Yet? The aircraft are grounded, and they will be until they're certain the problem won't reappear.
The FAA quite clearly wanted this plane in the air, and it's only been the extremely obvious nature of the problems that has grounded the plane.
And why, exactly, is the plane "fundamentally flawed"? The experimental nature of the aircraft
It's not an experiment any more.
mainly involves the composite nature of the materials and the new avionics- nothing related to why these planes were grounded. I've heard some talk of delamination of the composites, but if that were a serious issue, then the aircraft would have been grounded for that reason instead of battery fires.
Those issues have probably yet to surface. They are clearly trying to curt corners to not only save cost but save weight. I suspect the carbon composite build of the plane did not give them the fuel savings that would make the plane anywhere near compelling.
Errrr, no it's not a contradiction.It's had test flights for years and been delayed heavily (no, it is not two years old) but it has been flying commercially only for a small amount of time. It's now that further problems have arisen.
It's obvious you've got a rose-tinted view of aircraft design - the 737, for example, which is the most successful commercial jet of all time, had a rudder defect that caused several fatal crashes
Errrr, no. We're talking about multiple seemingly unrelated problems with the 787. We aren't talking about isolated parts here, but nice try.
It's only to be expected that some problems are going to arise in these new designs, and we should be relieved that when it does safety comes first.
If they are isolated problems yes. The problem is this plane has had issues that have cropped out of the woodwork for years, and they keep coming. Given its miniscule amount of flying time it's really quite worrying how many problems are yet to be found.
Plus, this is a pretty fast "recall", as these things go, and you can bet we're going to see revised designs in future.
There has been a fast recall simply because the problems have been so obvious and public. Given the nature of this plane's development, and that it's been delayed for three years, just how many revisions are we going to have to see? The plane is simply fundamentally flawed.
Would I spend $1,000,000 to prevent a fire on an aircraft? Absolutely. Would I spend that $1,000,000 if I believed the planes were safe with the batteries that the battery engineering firm signed off on? Probably not.
It's that kind of view that has got them into this trouble. Boeing is not absolved of blame or responsibility because a supplier has 'signed off'.
From a story in one of the above comments, a subcontractor's engineer working on the battery assembly was claiming it was unsafe and that his supervisor was pressuring him to sign off on the battery despite his concerns; when he failed to do so he was fired. We don't know if any of that information made it back to Boeing, but if it had, they probably would not have accepted the batteries from the supplier without further review.
I'm afraid the responsibility for that is squarely with Boeing. You absolutely must have total control over the quality of the components in an engineering project like this regardless of the supply chain. I also find pressure on suppliers to cut costs to be symptomatic of the pressure that is coming from above.
None of this is "silly." 18 pounds of additional weight requires an additional gallon of fuel for every 40 hours of flight, perhaps 2,500 gallons of fuel over the lifetime of the aircraft. This would cost the plane's owner $12,500 in additional fuel costs (at a rate of $5.00 per gallon for jet-A.) If Boeing sells 1,000 planes, that's over a million dollars in extra fuel costs to their customers.
I'm afraid it's too late for that now. The work required to make this plane safe will utterly negate any savings airlines were hoping to make and render the plane totally redundant, even with carbon composite usage.
I don't know why there is an assumption that Boeing only has to solve their battery problems. The FAA has had severe concerns about the fuel lines in the plane and one even leaked forty odd litres of fuel. This aircraft has severe, and I mean severe, issues especially after the thing being delayed for three years while they supposedly sorted it all out. These are not just teething issues that occur once the plane gets flown and they go away with some improvements. Multiple problems like this plane is having point to a fundamental flaw with the design philosophy or manufacture, and probably both. If the plane ever gets back in the air ever more problems will be discovered and the odds are some will be fatal.
I would never fly on this aircraft. Its die is cast. Boeing bet the future of their company on this aircraft and they tried to do it on the cheap. It will probably cost them their existance.
This plane is not safe by any stretch of the imagination no matter what the FAA or anyone else says. Never listen to what people say, look at what they do.
Almost certainly. The dollar is being debased at such a rapid rate that it will never survive for that long. Power will be based on how much gold you have in your vaults because no country or central bank currently trusts each other. No country is going to accept dollars or treasury IOUs where there are so many they are worthless and no one can trust something pulled out of thin air. Other countries will send representatives to the US to completely verify their gold otherwise the US won't be able to afford anything. It will be an excruciatingly painful process.
