Are we seeing the stumbling of the Microsoft Juggernaught with the slow adoption of Windows Vista?"
I sure hope so. Microsoft has forgotten who its customers are (hint: it's not the RIAA). Maybe the Vista reception will make them stand up and take notice—and get back to the client-driven business model that made them successful in the first place.
This, of course is the wrong place to say that; slashdotters tend to suffer from the delusion that they are the market.
This code is specific to Vista, but it doesn't exploit a Vista vulnerability.
The technique is applicable to any platform and exploits the well understood fact that if you can get a system to run your code at boot time, you can do anything you want with it, assuming you are willing to do the work it takes to do it without triggering wards (e.g. full disk encryption). Alex spent months on this.
I have all the reasons I need to give Vista a pass and wait for the OS Microsoft builds when they come to their senses and go back to a market-driven business model. This isn't one of those reasons.
Like you, I'm an old fart; I wrote assembler code for the PDP-8, PDP/LSI-11 and the 68k. They were ok: easy to learn and use, but I always preferred the X86.
Sure, it was harder to learn and I never got past having the blue book on my desk when I was coding but, in the end, it produced smaller, faster code. There were a number of apps I wrote for multiple platforms, so I got to compare. Also, (the same reason I love perl) you could do astounding things with side-effects.
Commercially, X86 has staying power because it was architected to scale. Variable-length instructions with lots of space in the operator range lets Intel adapt the design to any new demands. Most, if not all, of the complaints about X86 (e.g. too few registers) are just version features—yesterday's news if there's a market demand for an improvement.
Bottom line—it ain't neat, but that doesn't matter; it's programmed once and used millions of times. Programmer convenience is irrelevant.
It's Steven Milloy, and he's not so much discredited as seriously annoying to liberals who object to having their gods blasphemed and their oxen gored.
Good point, however. Wikipedia's just another source—OK if all you want to do is scratch an itch, but for something important it's nothing more than a starting point for real research.
"You have customers wanting to buy something from you..."
The three guys who want to buy Dell computers with Linux loaded aren't customers--they're prospects. A company that chases every prospect soon goes out of business.
As to "cost you virtually nothing": the difference in OEM cost between a PC with Windows and a bare PC is about $100 . That wouldn't even cover the incremental cost of advertising to the Linux demo and adding the product numbers to their database.
If Red Hat or Suse would be willing to spring for support in a way that would be profitable for Dell, they would already have made the offer to Dell. Obviously, they didn't.
My advice is the same as for open source--if you don't like it, fork it! Become a zillionaire satisfying the pent-up demand for Linux PCs.
Sorry to disappoint, but Dell's responsibility is to its shareholders and, by extension, its customer base. It has no responsibility to distribute the techno-OS du-jour.
When the MS account manager wants to meet with Dell, he goes to see Dell.
When RedHat or someone else goes to see Dell and makes an offer Dell can make a profit with, Dell might make a deal, if they have the time and resources to launch a new product line.
If they think Dell is being short-sighted, there are other PC builders. I have trouble believing that RedHat, etc. haven't tried to get their products preloaded on somebody's boxes. That none of the mainstream sources include a linux PC is fairly strong evidence that even the people who understand it best are hard-pressed to cobble together an attractive value proposition.
Actually, CRA is an all-IBM shop off the desktop; websphere, db2, da woiks. This is likely not the last little inconvenience they'll suffer; their development staff are a combination of highly experienced Cobol programmers and highly self-esteemed java "software engineers" with the ink still wet on their CS diplomas. Definitely more news at eleven...
Volume 1 of the 1982 edition of the Bell Labs Unix Programmer's Manual
defines/etc/ as "essential data and dangerous maintenance utilities". Sounds like etcetera to me.
In the first instance: Taking a large-scale event with short term predictable results is like spotting a bus hurtling down the road and predicting it won't stop for the intersection. The GISS model is loaded with best-guess parameters that, with small changes, could produce very different results. Even a broken clock is right twice a day and the GISS model is far from having proven itself. This is a trivial result whose relevance is exaggerated because it produces orthodox predictions.
In the second instance: I don't need to read up on quantum electrodynamics, having spent a few years studying it. You should read what I actually wrote. The problem was with people resisting the idea of intrinsic uncertainty, just as with chaos they resist the idea of intrinsic unpredictability. Hmmm. I hadn't thought of it that way before: in the former case we can't tell what it's been, in the latter case we can't tell what it will be.
