No, it's really not. Nothing in the article said anything about shifting blame around as a result of this discovery. It's just a discovery about a mechanism, nothing more. Let me guess, you compare about seven things a week to the gun debate, don't you?
I actually think even the idea is bad, because the registry is asked to do way too many things. There are certain things for which a central database is well purposed. But having virtually everything in the registry, as Windows does, is a bad idea. And allowing applications to modify the registry in ways that overwrite each other is incredibly bad. The registry is one of the most important parts of the OS, and yet it has less security infrastructure than the file system. Dumb, no?
You don't consider having to reinstall your system on a regular basis due to registry clutter to be a problem? I've had plenty of small registry related problems, too. Nothing that was a show stopper, but lots of small things like conflicting file types when two installed programs are competing for a file type. The ZIP file type is a complete mess, with windows constantly fighting over it, and always giving me the message about "would you like to make windows the default zip..." even though I always hit yes.
I can't figure it out, either. If you look at the summary, it's funny, underrated and flamebait. (Who are this prude schmucks who go around abusing the 'flamebait' and 'troll' mods like it's their first day on the net?)
I see your point, but I think it's really more of a polite way of saying "Well, they didn't fix the shit that's REALLY wrong with Windows so why bother." In the case of Vista, maybe they actually will improve security and reliability, but heaven knows the pretty GUI isn't exactly what Windows has been most sorely missing all these years.
What's wrong with Windows may very well be something that doesn't exist at Microsoft: elegance, simplicity and modularity of design. They are trying for that lately, at least they say they are, but it's going to be hard to change the mindset of everybody at Microsoft. They've always had very clever people but not very smart people, as exemplefied by Bill Gates himself. He's a man who is as shrewd as any suit in the room, but he has no sense of elegance. He's like that guy everybody knows who can do any math problem you give him, but who has the creativity of a field mouse. Elegance goes a long way in design, and a good OS is equal parts design and science, I think. You can have the tightest kernel in the world, but when some dipshit comes up with an idea like the Registry, it's all over.
most arguments on the other side seem to invoke either (a) it's ok to do bad things to those who do bad things or (b) we're not hurting anybody. the underlying assumption in both cases seems to be that if you want something, the most important thing is that you get it. maybe, even though it's unfair, you just don't get to use microsoft products if you don't think they deserve your money. that's an option.
anyway, your example about peter pan is a complete straw man. it's not ever in the same league as piracy. i have no idea what to do in that situation. but is there any argument over microsoft's ownership and right to control what happens with their software?
actually, i agree with you that most companies probably act amorally. maybe even apple. i would never advocate treating people with respect because they deserve it. most people don't, and virtually all people in business don't, in my experience. doing the moral thing, nevertheless, is probably better for you. most software is far cheaper than the self respect you'd gain from doing the right thing.
now, i'm sure you and everybody else is saying "well, i don't care about pirating, i know it's right." well, nobody has to think that hard to rationalize helping an old lady across the street, but people have to work very hard to justify why its ok to pirate software. that's the clue that deep down people know there's something wrong with it.
so, the only reason you don't cheat on your wife is that you promised not to? i'm sure you have friends and people who know at work with whom you have no formal promises, and you don't cheat them, do you? if you pirate software, you're wronging the people of a company. not because of any agreement or rights, but simply because you're doing something with their ideas they don't want done.
it's really quite simple. if you wouldn't do it to a friend, you shouldn't do it to a company. maybe it's worse to do to a friend, but i think it's ridiculous to argue that there's absolutely nothing wrong with pirating software because it results in no material loss of value. the vast majority of bad things you can do to people involves no loss of material value to them.
it's a modern, easy conceit to see a company as an inanimate object that can be treated badly without breaking any moral codes. it's a lie given to us by the anti-corporate zealots. but it's a cheap mental construct. everything, in the end, is just people. and they'd rather you respected their intellectual production. forget laws and lawyer's convoluted ideas about IP. i'm just talking about how we treat the people who make intellectual things.
so, maybe i should've said this: if your wife was a programmer, would you pirate her software, even if it sucked?:-) if it's wrong to do to one person you know well, it's wrong to do to a company full of strangers. maybe far less wrong, but wrong nonetheless. all i'm asking is that we recognize that while we pirate away. i'm not worried about piracy so much as eroding values and the slide into cheap, easy rationalization.