Essentially currency is based on trust.
For anyone who's not a complete, gullible rube, Bitcoin fails the "smell test" there.
Currency is based on what people think they can get for it. Once a currency is debased to such an extent that all value is lost all trust is lost. Bitcoin is not being debased to the extent that the dollar is. I wouldn't use it as a store of value mind, but as trust fades more ridiculous capital controls come in you'll see it used more and more.
When FDR needed to print vast sums of money (by the standards of the day) to pay for his social programs, he outlawed ownership of gold by US citizens, to prevent exactl that!
FDR did that because the US was short of gold. Those who kept their mouths shut made gains as gold went up from the $35 an ounce FDR had set it at.
That's not going to happen today because the US cannot ultimately set the price of gold (although they think they can) because the whole world now buys gold where once it didn't. Outlawing gold would also be the worst thing to do today because it would be a crystal clear admission that the dollar was toilet paper. Since there are more dollars outside the US than in it they would lose any influence they have in the world overnight.
Actual gold might hold value, but gold-based currency has a very long track record of doing nothing to prevent a government from diluting the currency.
That's a bit of a nonsensical argument really. The Romans debased over five hundred years. We have debased by more in less than one hundred. The lesson is clear that your currency has to be backed by a stable money supply otherwise it can only go to zero.
The value of the dollar is what you can buy with said dollar in the united states which barring a bit of inflation here and there(some inflation is a good thing) is about the same as it was last year or the year before.
Barring a bit of inflation here and there? Seriously, what? Do you know what's happened and how much currency debasement there has been in the last five years? No inflation is ever a good thing. It massages the egos of humans into believing that their investments are going up and paint over that everything else is as well.
Our economy barely had a hiccup and the US one was in the toilet, but the value of the US dollar rose dramatically.
Comparing the price of one currency to another when they are all being debased is a fallacy. Over the last five years it is pretty clear that dollar has declined markedly in value. In case you hadn't noticed there are a lot of dollars around. Everyone has them and that doesn't make it terribly valuable.
The key difference is that people tend not to use their mainframe running COBOL code to browser the internet at lunch time. Software for XP tends to be end-user software, on vulnerable workstations.
You're missing the point. Corporations have desktop software that they completely rely on that was written for the NT4/Windows 2000/Windows XP era as the desktop market expanded within business through the 90s and early 00s. That reached a critical mass some years ago. I hate to burst peoples' bubbles on this but companies do not spend vast sums on having dedicated teams of people continually upgrading Microsoft software and rewriting their own software to run on new platforms nor do they care about people telling them how vulnerable their desktops are. Their current dektops are a known quantity. Microsoft is going to find that out the hard way as they try and squeeze the lemon further over the next few years.
I posted comments here debating slashdotters who feel anyone still running an old IE at work deserves to be hacked who do not understand corporate IT.
You feel free to debate other 'Slashdotters' as much as you like to fit your own arguments. There are other browsers available on XP besides IE since Microsoft claims they can't upgrade it.
Like the mainframes platforms of old there are solutions for them. Citrix and MS terminal servers are just 2 to run older software.
More complexity and more expense to continue running exactly what users were running before. The corporate world has no time for it. However, we still have forty year old COBOL code calculating our bank balances every day and people are not going to be rewriting what they have in.Net to run on a newer platform. There is only so much Microsoft can squeeze from that lemon.
The fact of the matter is new hardware does not like XP very well.
Well it wouldn't would it, you idiot? That's why corporations are virtualising old versions of Windows, but this presents Microsoft with a dilemma. Previously they depended on perpetual hardware upgrades but virtualising Windows allows corporations to continue functioning as normal and upgrade hardware pretty much forever. Enter 'Secure Boot'. Hardware that doesn't have the keys to boot 'foreign' hypervisor platforms and hypervisors implementing Secure Boot that have keys only to boot what they feel like.
These will get EOL'd and you are screwed as they wont run XP anymore by 2014.
People will care little. I know of people running NT 4, many virtualised, on closed off networks because they have applications on there that would take a great deal of time and effort they don't have to upgrade. Iit is simply the way the real world is.
It is a security risk, and the rest of the world who does not have your requirements are moving on.