One of the problems with models is that they create the illusion of determinism; put the same numbers in, the same numbers come out, even if you are modeling a chaotic system. But with a real-life chaotic system, put the same numbers in, different numbers come out—every time. It just takes your breath away! Doesn't it?
Global climate is not even approximately closed. Solar radiation levels are a significant source of randomness. Given that it's also the product of fluid dynamics and that all past climate models have been absurdly wrong, the onus is those whose faith is in the predictability of climate to demonstrate the rightness of their position. First, show me that you can predict climate, then I might pay attention to what your prediction is. I won't lie awake waiting.
The most common mis-reaction to chaos is a conviction that somehow, with enough science, more and more accurate data, smarter analysis, we can tame it. Evolution planted cause-and-effect determinism deep and strong in the human psyche and it's hard to let go. We once had the same problem with Heisenberg.
Someone else suggested that we should just go with our best guess. The problem with that is there is no way to qualify the guesses. Climate models give wildly different results if you make small changes to wild-assed guesses about seemingly minor input parameters. Your best guess and worst guess are equally valid.
We may not be able to predict climate, but climate can predict climate. The best thing to do about climate change is to recognize that we're coming away from a cold, dry extreme of the normal variation since the last ice age; warmer and wetter is a distinct possibility, so let's be ready for it. Me, I'm buying recreational land in Labrador.
The problem with this and all the other dingbat proposals is that climate is of its essence chaotic; there's no way to predict what any particular action will end up doing. That's why past climate models have been so far off the mark (of course, the next one will be bang-on!). That's how it is with dynamic systems: Even God can't predict climate, and humans certainly can't control it.
When we can control the flow of water down a mountain with a little push here and a nudge there instead of digging a ditch, we might be ready to start thinking about controlling climate.
"we don't really deserve to colonize other places"?!
And who, child, gets to judge who is deserving? Shall we leave it up to sweet little misanthropes—or should we leave it up to the universe?
The universe has but one measure of what is deserving: The number of your descendants. Getting off the planet and colonizing space is one way to optimize this function—even if what we leave behind is a garbage heap for future anthropologists to pick over.
So it has always been, so it shall be; we come, eat everything in sight, bear our young, and move on. It's a good life.
Buy a Palm and powerOne Graph. You'll have the best graphing calculator and the base for lots of other useful applications (and programming languages if you don't find what you want).
However this rational decision says nothing about their belief. Belief is not a choice. You can't say "rationally I know that the question of existence of gods is unknowable, therefore I choose to not make a decision about my belief". Your belief is something that you have, not something that you decide.
I beg to differ. This fails to distinguish between belief and psychosis.
On the contrary, a belief is the one thing you have a choice about. Knowledge leaves you no choice; if you know something is, it is, at least for you. A belief, on the other hand, is like an axiom; pick one without fear of contradiction as long as you stay consistent with it.
The "Road to Damascus" effect is not unidirectional. I was a devout Catholic on the path to a Jesuit seminary before I demolished the last so-called proof of the existence of God. At that moment I realized that I could choose to believe in God, or not. I chose not.
It took a few years to adjust my systems to be consistent with this, but it did happen. The fact is, I choose one belief over another several times a day. I don't have the time to chase down the evidence on every little thing, so on those that don't matter, I make a choice from among the possibilities and believe that. It's something we all do without much thought.
You have to be awfully dim not to be able to experiment with your basic assumptions from time to time.
Wow! Most companies built on an aquarian model either quietly go out of business or, just as quietly, shift to a hierarchical model slowly, sloughing off one small piece of dead skin at a time.
Layoffs are clearly not the purpose of this exercise at Yahoo; they are an effect. Converting a web of informal relationships into a functional hierarchy of responsibilities and authorities eliminates a lot of redundancy. A lot of people will likely be laid off, not because they can't do the job, but because, among the five or six people currently doing the job, only one will be chosen.
I wonder how long it will take all the Yahoos to learn that good teamwork is putting everything you have into the quarterback's choice of play.
"It's so consumer-unfriendly that I think it's bound to fail -- and when it fails, it will sink whatever new formats content owners are trying to impose."
When not designed by an idiot, a system clock is a linear device that measures the elapsed time since some reference "moment in time". It doesn't know that it's Thanksgiving, New Years, or any other socially significant but otherwise irrelevant date. It has sufficient resolution to measure the smallest interval of interest and sufficient range to outlive the system.