the idea that some behaviors are more productive than others for an individual and a society is hardly childish. it is children who are generally so self centered as to be only concerned with their "rights" above all else.
i assume you aren't so dim as to assume rights are simply legal entities, and that you mean rights in a more nebulus, subjective way. if so, i do see your point, but consider this: rights are limits to your behavior, like bounds on a football field. morality is the question of where you go within those bounds. there are lots of societies where people all live with their rights, but not all societies are equally productive or happy. anyway, where do you think we even get our concepts of rights from? our rights are the broad boundaries, the outlines, of morality.
anyway, kind of a pointless discussion to have with you, since your last post was the dumbest, most small minded post i've ever read on/. and that's saying a bit.
i don't think we're talking about the same thing. you're talking about what you have a 'right' to do, and i'm talking about what is moral to do. you have a right to be a mean person, for example, but that's not a moral action.
if you do something with somebody's work that they don't want you to do, it's amoral. maybe even mean. it's not treating them with respect, which shows even less respect for yourself. it's also not a productive way for people to act in a society.
people will generally refute the above by giving me examples of things like stealing cars. but that's irrelevent. i agree stealing physical objects is even worse. i have no intention of trying to guess the relative morality of a bunch of red herrings people trot out to defend their actions.
all i'm saying is doing whatever you want with apple's software isn't the right thing to do, and we all used to know it. it's a moral code i, myself, haven't lived up to. but a society is REALLY done for not when its people start acting amorally (we always will be weak) but when its people start fooling themselve into thinking they aren't being amoral. more important than all of us acting perfectly morally is all of us at least knowing what it is.
I doubt that's what the guy meant. I assume he meant, skip the check such that the branch which gets executed if the check is good is automatically done. I still don't understand why that wouldn't be so hard. It's not like they can put the decryption key in the hardware. Somebody would just publish it. And if they used a unique key for everything, that would just be insane.
Somebody please explain to me why this can't be beat. I just don't see how you can make a system that hides information from itself. There must be some mathematical way to prove that nothing can ever be truly run protected without connecting to the outside.
actually, it's more like if we had star-trek replicators, and you could copy your friends BMW. in other words, it's like nothing except what it is. it's a unique situation, and everybody is doing their damndest to justify a degenerate situation. if everybody copied software, there would be no more software. spend some time justifying why you should be the person allowed to make the decision as to whether or not you pay for it.
in the end, this will all lead (and is starting to) draconian IP laws and DRM. and we will have deserved every bit of it, especially those of us (and I'm often one) who use shoddy logic and cheap analogy to defend what we know is wrong. in the end, we are violating common decency. it's not about complicated moral tactics, it's about how we treat the people who write software. if your level of morality is entirely based on material accounting, you're voluntarility missing out on much of your moral potential as a human.
just because material harm doesn't occur is only the basest, most primal level of decency. it's kindergarten for the morally challenged. the same argumentation would lead one to cheat on one's spouse the spouse would never find out. no material harm, right? well, maybe the person harmed is the person cheating, and the society which allows such finesse to pass.
that's a very shallow definition of moral. it's certainly passable, but you should aim for a higher standard than splitting hairs about material harm. would you cheat on your wife if you KNEW she would never find out? ok, bad example, but you get my point...
Why does everybody on the left think the US went to Iraq to secure the oil? It's just such a stupid accusation. Securing the oil was why we supported Saddam when we did, not why we took him out. Apparently, only liberals taking pot shots are dumb enough to think stabilizing the oil situation is a potential outcome of going to war in Iraq. Believe me, if there's one things Republicans understand, it's oil markets and everbody in the Bush administration knew damn well that (a) during the war there would be no oil and (b) after the war there will be less oil coming from Iraq for a long time.
I'm not saying going to Iraq was a remotely intelligent thing to do, I'm just saying let's dispense with this whole cheap bullshit about oil motivating the war. It's just such simplistic college freshman politics.
Yeah, a broad range of opinion is EXACTLY what you want with regard to nuclear waste treatment. Why limit yourself to just the opinion of nuclear engineers and scientists? Only the right would be so closed minded.
