My bet is if somebody trojan a Apache is to setup a botnet. Basically then, what Apache is designed to do, exept that controled by a third party instead of you. The efficiency of AppArmor is that not everybody is running them, so trojan maker will not design for that type of protection.
Problem is that what virus/trojan want to do what the user want to do. Sure, for a while (1 month... more) Armor will provide some sort of protection. Once a significant part of the population runs it, the malware will evolve.
As an illustration. Today if you just run Windows as normal user instead of admin, 99% of the malware will not install on your machine and the rest 1% will not execute properly. There is no technical reason why the malware should not install or run, after all, generally it needs to access user files and do general user stuff like sending mail. But since nobody is using it in this kind of configuration, malware writer don't care and assume your are an admin.
Well that said, what you propose is already available for Windows. Most firewall suite propose various level of program monitoring. Limiting access of a program to several folder, disallowing it to load unknown dll, disallowing access to net, filtering access to registry,... The problem of those program is that they require quite some training before being of any use. ( believe me, explaining what is the difference between Internet and the browser is already difficult, so I would not imagine try to explain what the browser should reasonably be allowed to do on the machine )
That's also a measure of the lack of interest for security Microsoft has had for years ! Those parasites companies, only living from the weakness of their host, have created a huge market, powerfull enough to threaten Microsoft. ( Hell, talk about working for the good of the customer here. You imagine a bodyguard pointing its gun at you when you decide to replace the backdoor he was guarding... that's mafia "protection" we, customer, are buying. )
I wonder where are the open source/free software when you need them. Their only reply was that windows user needed to change their behavior completely and use Linux. That's sad because if there is something where the open source community is really efficient is with security related software. Why haven't we got a firefox-equivalent security suite, while it is probably one of the most important sofware on a Windows computer nowadays ?
In this case, as in any OO language (including C++... which also has function pointer): you define an interface/class and use a reference instead of the function pointer.
In your case, problably the most common in java would be to define interface command {
abstract string getname();
abstract void handle();... }
class NameVirtualHost implements command {
string getname(return "NameVirtualHost");
void handle(/* do stuff */);... }
After you can implement a factory, or use an hashmap between the name of the command and a reference to the right command implementation.
For a more "function pointer"-ish code, you can use anonymous class
You can still use windows. It just starts to annoy you like a shareware.
That said, how many user would raise a problem on the WGA Problem Forum if they are not dead certain their Windows is genuine. I know that WGA should also warn users when he purchased unknowingly a pirated version, but I guess that the kind of people unknowingly purchasing pirated software falls into the category that would not think of going to the forum anyway.
I'm surprise the number of false positive on the forum is not even higher.
If it takes you 2 min to develop the application, I guess that's not the same kind of application Gartner has in mind. The smallest application I worked on was about 120 Man-Days development (not including QA, Analysis and "corporate crap overhead"). Even if you can code 10 times faster than me, that's still 2 week worth of work and that's not something you just want to throw out the window. ( and even if you have time to kill, you would not want to go through QA, TAT, UAT, xxT, xxT2,... without a good reason )
What gartner has in mind is telling the manager what they already believe. Several year ago it was so fashion to rewrite an application from scratch. As a manager, saying that you were reusing something made you look so old school, not a true dot-com mentality. Nowadays you must sacrifice a chicken to get some hope of having the budget to look at the code. Look at the buzzword friendly tech in the development world, like SOA and Co, this is all about flow management, gluing application together,...
I don't know what gartner is for. Basically whatever is the tendency of the day, they just acknowledge that the right way to go.
Probably the code that validate if a copy is genuine is the same or very close ( like with more tracing )
The problem seem to come from the execution mode. Executing WGA in the interactive context or having WGA running in the background somewhere,sometimes is different and can lead to various problem to access the data it needs to do its job.
Also, Windows machine typically have load of various applications that interfer badly with Windows. Sounds silly but Wireless Network Card driver, Firewall, Antivirus or "rootkit" and the countless sharewares using heavy weaponery ( like kernel driver and general system hook for a notepad clone ) List of abuse possible is infinite, the most common is thinking nobody else is as 1337 as you are and so you don't have to clutter your code with the 2000 lines of error handling and cleanup code needed for the well being of the next hook, driver,...
