thing, then the UAC is, in a sense, defeated. However, this applies to any OS. If I were to install a.deb file on any debian-based distro of Linux, and entered my password blindly, I would be able to install malicious software on my machine, or even do something as drastic as installing a new kernel and changing which kernel my system boots up to. I fail to see how the UAC, in this respect, is any different from Linux or MacOSX - you either have super-user access or you do not, and you require super-user access to install software. I'm happy enough to at least see the effort from Microsoft to make this principal finally apply to Windows, and if it doesn't make everyone happy, then I'd like to see them come up with something better.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't go so far as to shift the blame for poor OS design on end-users. The problem may partly be with the end users, but I wouldn't think mostly or completely so. Furthermore, I would state that the lack of change in OS design is something we can blame end-users for largely. Fact is, people generally do not like change, and are too often far too short-sighted and unreceptive to improvements that may significantly benefit them long term.
If people were perfectly peaceful, we wouldn't need laws or governance
If everybody washed their bums correctly and cooked meat well every time, nobody would have to worry about butt-worms
If people were perfectly courteous and attentive on the road, there would be no need for auto-insurance
So now let us imagine what it would take to get to a point where we no longer need people specialized in securing and maintaining the integrity of data. Do We Really Need a Security Industry? YES! We most definitely do, and always will! Is there room for improvement? Yes, vasts, and there always will be!
I own 2 legitimately, untampered-with DVD players, several computers with DVD drives, and an old XBox. When I rent or purchase a DVD that I am unable to play on any of these devices, nothing makes me more livid (especially when I'm already moody because I'm hungry and planned to eat while watching the DVD). It's actually to the point now where I look at the back of the DVD to see who the publisher is before renting or purchasing it, because I've found my devices especially have trouble with Sony DVDs, of course. I've never even made a copy of a DVD or pirated any DVDs, but I can honestly say that as it becomes more painful for me to legitimately watch my DVDs, I will eventually be driven to circumvent their DRM entirely as that would be less painful of a process. It just pisses me off, but there are some movies I would really enjoy watching and owning a legitimate copy of, but I simply won't spend a penny of mine if Sony's name is on it. Furthermore, Sony's BS about hardware manufacturers needing to keep up-to-date with their latest DRM mechanisms doesn't bode well either - I'm not replacing any of these devices which work perfectly fine with the exception of their purposely fouled media.
If I could buy a retail copy of OSX and install it on my AMD machine. I can't justify the cost of a Mac because you really don't get a whole lot of bang-for-your-buck in terms of the hardware your buying as opposed to if you just built your own PC off of quality parts from a service such as NewEgg. I love the OS - I really do, but I'm not crazy about the hardware. I know I might be able to do this once Leopard is released, but now I have to wait till October for that, and I'll just have to deal with not knowing that much longer. :-( I don't care about support or anything like that - I just want to be able to run Linux, Windows, and OSX on any PC I own.
Quoted from Monty Python, of course.
How does this differ from "Verified by Visa," and in what ways is it better and/or worse?
Somebody wake me up when they've put their prices out there. The bottom line to me is, how does it compare/contrast with the competition? Can I get more bang for my buck from Dell than I could from System76?
Imagine keeping one of those things in your pocket - that would make for a great episode of "Ow, my balls!"
Honestly, that has a much better chance of working than a voting system using a Jet database. ^_^
This was utterly disappointing to have come across. While I certainly agree that Linux is indeed a kernel, what is so wrong about summing up variations of Linux as simply being Linux? The beauty of Linux and GNU is the fundamental freedoms provided, of course. I believe that people should be free to call it what they will, and if for no other reason, the greater summation of programs, distributions, and contributions referred to as Linux is deserving to the project (the kernel, of course) that is at the root of it all. And let us take this a step further. How many average users have you heard say something like, "I need to install Microsoft." Do you really think Microsoft cares that what they say is horribly inaccurate? Of course, I suspect they only care that the vast majority of people in this constituent group are purchasing their software.
It sounds to me like their making boss synonymous to "ladies man" or "pimp" as well. Either way you look at it, the result is supposed to be a crack team providing services. ^_^
Good guess, but playing cheap with the ECU is flat out asking for it! Here's an example of a cheap modification that is quite vague about what signals being sent to the ECU are being changed: http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/NISSAN-ALTIMA-1993- 2007-2006-2005-2004-GAS-SAVER-HP_W0QQitemZ29010018 8833QQihZ019QQcategoryZ33597QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem. Here is an example of something that actually adjusts your ECU's programming slightly: http://www.focussport.com/chips.htm
The truth of this is that the ebay mod sends garbage data to your ECU to try to trick it in some way (i.e. the infamous "resistor" mod on the MAF). 99 times out of 100. sending crap data to your car's computer either has no effect (because it may be smart enough to compensate for that error elsewhere), or has a negative effect (making your car run like crap). Re-tuning your car using the example of something like the SCT chip tuner mentioned above means the computer reacts differently to accurate data. This can and will make your car perform better. The difference is $9.00 for the quack solution, and about $300.00 for the solution that works well.
Here it is. Sometimes you'll see some really cheap "car mods" on ebay that advertise they could give you an additional 20hp while only costing you $5.00. Let's be real here - we all know that's a load of crap, and that you get what you pay for 99.9% of the time.