Hell, if the processing of radioactive waste wasn't the reason people invented public polling, I don't know what is.
I agree everybody manifests differently. But I think one thing is fairly common: people with Asperger's autism generally don't seem to be nearly as high functioning as Bram clearly is.
If he's really got it, he's the highest functioning autistic that I've ever seen. I know a person with Aspergers, and it was hard for them to get through school. Furthermore, their obsessions tend to deal with obtaining weather information, compulsively, for every city in the US every day, as opposed to sitting down over a period of years and conceiving and writing a very complicated transfer protocol. My guess is he's a very talented guy who also happens to be a bit of a headcase. But who the fuck self-diagnoses with autism? It's almost an oxymoron. If you've got it, you're probably not aware you've got it.
Huh? It would be pedantic if everybody got it right. You're saying people tend to get it wrong. Therefore, it's anything but pedantic to correct a mistake everybody makes, especially when it's significant. I don't think most people consider a battery an energy source. Everybody knows you have to charge a battery. I don't think everybody knows the same is true for hydrogen.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's really not. Nothing in the article said anything about shifting blame around as a result of this discovery. It's just a discovery about a mechanism, nothing more. Let me guess, you compare about seven things a week to the gun debate, don't you?
I never started beating her. See how simple it is to answer a leading question? Now you try.
I actually think even the idea is bad, because the registry is asked to do way too many things. There are certain things for which a central database is well purposed. But having virtually everything in the registry, as Windows does, is a bad idea. And allowing applications to modify the registry in ways that overwrite each other is incredibly bad. The registry is one of the most important parts of the OS, and yet it has less security infrastructure than the file system. Dumb, no?
You don't consider having to reinstall your system on a regular basis due to registry clutter to be a problem? I've had plenty of small registry related problems, too. Nothing that was a show stopper, but lots of small things like conflicting file types when two installed programs are competing for a file type. The ZIP file type is a complete mess, with windows constantly fighting over it, and always giving me the message about "would you like to make windows the default zip..." even though I always hit yes.
I can't figure it out, either. If you look at the summary, it's funny, underrated and flamebait. (Who are this prude schmucks who go around abusing the 'flamebait' and 'troll' mods like it's their first day on the net?)
I can't possibly be the only person who read the last "geeky" as "sticky" upon first skimming it.
Is that WierdHat hasn't been laid since episode IV.
What's wrong with Windows may very well be something that doesn't exist at Microsoft: elegance, simplicity and modularity of design. They are trying for that lately, at least they say they are, but it's going to be hard to change the mindset of everybody at Microsoft. They've always had very clever people but not very smart people, as exemplefied by Bill Gates himself. He's a man who is as shrewd as any suit in the room, but he has no sense of elegance. He's like that guy everybody knows who can do any math problem you give him, but who has the creativity of a field mouse. Elegance goes a long way in design, and a good OS is equal parts design and science, I think. You can have the tightest kernel in the world, but when some dipshit comes up with an idea like the Registry, it's all over.
thanks for the link of psuedoscientific bullshit. like we don't have enough hollow controversy around here as it is...
which side is hard to explain? i'm not sure i follow you.
anyway, your example about peter pan is a complete straw man. it's not ever in the same league as piracy. i have no idea what to do in that situation. but is there any argument over microsoft's ownership and right to control what happens with their software?
now, i'm sure you and everybody else is saying "well, i don't care about pirating, i know it's right." well, nobody has to think that hard to rationalize helping an old lady across the street, but people have to work very hard to justify why its ok to pirate software. that's the clue that deep down people know there's something wrong with it.
Thank GOD I hit that link while I was at home and not at work...
it's really quite simple. if you wouldn't do it to a friend, you shouldn't do it to a company. maybe it's worse to do to a friend, but i think it's ridiculous to argue that there's absolutely nothing wrong with pirating software because it results in no material loss of value. the vast majority of bad things you can do to people involves no loss of material value to them.
it's a modern, easy conceit to see a company as an inanimate object that can be treated badly without breaking any moral codes. it's a lie given to us by the anti-corporate zealots. but it's a cheap mental construct. everything, in the end, is just people. and they'd rather you respected their intellectual production. forget laws and lawyer's convoluted ideas about IP. i'm just talking about how we treat the people who make intellectual things.