Some people pointed out that they had a specific problem with McAffee, forbidding WGA to run properly before the user has logged in. I know that my firewall will block any attempt from WGA to access the network before I have time to login and setup a specific rule.
Well that's a little strong. Having a monopol is more or less the ultimate achievement of a company. Unfortunatly, once a monopol emerge, basically the entire sector is screwed up. Ideally you should say Microsoft "won the game" and enter the hall of fame of legendary companies, but the game is finished and we start again ( break Microsoft, opensource it,... whatever )
Once you are a monopol, you should not exist, basically anything you do then can fall into the "illegal" section. Even if Microsoft improves notepad, that's illegal. They are in the limbo zone of convicted monopol. Microsoft certainly did its job as expected, the market naturally produce monopol. But the fact that they still have the monopol means that somebody didn't do its job here. ( you cannot really expect a company to voluntarily suicide just to be nice for everybody else but their shareholders )
What we have now in the EU is a sick game of lobbying. Nobody is really trying to break the monopol, the biggest pocket simply try to get their cut. Today it is Symantec, tomorrow Adobe, and after... Why nobody cares about IE for example ? Nobody cares, because only the consumer could win, and there is not more company with juicy interests to ask for sanction. Why the EU care about Windows security ( a key feature of an OS ), because Symantec is not happy. But Symantec business model rely entirely on the fact that Microsoft is and remains a monopol: they try to prevent Microsoft to change its kernel while at the same time they would have to reprogram their suite to support completely different kernels like Linux or MacOS or FreeBSD or... Does the consumer really win in this case ?
Maybe US are more lucky than Europe, but it seems that the exchange rate 1 EUR = 100 Yen is a universal constant. For example the PS3 sold ¥49980 will be sold for 499 EUR
¥9,240 that could easily mean 92 EUR, or 117 USD. Much less fun.
5) When Vista is finally shipped in Europe, US companies have more mature products and support in Vista they can resell to Europe. Europe is less competitive because their product does not run on the main OS used in US.
The idea of the broken window is in short 1. Break Mr X window 2. Mr X buy a new window 3. Profit ?? -> No because Mr X money could have been invested into something beter. Actually the community is poorer of 1 window.
In this case that does not apply. Microsoft did not break anything. It produced something and the community may or may not decide to invest in it. You are not limiting the choice of anybody. The community is richer of one product.
"Why is it beneficial to anyone that a new operating system will require 100,000 new jobs to support it - couldn't they be better employed improving the human condition?"
What about Designer Clothes, McDonald, iPod,... do they improve human condition ? Why western civilisation, as a whole, produces so much wealth and at the same time billions are poor. Couldn't our society be better employed improving human condition ?
"Used games sales bring no profit whatsoever to hardware manufacturers, game publishers or developers."
Off course they do. Saying that it brings nothing to the developer is the same fallacy than saying that one pirate copy of Windows is one net sale less for Microsoft. There are other dynamics: for example people sell game and reinvest the money directly into new games, or people that get access to more title in the second hand market and may become buyer in the first hand market, or some people invest more because they have the feeling than they can always resell it if they don't like it,...
That's very difficult to know the real NET effect of second hand sales. Second Hand market is legit and part of the dynamic of the market. Killing the second hand market is only telling your customer that the intrinsic value of your product is nil. That's not actually a problem, that's working for an entry to the theater for example but that doesn't mean that you will be able to continue to sell your game with the same price tag. The new price tag may be higher if the demand is high and the offer is low but in this case I doubt it. If the second hand market is really causing them a net problem, then maybe that's because the perceived value of their product is already lower than their price tag ( no replayability, poor packaging, feeling of disposable product instead of exclusive product,... )
"Risking $500k a day in fines from a country with 10 million residents? No WAY it's remotely worth it"
This is a fine IF google does NOT follow the court judgement. A fine must be high enough so that Google cannot disregard the court decision.
Now they can shutdown Google.be, sure, but what will be the WORLD public opinion if they decide to shutdown Belgium because they don't like the court order (that affect only the content of the news aggregator) while at the same time they filter everything for the chinese government ?
"Google had gross revenue of $6B last year. That's $1 per person on the planet per YEAR"... "Belgium would then be responsible for $10M a year."
And Google makes less than $1B in USA, Japan and Europe all together. Much less than in China alone.