The numbers in the corporate world who are still running XP tell you otherwise. They aren't moving on.
Already Office 2003 is not fully compatible with the newest.docx files in Office 2013 and sometimes Office 2010.
That's not anyone's problem but Microsoft. No one cares in the corporate world. Many have mail merges and Office BASIC tied into Office 97. They won't be rewritten. They already have all their documents in the old binary doc format and have no time to do conversions or find out if a new version of Office will actually open them.
Did you read about hte newest malware targetting the XP versions of Ie 8, 7, and 6?
The moral of the story? Don't use IE.
Who are you going to get support from after next year?
People are not phoning Microsoft up every day of the week getting support to keep their systems running. Things are a known quantity.
It is time to consider Hyper V, Windows Server 2003 terminals, and Citrix similiar to rally and x3700 IBM terminal software for these must have apps before it is too late.
More complexity the corporate world dislikes. However, those who have needed to virtualise and and run terminal sessions have been doing so. The trick with that though is that you don't need a magical desktop environment to run web or remote applications.
I disagree that a corporate customer wouldn't love to have documents time bomb, lock and encrypt files, and prevent software that is unathorized to steal keystrokes at bootup.
I thought this wasn't about DRM?;-) Any experience of corporate IT tells you these are accidents waiting to happen. All you'll get is a load of support calls asking you why something doesn't work.
I know it is an uneccesary cost for you but come on? 12 years is a FUCKload A LOT of time and you
The master key in both situations are still secure.
They are not guaranteed to stay that way, that's the OP's point. If I was a serious virus writer this system is a potential boon. If you can find a way of compromising the system so that things appear to be trusted when they're actually not and you can lock out other software as a result you can create a hell of a lot of damage before anyone even notices.
But yes, I was surprised and pleased that MS included those requirements, even if it was just for x86, and I'm sure the FSF was as well.
I wasn't surprised. On x86 they had to because of the stink that would be created if corporations couldn't install existing Windows versions on new hardware or run their ghosting and imaging tools. On ARM they have no such problems and all they want to do is ensure Android cannot run.
Why do people think that no one complained about Apple's lock down? They've had a walled garden in place since iOS 2.0 and it's always been a point of contention. Secure Boot just brings the threat of universal lock down that much closer.
Because secure boot is about locking down the PC platform. It's on a whole different level. People can actually chose not to use iOS. They don't exactly get a choice these days not to use a PC.
So then they're fine with the way Windows 8 handles it? Because that's exactly what Microsoft demands of computer manufacturers who want to be certified for Windows 8
The difficulty is that OEMs will not lose any Windows 8 certification if they do not implement a user configurable key database. If it boots Windows 8 Microsoft won't care. Microsoft tacked that on to their 'mandatory requirements' knowing full well it won't be implemented in just about any case. In another 'mandatory requirement' they specify that the key database contents are to be determined by the OEM.
As for disabling secure boot, that was done so that existing versions of Windows and other platforms can at least be installed for a period without kicking up a stink. Ghosting imaging and other tools are a problem. In a few years new hardware will ship where you can't disable secure boot and anyone wishing to boot up on a PC platform will have to be deemed acceptable by Microsoft in order to get their software booted or even running on Windows itself. Freely available software will be out of the question.
This makes the job of a rootkit much harder and is one of the only arguments to give for die hard XP users who are chaining their old systems by their ankles for life afraid to upgrade.
It's not a case of being afraid to upgrade. It's the fact that users, companies and organisations have software and infrastructure that runs and is tested on XP and there is zero benefit to them changing it. Kind of like how a great deal of mainframe code is still written in COBOL. There is no benefit to rewriting it and people do not have the time or the resources. You might not like that but that's the real world.
It is not about DRM at all and is not used. A signed bootloader with the kernel path and device drivers prevent the next aulurion worm/rootkit from taking shape as nothing untrusted can run from the kernel.
Anything can be deemed to be untrusted, that's the problem. I'm afraid the rootkit/virus/security angle to this stuff is just an excuse, plain and simple.
It is great for corporate customers.
It's a disaster for corporate customers. They face a future of new hardware refusing to boot existing versions of Windows or any other operating systems, enforced upgrades and a spiralling in costs, licensing and otherwise. A rootkit is the least of their worries.