If the shuttle system clocks use year, month, day, etc., there's a lot that should be done, not the least of which is finding whoever made the design decision and take him out to a public place where thousands of engineers and programmers will point at him and laugh.
What few seem to realize is that the Zune is not aimed at the iPod market. The iPod is aimed at the self-absorbed cool kids who either have a Mac or would like to. The Zune is aimed at a more social demo.
The signal event to highlight the difference was Steve Jobs crowning himself King of the Geeks when he dismissed the Zune sharing feature because it wouldn't help you pick up a girl. iPod owners everywhere agreed.
Note that Zune advertising is about Zune sharing. The Zune isn't a media machine with sharing, it's a sharing machine with media.
There are three fundamentally discrete domains of technology that are used differently by different people to do different things: Corporate, Personal, and Network. The iPod is in the Personal domain, the Zune is in the Network domain. It's as useful to compare them as it is to compare a word processor with a wiki.
Microsoft didn't screw IBM on DOS. The deal was that IBM would make PCs and Microsoft would provide the operating system; that deal is still on.
In the case of OS/2, IBM was trying to put a mainframe operating system on a personal microcomputer. I was in the PC systems business at the time and what I saw of OS/2 appalled me; for the market at that time, it was too much, too late. It was attractive to the guys in the Fishbowl, but they weren't buying many PCs.
What might seem prescient in 2006 was suicidal in 1988 and I was one of the many OEMs to so tell Microsoft. Gates' decision to take a simpler, more incremental approach was either a clever response to customer demand or astounding luck, since it turned out to be so effective against not just OS/2 but the other dozen PC OS' available at the time (remember CPM, DR-DOS, GEOS, Convergent Unix,...?).
IBM didn't need Microsoft to build OS/2; they had thousands of programmers on their payroll. The success of OS/2 is ample evidence of the bullet that Microsoft ducked.
Slashdot Mirror
Are we seeing the stumbling of the Microsoft Juggernaught with the slow adoption of Windows Vista?"
I sure hope so. Microsoft has forgotten who its customers are (hint: it's not the RIAA). Maybe the Vista reception will make them stand up and take notice—and get back to the client-driven business model that made them successful in the first place.
This, of course is the wrong place to say that; slashdotters tend to suffer from the delusion that they are the market.
This code is specific to Vista, but it doesn't exploit a Vista vulnerability.
The technique is applicable to any platform and exploits the well understood fact that if you can get a system to run your code at boot time, you can do anything you want with it, assuming you are willing to do the work it takes to do it without triggering wards (e.g. full disk encryption). Alex spent months on this.
I have all the reasons I need to give Vista a pass and wait for the OS Microsoft builds when they come to their senses and go back to a market-driven business model. This isn't one of those reasons.
What's with all this dissing of the X86?
Like you, I'm an old fart; I wrote assembler code for the PDP-8, PDP/LSI-11 and the 68k. They were ok: easy to learn and use, but I always preferred the X86.
Sure, it was harder to learn and I never got past having the blue book on my desk when I was coding but, in the end, it produced smaller, faster code. There were a number of apps I wrote for multiple platforms, so I got to compare. Also, (the same reason I love perl) you could do astounding things with side-effects.
Commercially, X86 has staying power because it was architected to scale. Variable-length instructions with lots of space in the operator range lets Intel adapt the design to any new demands. Most, if not all, of the complaints about X86 (e.g. too few registers) are just version features—yesterday's news if there's a market demand for an improvement.
Bottom line—it ain't neat, but that doesn't matter; it's programmed once and used millions of times. Programmer convenience is irrelevant.
It's Steven Milloy, and he's not so much discredited as seriously annoying to liberals who object to having their gods blasphemed and their oxen gored.
Good point, however. Wikipedia's just another source—OK if all you want to do is scratch an itch, but for something important it's nothing more than a starting point for real research.
Dubito ergo sum
The best way to learn, child, is to experience. Why don't you join and find out?
He's confusing Microsoft with Al Gore. That happens a lot.
"You have customers wanting to buy something from you..."
The three guys who want to buy Dell computers with Linux loaded aren't customers--they're prospects. A company that chases every prospect soon goes out of business.
As to "cost you virtually nothing": the difference in OEM cost between a PC with Windows and a bare PC is about $100 . That wouldn't even cover the incremental cost of advertising to the Linux demo and adding the product numbers to their database.