Guidelines are meant for developer whatever the guidelines, the developper must follow them: i.e. design its application to met the guidelines.
Now what you are saying is that the overall result when a developer program an application using the guildelines and tools (frameworks, api, infrastructure) available is better on Mac. I sure agree.
But as a developer, to have my problem solved, I would like to develop my application as I would do for a console application using a big config file for all options and such. A magic OS would reverse engineer my config file and analyse my IO and code at runtime to provide the best interface that follow the guidelines for it. A bit like they do in scifi movies: they "code" the interesting bit of the program and the computer do the rest.
Let's call that Enron Defense: hey, I'm the boss, I don't know anything about the details of this company, ask the interns, that's their fault.
Seriously if something needs to be approved by the CEO, that means that to do his job, the CEO should know exactly what's implied by his approval. The CEO does not approve the hiring of a new Janitor or the number of printers to buy in Alaska branch. The CEO personally approves "important" decisions. If he just sign everything his PA gives him, that makes him a moron, and he deserves the blame, 2 times.
And also, do not forget that there is also juicy golden parachute to "repair this injustice" and soothe his emotional distress.
There are always undocumented "feature". As for any API, Win32 is the external layer of an onion. The internal layers are also organised sometimes in smaller private "APIs". Most of the time you don't see them and you cannot access them (eg: statically linked) but with in specific area you can call undocumented private function by selecting an entry in a dll or by updating some undocumented memory structure. Needless to say that those function are highly susceptible to change from one security fix/patch to another, however in mature area a lot of them are stable and didn't change since a long long time.
Have a look at how rootkits are implemented. A lot of them use some sort of undocummented "API" at some point.
I wonder aswell but I guess ( I certainly hope ) that before putting some doubt on such a fundamental element of today science those professional astroner tooks the time to quickly discard most common reason for such a phenomenom: bad reading, bad calibration, lense effect, whatever other effect,... Especially since the news seems to originate from Nature, and if it took only 6 min to find a slashdot reader with a sensible explanation, I suspect it would not have taken much more time within Nature Readers.
But I suddenly realised that most "breaking" news in the IT field are generally PR Stunt or simple marketing bull. So I adapt the question: Could that be an effect of some marketing campain to gain some public interest and possibly some funding ?
Re:More like $22 each
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Micro£oft
that pretty much summarise my renting experience in London.
"cutting edge technology military aid for DECADES"
Yes maybe they launched hundreds of rocket a day, but with what precision and result ?? With hundreds of rocket launched per day, what kind of significant damage did they managed to do ? In the whole campain they probably did less dammage overall than what 1 isrealian plane in 1 raid can do. Or maybe you mean that they kept their "cutting edge technology military aid" for a better time because they feared to hurt Israel too badly ?
Hezbollah is indeed a guerilla, probably, funded and supported by Iran. Maybe they even received the best technologies Iran had in store, but if that's the case, that means that Iran itself is vastly under-equiped, under-armed, and certainly more in line with Irak army ( before the war )
OK I have been running in non-admin account for over 5 years ( at home since Win2000 with its magic RunAs command ( I know this is sad to think of a su-like command as magic:-) ) ) The rest of my family have happily used it for well over 2 years. No incident, no malware crap on their pc. Basically their pc run as new (no windows rotting) and they almost never need any support.
It is true that several years ago it was a real nightmare to setup. Especially with all the program designed for Win95. But after the release of WindowsXP every major suite have been "ported" to run nicely in normal user account. It took a little more time for sharewares ( and strangely multiplatform opensource software... god knows why )
Basically if a user is a Mac-like user: buy a nice little machine, run software from major vendors or well known shareware. There is no problem to setup the Windows machine as normal user. And you hear from them much less past the first few days. My rule of thumb is, if you think you can migrate this user in Ubuntu, MacOS or anything like that, that means this user is also ready to run Windows as a normal user. (Setting up the beast requires a little use to - not neat and pretty out of the box like MacOS)
The only 2 problems: first if you configure the machine for a gamer/poweruser wannabe since most games, tweaking/system utilities still sucks and requires a little "training". Second problem: if you have "typical"(as in AOL/MySpace) windows user that install tons of shit, care about nothing and don't want to enter his admin password to install NudeBritneySpear.exe. There is nothing you can do for them and unfortunatly they represent the vast majority of computer users. If you install them MacOS or Ubuntu, they will think this system sucks because it doesn't fit their need (FreeSmileys doesn't run). Sad reality.