so, maybe i should've said this: if your wife was a programmer, would you pirate her software, even if it sucked? :-) if it's wrong to do to one person you know well, it's wrong to do to a company full of strangers. maybe far less wrong, but wrong nonetheless. all i'm asking is that we recognize that while we pirate away. i'm not worried about piracy so much as eroding values and the slide into cheap, easy rationalization.
i assume you aren't so dim as to assume rights are simply legal entities, and that you mean rights in a more nebulus, subjective way. if so, i do see your point, but consider this: rights are limits to your behavior, like bounds on a football field. morality is the question of where you go within those bounds. there are lots of societies where people all live with their rights, but not all societies are equally productive or happy. anyway, where do you think we even get our concepts of rights from? our rights are the broad boundaries, the outlines, of morality.
anyway, kind of a pointless discussion to have with you, since your last post was the dumbest, most small minded post i've ever read on /. and that's saying a bit.
i don't think we're talking about the same thing. you're talking about what you have a 'right' to do, and i'm talking about what is moral to do. you have a right to be a mean person, for example, but that's not a moral action. if you do something with somebody's work that they don't want you to do, it's amoral. maybe even mean. it's not treating them with respect, which shows even less respect for yourself. it's also not a productive way for people to act in a society. people will generally refute the above by giving me examples of things like stealing cars. but that's irrelevent. i agree stealing physical objects is even worse. i have no intention of trying to guess the relative morality of a bunch of red herrings people trot out to defend their actions. all i'm saying is doing whatever you want with apple's software isn't the right thing to do, and we all used to know it. it's a moral code i, myself, haven't lived up to. but a society is REALLY done for not when its people start acting amorally (we always will be weak) but when its people start fooling themselve into thinking they aren't being amoral. more important than all of us acting perfectly morally is all of us at least knowing what it is.
Somebody please explain to me why this can't be beat. I just don't see how you can make a system that hides information from itself. There must be some mathematical way to prove that nothing can ever be truly run protected without connecting to the outside.
in the end, this will all lead (and is starting to) draconian IP laws and DRM. and we will have deserved every bit of it, especially those of us (and I'm often one) who use shoddy logic and cheap analogy to defend what we know is wrong. in the end, we are violating common decency. it's not about complicated moral tactics, it's about how we treat the people who write software. if your level of morality is entirely based on material accounting, you're voluntarility missing out on much of your moral potential as a human.
just because material harm doesn't occur is only the basest, most primal level of decency. it's kindergarten for the morally challenged. the same argumentation would lead one to cheat on one's spouse the spouse would never find out. no material harm, right? well, maybe the person harmed is the person cheating, and the society which allows such finesse to pass.
that's a very shallow definition of moral. it's certainly passable, but you should aim for a higher standard than splitting hairs about material harm. would you cheat on your wife if you KNEW she would never find out? ok, bad example, but you get my point...
I agree with the second paragraph, but still maintain that nobody could have possibly been dumb enough to think the oil situation would improve.
I'm not saying going to Iraq was a remotely intelligent thing to do, I'm just saying let's dispense with this whole cheap bullshit about oil motivating the war. It's just such simplistic college freshman politics.
Hell, if the processing of radioactive waste wasn't the reason people invented public polling, I don't know what is.
I agree everybody manifests differently. But I think one thing is fairly common: people with Asperger's autism generally don't seem to be nearly as high functioning as Bram clearly is.
If he's really got it, he's the highest functioning autistic that I've ever seen. I know a person with Aspergers, and it was hard for them to get through school. Furthermore, their obsessions tend to deal with obtaining weather information, compulsively, for every city in the US every day, as opposed to sitting down over a period of years and conceiving and writing a very complicated transfer protocol. My guess is he's a very talented guy who also happens to be a bit of a headcase. But who the fuck self-diagnoses with autism? It's almost an oxymoron. If you've got it, you're probably not aware you've got it.
Huh? It would be pedantic if everybody got it right. You're saying people tend to get it wrong. Therefore, it's anything but pedantic to correct a mistake everybody makes, especially when it's significant. I don't think most people consider a battery an energy source. Everybody knows you have to charge a battery. I don't think everybody knows the same is true for hydrogen.