Recently, we had one of our customers outsource the implementation of our SDK to another company (this happened to be outsourced to an Indian company, though we've seen this same type of thing happen with domestic companies as well, of course). Our customer contacted us complaining his software was behaving quite strangely. Of course, our reply was that we didn't do the implementation, and we had never heard of that kind of behavior before (and the software has been in the market for about 15 years now and we have thousands of customers). So we offered to look at his source code, and of course, we found some horribly atrocious code which was the root of the problem - not our SDK, of course. The point is; any time you outsource a project to anybody, you need to be extraordinarily careful that the job is done correctly, and that you have everything you need to pick up where the company you outsourced to left off (coughs Mack-Truck syndrome under breath). That's just my $0.02, and it seems like common sense to me...
So what you're saying is we need some sort of rivalry between two large and powerful nations to punctuate the engineering and development of such technologies, right? Not that I mean to troll or anything of the sort, but it sometimes feels like lighting a big fire under everyones' asses seems to be the only thing that does the trick. :-(
With that solid state drive, I could use it as an mp3 player in a Bugatti and not worry about loosing all those mp3's when I crash the car. ^_^
While I definitely feel you should have your strong points, you should always do your best to learn as much about all these areas of IT as reasonably possible. I've been programming for only 6 1/2 years professionally now, but I've found that my interests and efforts towards other areas such as network administration, information security, database design, database administration, web development, web design, usability, accessibility, and so on have all been indefinitely helpful in augmenting my programming skills. For example, you could "know how to code" and write a horrible web application because it looks like crap and is too confusing for anyone to use, the database is unmaintainable because it is not properly normalized. Likewise, even if it were easy to use, aesthetically pleasing, and had a normalized database, if any sensitive information is not secure and your constituents find out, nobody will trust your program/service enough to use it. It's just my $0.02, but I strongly recommend learning a little bit about everything, and a lot about one thing in particular. There's always overlap with these things...
"Brilliant!"
They're gonna download the Internet?
I know it's a bit late to reply now, but I'm not developing *for* Microsoft. I develop for the Windows platform because it pays the bills. I do, however, do my best to use open source for my side/contracting work where appropriate, as the licensing is much more convenient as an individual trying to make a few extra bucks here and there. I'm not sure why anyone would have modded this as a troll, but it's the truth that I saw this "hiddencheck.exe" crap. By the way, I now recall that it was from one of the articles from the RSS news on the "startup" tab of vs2005. Of course, that article is long gone and I can't recall exactly which one it is...
Personally, think it would be fun to use known cartoon characters instead. I would want to use Hoss Delgado.
The only downside to this technology is that I could only imagine that people would end up using sprites of celebrities everywhere, which could become quite annoying.
For example, if you are using the Visual Studio 2005 IDE and use the integrated access to the online MSDN documentation, you can copy the URL from the address bar in VS2005 and paste it into firefox. What you'll find, in many cases, is Firefox asking you if you would like to download "HiddenCheck.exe". Though I have not seen this for some time now, I have recently found that there are a few pages in the online MSDN docs that load fine with IE, yet say the "Resource is not available" in Firefox. Of course, while I'm sort-of whining a little, I may as well go on to complain about how several of the MSDN pages only render properly in IE. :-( I can't trust them enough to use their own browser without feeling like I'm being watched, and I can't use an alternative browser in an attempt to try to protect my privacy. Granted, I'm not doing anything wrong, but that feeling of always being watched is enough to make anybody feel uneasy.
My understanding is that JSE6 is not GPL'd because they did not want to delay its release. This means that the old licensing concerns with distributing Java on GPL'd platforms are still a concern. Though much if not most of the JVM has already been "open source," they were not GPL'd. JSE7 will be GPL'd if all goes according to plan, however, and Sun is now aiming to go straight to the GPL3. Here is JSE6's current license.
From the TFA:
Maybe my interpretation is wrong, but I interpreted this as him clearly stating that Linux is cheaper than Windows. What ever happened to "Get the Facts?"
...The parent post brings up a very important point, however. I suspect the reason why they haven't already offered pre-installed Linux computers is because they have not figured out what additional commercial offerings they could provide on this platform to earn extra money. Though I'm sure this provides them some extra bucks, I imagine it may also have at least some part in lowering the overall cost of the computers they are trying to sell, which helps make them competitive. Imagine this scenario: 'Computer A' is bundled with Windows and a bunch of crap you and I don't want, and costs $399; however, 'Computer B' which consists of exactly the same hardware is bundled with Linux and no third-party programs is offered at $499. While us Slashdot folk may be willing to spend a few extra bucks not to have that "crap" pre-installed, the "average Joe/Jane" would most likely see the lower price as the bottom-line.
Yes, it is true that Vista assumes all installation/setup programs require elevated permissions. This is fair because setup programs will often (if not almost always) need access to create registry keys, system files and libraries, etc... One big piece of the puzzle that this article misses, however, is the ability to specify in your program's manifest that it requires elevated access. This means I could compile any executable and embed a manifest that the executable I compiled requires this elevated access. This is the one place I can say the UAC varies from such features in *nix operating systems. The next step is obvious: social engineering. If you can convince the user that allowing elevated access for a malicious program is instead a good/necessary thing, then the UAC is, in a sense, defeated. However, this applies to any OS. If I were to install a .deb file on any debian-based distro of Linux, and entered my password blindly, I would be able to install malicious software on my machine, or even do something as drastic as installing a new kernel and changing which kernel my system boots up to. I fail to see how the UAC, in this respect, is any different from Linux or MacOSX - you either have super-user access or you do not, and you require super-user access to install software. I'm happy enough to at least see the effort from Microsoft to make this principal finally apply to Windows, and if it doesn't make everyone happy, then I'd like to see them come up with something better.