There are always at least one brand that will sell a player without rfid like what happen with dezoned dvd player. In the beginning it was difficult to find one, after a while some brand started to sell some and not it is not even possible to find a player that check zone encoding on dvd.
Off course the movie studio could use the RFID to store something mandatory to read the DVD. But that would mean making DVD incompatible with the huge park of player already existing. There is no way they will try that at the same time than they try to introduce the next generation of players ( they want people to replace their DVD player by a next generation one, not buy another dvd player )
The only way this technology would be usefull is if you make a law that outlaw DVD player with the RFID reader, but xxAA have more juicy target for their "buy you own politician puppet" budget.
A song will probably cost about 2$. You just buy one at a time and the player gives you an easy way to purchase it.
That business model look a lot like the business model of mobile ring tone and games. You may wonder ( I wonder ) who send an SMS to an obscure service for 2$ and only receive a stupid ring tone. But that kind of service is very *very* profitable. Do not overestimate people reaction against DRM. People bought DVD long before it was cracked and even now most people buying a DVD don't care about the zone, mandatory warning,... or the simple fact that they can't make a copy.
The Microsoft player certainly has a lot under its belt. It would probably have been a real hit if iPod didn't exist. (Depending on the polish of the service and interface off course)
Off course we are in an iPod + iTune world so there is little place for alternative ( Sandisk, Creative,... tried multiple times before )
( Note: I know I know, this is/. and iPod is Apple -> the iPod do not need an alternative )
Slashdot Mirror
My bet is if somebody trojan a Apache is to setup a botnet. Basically then, what Apache is designed to do, exept that controled by a third party instead of you. The efficiency of AppArmor is that not everybody is running them, so trojan maker will not design for that type of protection.
... more) Armor will provide some sort of protection. Once a significant part of the population runs it, the malware will evolve.
... The problem of those program is that they require quite some training before being of any use. ( believe me, explaining what is the difference between Internet and the browser is already difficult, so I would not imagine try to explain what the browser should reasonably be allowed to do on the machine )
Problem is that what virus/trojan want to do what the user want to do. Sure, for a while (1 month
As an illustration. Today if you just run Windows as normal user instead of admin, 99% of the malware will not install on your machine and the rest 1% will not execute properly. There is no technical reason why the malware should not install or run, after all, generally it needs to access user files and do general user stuff like sending mail. But since nobody is using it in this kind of configuration, malware writer don't care and assume your are an admin.
Well that said, what you propose is already available for Windows. Most firewall suite propose various level of program monitoring. Limiting access of a program to several folder, disallowing it to load unknown dll, disallowing access to net, filtering access to registry,
That's also a measure of the lack of interest for security Microsoft has had for years ! Those parasites companies, only living from the weakness of their host, have created a huge market, powerfull enough to threaten Microsoft. ... that's mafia "protection" we, customer, are buying. )
( Hell, talk about working for the good of the customer here. You imagine a bodyguard pointing its gun at you when you decide to replace the backdoor he was guarding
I wonder where are the open source/free software when you need them. Their only reply was that windows user needed to change their behavior completely and use Linux. That's sad because if there is something where the open source community is really efficient is with security related software.
Why haven't we got a firefox-equivalent security suite, while it is probably one of the most important sofware on a Windows computer nowadays ?
In this case, as in any OO language (including C++ ... which also has function pointer): you define an interface/class and use a reference instead of the function pointer.
...
...
In your case, problably the most common in java would be to define
interface command
{
abstract string getname();
abstract void handle();
}
class NameVirtualHost implements command
{
string getname(return "NameVirtualHost");
void handle(/* do stuff */);
}
After you can implement a factory, or use an hashmap between the name of the command and a reference to the right command implementation.
For a more "function pointer"-ish code, you can use anonymous class
like
callmeback ( new Callback() { void handle() { a_function_in_this_class(); } } );
That should cove about 99% of the use of function pointer. As another author pointed out, there is still reflexion API to cover the last 1%.
with the war on terror that gave all those security authorities the power to make your life miserable and still keep public support.