1. It heads off anything else that is good enough being installed on to PC hardware that Microsoft deems threatening.
2. It's a lovely form of DRM Microsoft is probably salivating at. It means that future hardware can explcitly refuse to install previous versions of Windows even if it is possible.
3. Manufacturers will probably love it because there is the possibility that they can enforce what hardware can or can't be installed in the system. The net result is that hardware will have an artificially shorter life from now on and things will get a whole lot more expensive for users and for any prospective entrants into the hardware business. In fact, it will be downright impossible. Expect this to turn into one God-awful mess.
4. Everyone talks about Linux and other operating systems, but it will have an interesting effect on virtualisation. Microsoft has long been deeply uncomfortable about non-Microsoft systems running Windows virtual machines. The net effect is that these days you can run NT, Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 and prolong their life on new hardware by virtualising. With 'Secure' Boot Microsoft gets to dictate what hypervisors will run on hardware in future and they'll be able to control the life of their current and future operating systems. Expect to install Windows 8 on Windows Server 2015 with Hyper-V? Nope, sorry. Windows will probably also end up refusing to run as a guest on any hardware it doesn't like.
Basically, it's the end of the PC platform. I don't know whether Microsoft realises it but we'll all look back on this as the beginning of the end for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet? The aircraft are grounded, and they will be until they're certain the problem won't reappear.
The FAA quite clearly wanted this plane in the air, and it's only been the extremely obvious nature of the problems that has grounded the plane.
And why, exactly, is the plane "fundamentally flawed"? The experimental nature of the aircraft
It's not an experiment any more.
mainly involves the composite nature of the materials and the new avionics- nothing related to why these planes were grounded. I've heard some talk of delamination of the composites, but if that were a serious issue, then the aircraft would have been grounded for that reason instead of battery fires.
Those issues have probably yet to surface. They are clearly trying to curt corners to not only save cost but save weight. I suspect the carbon composite build of the plane did not give them the fuel savings that would make the plane anywhere near compelling.
It's obvious you've got a rose-tinted view of aircraft design - the 737, for example, which is the most successful commercial jet of all time, had a rudder defect that caused several fatal crashes
Errrr, no. We're talking about multiple seemingly unrelated problems with the 787. We aren't talking about isolated parts here, but nice try.
No.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_811
It's only to be expected that some problems are going to arise in these new designs, and we should be relieved that when it does safety comes first.
If they are isolated problems yes. The problem is this plane has had issues that have cropped out of the woodwork for years, and they keep coming. Given its miniscule amount of flying time it's really quite worrying how many problems are yet to be found.
The difference is, there's no fatalities here.
Yet.
Plus, this is a pretty fast "recall", as these things go, and you can bet we're going to see revised designs in future.
There has been a fast recall simply because the problems have been so obvious and public. Given the nature of this plane's development, and that it's been delayed for three years, just how many revisions are we going to have to see? The plane is simply fundamentally flawed.
Would I spend $1,000,000 to prevent a fire on an aircraft? Absolutely. Would I spend that $1,000,000 if I believed the planes were safe with the batteries that the battery engineering firm signed off on? Probably not.
It's that kind of view that has got them into this trouble. Boeing is not absolved of blame or responsibility because a supplier has 'signed off'.
From a story in one of the above comments, a subcontractor's engineer working on the battery assembly was claiming it was unsafe and that his supervisor was pressuring him to sign off on the battery despite his concerns; when he failed to do so he was fired. We don't know if any of that information made it back to Boeing, but if it had, they probably would not have accepted the batteries from the supplier without further review.
I'm afraid the responsibility for that is squarely with Boeing. You absolutely must have total control over the quality of the components in an engineering project like this regardless of the supply chain. I also find pressure on suppliers to cut costs to be symptomatic of the pressure that is coming from above.
None of this is "silly." 18 pounds of additional weight requires an additional gallon of fuel for every 40 hours of flight, perhaps 2,500 gallons of fuel over the lifetime of the aircraft. This would cost the plane's owner $12,500 in additional fuel costs (at a rate of $5.00 per gallon for jet-A.) If Boeing sells 1,000 planes, that's over a million dollars in extra fuel costs to their customers.
I'm afraid it's too late for that now. The work required to make this plane safe will utterly negate any savings airlines were hoping to make and render the plane totally redundant, even with carbon composite usage.