If Red Hat or Suse would be willing to spring for support in a way that would be profitable for Dell, they would already have made the offer to Dell. Obviously, they didn't.
My advice is the same as for open source--if you don't like it, fork it! Become a zillionaire satisfying the pent-up demand for Linux PCs.
Sorry to disappoint, but Dell's responsibility is to its shareholders and, by extension, its customer base. It has no responsibility to distribute the techno-OS du-jour.
When the MS account manager wants to meet with Dell, he goes to see Dell.
When RedHat or someone else goes to see Dell and makes an offer Dell can make a profit with, Dell might make a deal, if they have the time and resources to launch a new product line.
If they think Dell is being short-sighted, there are other PC builders. I have trouble believing that RedHat, etc. haven't tried to get their products preloaded on somebody's boxes. That none of the mainstream sources include a linux PC is fairly strong evidence that even the people who understand it best are hard-pressed to cobble together an attractive value proposition.
Actually, CRA is an all-IBM shop off the desktop; websphere, db2, da woiks. This is likely not the last little inconvenience they'll suffer; their development staff are a combination of highly experienced Cobol programmers and highly self-esteemed java "software engineers" with the ink still wet on their CS diplomas. Definitely more news at eleven...
Volume 1 of the 1982 edition of the Bell Labs Unix Programmer's Manual defines /etc/ as "essential data and dangerous maintenance utilities". Sounds like etcetera to me.
See Conventions: HIER(7).
Another couple of generations and we'll be able to put them to work as Java programmers.
In the first instance: Taking a large-scale event with short term predictable results is like spotting a bus hurtling down the road and predicting it won't stop for the intersection. The GISS model is loaded with best-guess parameters that, with small changes, could produce very different results. Even a broken clock is right twice a day and the GISS model is far from having proven itself. This is a trivial result whose relevance is exaggerated because it produces orthodox predictions.
In the second instance: I don't need to read up on quantum electrodynamics, having spent a few years studying it. You should read what I actually wrote. The problem was with people resisting the idea of intrinsic uncertainty, just as with chaos they resist the idea of intrinsic unpredictability. Hmmm. I hadn't thought of it that way before: in the former case we can't tell what it's been, in the latter case we can't tell what it will be.
One of the problems with models is that they create the illusion of determinism; put the same numbers in, the same numbers come out, even if you are modeling a chaotic system. But with a real-life chaotic system, put the same numbers in, different numbers come out—every time. It just takes your breath away! Doesn't it?
Global climate is not even approximately closed. Solar radiation levels are a significant source of randomness. Given that it's also the product of fluid dynamics and that all past climate models have been absurdly wrong, the onus is those whose faith is in the predictability of climate to demonstrate the rightness of their position. First, show me that you can predict climate, then I might pay attention to what your prediction is. I won't lie awake waiting.
The most common mis-reaction to chaos is a conviction that somehow, with enough science, more and more accurate data, smarter analysis, we can tame it. Evolution planted cause-and-effect determinism deep and strong in the human psyche and it's hard to let go. We once had the same problem with Heisenberg.
Someone else suggested that we should just go with our best guess. The problem with that is there is no way to qualify the guesses. Climate models give wildly different results if you make small changes to wild-assed guesses about seemingly minor input parameters. Your best guess and worst guess are equally valid.
We may not be able to predict climate, but climate can predict climate. The best thing to do about climate change is to recognize that we're coming away from a cold, dry extreme of the normal variation since the last ice age; warmer and wetter is a distinct possibility, so let's be ready for it. Me, I'm buying recreational land in Labrador.
The problem with this and all the other dingbat proposals is that climate is of its essence chaotic; there's no way to predict what any particular action will end up doing. That's why past climate models have been so far off the mark (of course, the next one will be bang-on!). That's how it is with dynamic systems: Even God can't predict climate, and humans certainly can't control it.
When we can control the flow of water down a mountain with a little push here and a nudge there instead of digging a ditch, we might be ready to start thinking about controlling climate.
"we don't really deserve to colonize other places"?!
And who, child, gets to judge who is deserving? Shall we leave it up to sweet little misanthropes—or should we leave it up to the universe?
The universe has but one measure of what is deserving: The number of your descendants. Getting off the planet and colonizing space is one way to optimize this function—even if what we leave behind is a garbage heap for future anthropologists to pick over.