You can still use windows. It just starts to annoy you like a shareware.
That said, how many user would raise a problem on the WGA Problem Forum if they are not dead certain their Windows is genuine. I know that WGA should also warn users when he purchased unknowingly a pirated version, but I guess that the kind of people unknowingly purchasing pirated software falls into the category that would not think of going to the forum anyway.
I'm surprise the number of false positive on the forum is not even higher.
If it takes you 2 min to develop the application, I guess that's not the same kind of application Gartner has in mind. The smallest application I worked on was about 120 Man-Days development (not including QA, Analysis and "corporate crap overhead"). Even if you can code 10 times faster than me, that's still 2 week worth of work and that's not something you just want to throw out the window. ( and even if you have time to kill, you would not want to go through QA, TAT, UAT, xxT, xxT2, ... without a good reason )
...
What gartner has in mind is telling the manager what they already believe. Several year ago it was so fashion to rewrite an application from scratch. As a manager, saying that you were reusing something made you look so old school, not a true dot-com mentality. Nowadays you must sacrifice a chicken to get some hope of having the budget to look at the code.
Look at the buzzword friendly tech in the development world, like SOA and Co, this is all about flow management, gluing application together,
I don't know what gartner is for. Basically whatever is the tendency of the day, they just acknowledge that the right way to go.
Probably the code that validate if a copy is genuine is the same or very close ( like with more tracing )
...
The problem seem to come from the execution mode. Executing WGA in the interactive context or having WGA running in the background somewhere,sometimes is different and can lead to various problem to access the data it needs to do its job.
Also, Windows machine typically have load of various applications that interfer badly with Windows. Sounds silly but Wireless Network Card driver, Firewall, Antivirus or "rootkit" and the countless sharewares using heavy weaponery ( like kernel driver and general system hook for a notepad clone ) List of abuse possible is infinite, the most common is thinking nobody else is as 1337 as you are and so you don't have to clutter your code with the 2000 lines of error handling and cleanup code needed for the well being of the next hook, driver,
Some people pointed out that they had a specific problem with McAffee, forbidding WGA to run properly before the user has logged in. I know that my firewall will block any attempt from WGA to access the network before I have time to login and setup a specific rule.
"THEY ARE CRIMINALS"
... whatever )
... Why nobody cares about IE for example ? Nobody cares, because only the consumer could win, and there is not more company with juicy interests to ask for sanction. Why the EU care about Windows security ( a key feature of an OS ), because Symantec is not happy. But Symantec business model rely entirely on the fact that Microsoft is and remains a monopol: they try to prevent Microsoft to change its kernel while at the same time they would have to reprogram their suite to support completely different kernels like Linux or MacOS or FreeBSD or ... Does the consumer really win in this case ?
Well that's a little strong. Having a monopol is more or less the ultimate achievement of a company. Unfortunatly, once a monopol emerge, basically the entire sector is screwed up. Ideally you should say Microsoft "won the game" and enter the hall of fame of legendary companies, but the game is finished and we start again ( break Microsoft, opensource it,
Once you are a monopol, you should not exist, basically anything you do then can fall into the "illegal" section. Even if Microsoft improves notepad, that's illegal. They are in the limbo zone of convicted monopol. Microsoft certainly did its job as expected, the market naturally produce monopol. But the fact that they still have the monopol means that somebody didn't do its job here. ( you cannot really expect a company to voluntarily suicide just to be nice for everybody else but their shareholders )
What we have now in the EU is a sick game of lobbying. Nobody is really trying to break the monopol, the biggest pocket simply try to get their cut. Today it is Symantec, tomorrow Adobe, and after
Maybe US are more lucky than Europe, but it seems that the exchange rate 1 EUR = 100 Yen is a universal constant.
For example the PS3 sold ¥49980 will be sold for 499 EUR
¥9,240 that could easily mean 92 EUR, or 117 USD. Much less fun.
5) When Vista is finally shipped in Europe, US companies have more mature products and support in Vista they can resell to Europe. Europe is less competitive because their product does not run on the main OS used in US.
Go deal for US except Microsoft, bad deal for EU.
The idea of the broken window is in short
... do they improve human condition ?
1. Break Mr X window
2. Mr X buy a new window
3. Profit ?? -> No because Mr X money could have been invested into something beter. Actually the community is poorer of 1 window.
In this case that does not apply. Microsoft did not break anything. It produced something and the community may or may not decide to invest in it. You are not limiting the choice of anybody. The community is richer of one product.
"Why is it beneficial to anyone that a new operating system will require 100,000 new jobs to support it - couldn't they be better employed improving the human condition?"
What about Designer Clothes, McDonald, iPod,
Why western civilisation, as a whole, produces so much wealth and at the same time billions are poor. Couldn't our society be better employed improving human condition ?
"Used games sales bring no profit whatsoever to hardware manufacturers, game publishers or developers."
...
... )
Off course they do. Saying that it brings nothing to the developer is the same fallacy than saying that one pirate copy of Windows is one net sale less for Microsoft. There are other dynamics: for example people sell game and reinvest the money directly into new games, or people that get access to more title in the second hand market and may become buyer in the first hand market, or some people invest more because they have the feeling than they can always resell it if they don't like it,
That's very difficult to know the real NET effect of second hand sales. Second Hand market is legit and part of the dynamic of the market. Killing the second hand market is only telling your customer that the intrinsic value of your product is nil. That's not actually a problem, that's working for an entry to the theater for example but that doesn't mean that you will be able to continue to sell your game with the same price tag.
The new price tag may be higher if the demand is high and the offer is low but in this case I doubt it. If the second hand market is really causing them a net problem, then maybe that's because the perceived value of their product is already lower than their price tag ( no replayability, poor packaging, feeling of disposable product instead of exclusive product,
"Risking $500k a day in fines from a country with 10 million residents? No WAY it's remotely worth it"
... "Belgium would then be responsible for $10M a year."
This is a fine IF google does NOT follow the court judgement. A fine must be high enough so that Google cannot disregard the court decision.
Now they can shutdown Google.be, sure, but what will be the WORLD public opinion if they decide to shutdown Belgium because they don't like the court order (that affect only the content of the news aggregator) while at the same time they filter everything for the chinese government ?
"Google had gross revenue of $6B last year. That's $1 per person on the planet per YEAR"
And Google makes less than $1B in USA, Japan and Europe all together. Much less than in China alone.
"Get a Mac and all those problems are solved!"
Sorry to say that, but no.
Guidelines are meant for developer whatever the guidelines, the developper must follow them: i.e. design its application to met the guidelines.
Now what you are saying is that the overall result when a developer program an application using the guildelines and tools (frameworks, api, infrastructure) available is better on Mac. I sure agree.
But as a developer, to have my problem solved, I would like to develop my application as I would do for a console application using a big config file for all options and such. A magic OS would reverse engineer my config file and analyse my IO and code at runtime to provide the best interface that follow the guidelines for it. A bit like they do in scifi movies: they "code" the interesting bit of the program and the computer do the rest.
What part of the "joke" bit did you miss?
Let's call that Enron Defense: hey, I'm the boss, I don't know anything about the details of this company, ask the interns, that's their fault.
Seriously if something needs to be approved by the CEO, that means that to do his job, the CEO should know exactly what's implied by his approval. The CEO does not approve the hiring of a new Janitor or the number of printers to buy in Alaska branch. The CEO personally approves "important" decisions. If he just sign everything his PA gives him, that makes him a moron, and he deserves the blame, 2 times.
And also, do not forget that there is also juicy golden parachute to "repair this injustice" and soothe his emotional distress.
There are always undocumented "feature".
As for any API, Win32 is the external layer of an onion. The internal layers are also organised sometimes in smaller private "APIs". Most of the time you don't see them and you cannot access them (eg: statically linked) but with in specific area you can call undocumented private function by selecting an entry in a dll or by updating some undocumented memory structure.
Needless to say that those function are highly susceptible to change from one security fix/patch to another, however in mature area a lot of them are stable and didn't change since a long long time.
Have a look at how rootkits are implemented. A lot of them use some sort of undocummented "API" at some point.
I wonder aswell but I guess ( I certainly hope ) that before putting some doubt on such a fundamental element of today science those professional astroner tooks the time to quickly discard most common reason for such a phenomenom: bad reading, bad calibration, lense effect, whatever other effect, ...