So it has always been, so it shall be; we come, eat everything in sight, bear our young, and move on. It's a good life.
Buy a Palm and powerOne Graph. You'll have the best graphing calculator and the base for lots of other useful applications (and programming languages if you don't find what you want).
And I have a bridge you may be interested in buying.
However this rational decision says nothing about their belief. Belief is not a choice. You can't say "rationally I know that the question of existence of gods is unknowable, therefore I choose to not make a decision about my belief". Your belief is something that you have, not something that you decide.
I beg to differ. This fails to distinguish between belief and psychosis.
On the contrary, a belief is the one thing you have a choice about. Knowledge leaves you no choice; if you know something is, it is, at least for you. A belief, on the other hand, is like an axiom; pick one without fear of contradiction as long as you stay consistent with it.
The "Road to Damascus" effect is not unidirectional. I was a devout Catholic on the path to a Jesuit seminary before I demolished the last so-called proof of the existence of God. At that moment I realized that I could choose to believe in God, or not. I chose not.
It took a few years to adjust my systems to be consistent with this, but it did happen. The fact is, I choose one belief over another several times a day. I don't have the time to chase down the evidence on every little thing, so on those that don't matter, I make a choice from among the possibilities and believe that. It's something we all do without much thought.
You have to be awfully dim not to be able to experiment with your basic assumptions from time to time.
Wow! Most companies built on an aquarian model either quietly go out of business or, just as quietly, shift to a hierarchical model slowly, sloughing off one small piece of dead skin at a time.
Layoffs are clearly not the purpose of this exercise at Yahoo; they are an effect. Converting a web of informal relationships into a functional hierarchy of responsibilities and authorities eliminates a lot of redundancy. A lot of people will likely be laid off, not because they can't do the job, but because, among the five or six people currently doing the job, only one will be chosen.
I wonder how long it will take all the Yahoos to learn that good teamwork is putting everything you have into the quarterback's choice of play.
"It's so consumer-unfriendly that I think it's bound to fail -- and when it fails, it will sink whatever new formats content owners are trying to impose."
This would be a good thing, wouldn't it?
It's intriguing that this comes on the fifth anniversary of Java.NET, aka. Visual JSharp.
When not designed by an idiot, a system clock is a linear device that measures the elapsed time since some reference "moment in time". It doesn't know that it's Thanksgiving, New Years, or any other socially significant but otherwise irrelevant date. It has sufficient resolution to measure the smallest interval of interest and sufficient range to outlive the system.
If the shuttle system clocks use year, month, day, etc., there's a lot that should be done, not the least of which is finding whoever made the design decision and take him out to a public place where thousands of engineers and programmers will point at him and laugh.
What few seem to realize is that the Zune is not aimed at the iPod market. The iPod is aimed at the self-absorbed cool kids who either have a Mac or would like to. The Zune is aimed at a more social demo.
The signal event to highlight the difference was Steve Jobs crowning himself King of the Geeks when he dismissed the Zune sharing feature because it wouldn't help you pick up a girl. iPod owners everywhere agreed.
Note that Zune advertising is about Zune sharing. The Zune isn't a media machine with sharing, it's a sharing machine with media.
There are three fundamentally discrete domains of technology that are used differently by different people to do different things: Corporate, Personal, and Network. The iPod is in the Personal domain, the Zune is in the Network domain. It's as useful to compare them as it is to compare a word processor with a wiki.
Microsoft didn't screw IBM on DOS. The deal was that IBM would make PCs and Microsoft would provide the operating system; that deal is still on.
In the case of OS/2, IBM was trying to put a mainframe operating system on a personal microcomputer. I was in the PC systems business at the time and what I saw of OS/2 appalled me; for the market at that time, it was too much, too late. It was attractive to the guys in the Fishbowl, but they weren't buying many PCs.
What might seem prescient in 2006 was suicidal in 1988 and I was one of the many OEMs to so tell Microsoft. Gates' decision to take a simpler, more incremental approach was either a clever response to customer demand or astounding luck, since it turned out to be so effective against not just OS/2 but the other dozen PC OS' available at the time (remember CPM, DR-DOS, GEOS, Convergent Unix,...?).
IBM didn't need Microsoft to build OS/2; they had thousands of programmers on their payroll. The success of OS/2 is ample evidence of the bullet that Microsoft ducked.