Especially since the news seems to originate from Nature, and if it took only 6 min to find a slashdot reader with a sensible explanation, I suspect it would not have taken much more time within Nature Readers.
But I suddenly realised that most "breaking" news in the IT field are generally PR Stunt or simple marketing bull.
So I adapt the question: Could that be an effect of some marketing campain to gain some public interest and possibly some funding ?
Micro£oft
that pretty much summarise my renting experience in London.
"cutting edge technology military aid for DECADES"
Yes maybe they launched hundreds of rocket a day, but with what precision and result ?? With hundreds of rocket launched per day, what kind of significant damage did they managed to do ?
In the whole campain they probably did less dammage overall than what 1 isrealian plane in 1 raid can do. Or maybe you mean that they kept their "cutting edge technology military aid" for a better time because they feared to hurt Israel too badly ?
Hezbollah is indeed a guerilla, probably, funded and supported by Iran.
Maybe they even received the best technologies Iran had in store, but if that's the case, that means that Iran itself is vastly under-equiped, under-armed, and certainly more in line with Irak army ( before the war )
"M$ IMPOSES their security model in an area they are traditionally weak in, removing key players in the business."
YES ! Think of the spyware developers and botnet administrators !
"The problem is that with the short public attention span, misinformation can quickly damage someone or some company's reputation."
Other term for this phenomenom : urban legend.
OK I have been running in non-admin account for over 5 years ( at home since Win2000 with its magic RunAs command ( I know this is sad to think of a su-like command as magic :-) ) )
... god knows why )
The rest of my family have happily used it for well over 2 years. No incident, no malware crap on their pc. Basically their pc run as new (no windows rotting) and they almost never need any support.
It is true that several years ago it was a real nightmare to setup. Especially with all the program designed for Win95. But after the release of WindowsXP every major suite have been "ported" to run nicely in normal user account. It took a little more time for sharewares ( and strangely multiplatform opensource software
Basically if a user is a Mac-like user: buy a nice little machine, run software from major vendors or well known shareware. There is no problem to setup the Windows machine as normal user. And you hear from them much less past the first few days. My rule of thumb is, if you think you can migrate this user in Ubuntu, MacOS or anything like that, that means this user is also ready to run Windows as a normal user. (Setting up the beast requires a little use to - not neat and pretty out of the box like MacOS)
The only 2 problems: first if you configure the machine for a gamer/poweruser wannabe since most games, tweaking/system utilities still sucks and requires a little "training". Second problem: if you have "typical"(as in AOL/MySpace) windows user that install tons of shit, care about nothing and don't want to enter his admin password to install NudeBritneySpear.exe. There is nothing you can do for them and unfortunatly they represent the vast majority of computer users. If you install them MacOS or Ubuntu, they will think this system sucks because it doesn't fit their need (FreeSmileys doesn't run). Sad reality.
It is unlikely that's all that will be available.
There are always at least one brand that will sell a player without rfid like what happen with dezoned dvd player. In the beginning it was difficult to find one, after a while some brand started to sell some and not it is not even possible to find a player that check zone encoding on dvd.
Off course the movie studio could use the RFID to store something mandatory to read the DVD. But that would mean making DVD incompatible with the huge park of player already existing. There is no way they will try that at the same time than they try to introduce the next generation of players ( they want people to replace their DVD player by a next generation one, not buy another dvd player )
The only way this technology would be usefull is if you make a law that outlaw DVD player with the RFID reader, but xxAA have more juicy target for their "buy you own politician puppet" budget.
A song will probably cost about 2$. You just buy one at a time and the player gives you an easy way to purchase it.
... or the simple fact that they can't make a copy.
... tried multiple times before )
/. and iPod is Apple -> the iPod do not need an alternative )
That business model look a lot like the business model of mobile ring tone and games. You may wonder ( I wonder ) who send an SMS to an obscure service for 2$ and only receive a stupid ring tone. But that kind of service is very *very* profitable.
Do not overestimate people reaction against DRM. People bought DVD long before it was cracked and even now most people buying a DVD don't care about the zone, mandatory warning,
The Microsoft player certainly has a lot under its belt. It would probably have been a real hit if iPod didn't exist. (Depending on the polish of the service and interface off course)
Off course we are in an iPod + iTune world so there is little place for alternative ( Sandisk, Creative,
( Note: I know I know, this is