I don't know why there is an assumption that Boeing only has to solve their battery problems. The FAA has had severe concerns about the fuel lines in the plane and one even leaked forty odd litres of fuel. This aircraft has severe, and I mean severe, issues especially after the thing being delayed for three years while they supposedly sorted it all out. These are not just teething issues that occur once the plane gets flown and they go away with some improvements. Multiple problems like this plane is having point to a fundamental flaw with the design philosophy or manufacture, and probably both. If the plane ever gets back in the air ever more problems will be discovered and the odds are some will be fatal.
I would never fly on this aircraft. Its die is cast. Boeing bet the future of their company on this aircraft and they tried to do it on the cheap. It will probably cost them their existance.
This plane is not safe by any stretch of the imagination no matter what the FAA or anyone else says. Never listen to what people say, look at what they do.
Yeah, the DeHaviland Comet airliner was a sterling example of the quality of European aircraft design...
Yes it was considering it was the first jetliner. Someone had to go first and it certainly wasn't the US because they were so far behind.
....individuals from poorer backgrounds being more likely to smoke cannabis as well as having reduced access to schooling.
There you have your answer about cannabis and drugs in general.
Is the US going away tomorrow?
Probably not.
Are they going away next year?
Possibly.
Are they going away in 5-10 years?
Almost certainly. The dollar is being debased at such a rapid rate that it will never survive for that long. Power will be based on how much gold you have in your vaults because no country or central bank currently trusts each other. No country is going to accept dollars or treasury IOUs where there are so many they are worthless and no one can trust something pulled out of thin air. Other countries will send representatives to the US to completely verify their gold otherwise the US won't be able to afford anything. It will be an excruciatingly painful process.
Essentially currency is based on trust. For anyone who's not a complete, gullible rube, Bitcoin fails the "smell test" there.
Currency is based on what people think they can get for it. Once a currency is debased to such an extent that all value is lost all trust is lost. Bitcoin is not being debased to the extent that the dollar is. I wouldn't use it as a store of value mind, but as trust fades more ridiculous capital controls come in you'll see it used more and more.
When FDR needed to print vast sums of money (by the standards of the day) to pay for his social programs, he outlawed ownership of gold by US citizens, to prevent exactl that!
FDR did that because the US was short of gold. Those who kept their mouths shut made gains as gold went up from the $35 an ounce FDR had set it at.
That's not going to happen today because the US cannot ultimately set the price of gold (although they think they can) because the whole world now buys gold where once it didn't. Outlawing gold would also be the worst thing to do today because it would be a crystal clear admission that the dollar was toilet paper. Since there are more dollars outside the US than in it they would lose any influence they have in the world overnight.
Actual gold might hold value, but gold-based currency has a very long track record of doing nothing to prevent a government from diluting the currency.
That's a bit of a nonsensical argument really. The Romans debased over five hundred years. We have debased by more in less than one hundred. The lesson is clear that your currency has to be backed by a stable money supply otherwise it can only go to zero.
The value of the dollar is what you can buy with said dollar in the united states which barring a bit of inflation here and there(some inflation is a good thing) is about the same as it was last year or the year before.
Barring a bit of inflation here and there? Seriously, what? Do you know what's happened and how much currency debasement there has been in the last five years? No inflation is ever a good thing. It massages the egos of humans into believing that their investments are going up and paint over that everything else is as well.
Our economy barely had a hiccup and the US one was in the toilet, but the value of the US dollar rose dramatically.
Comparing the price of one currency to another when they are all being debased is a fallacy. Over the last five years it is pretty clear that dollar has declined markedly in value. In case you hadn't noticed there are a lot of dollars around. Everyone has them and that doesn't make it terribly valuable.
My big question is what the return rate will be like. I suspect that some people are expecting a full desktop OS, like Windows.
That's the general line Microsoft like to tot out - that people will be expecting Windows. From the reviews, worryingly, it appears not.
You've split some pretty major hairs there to explain why the Chromebook is on top.
-- Whoosh Re-read carefully. I'm afraid you're not arguing anything by giving us an astroturfed commercial for Windows 2012.
The key difference is that people tend not to use their mainframe running COBOL code to browser the internet at lunch time. Software for XP tends to be end-user software, on vulnerable workstations.
You're missing the point. Corporations have desktop software that they completely rely on that was written for the NT4/Windows 2000/Windows XP era as the desktop market expanded within business through the 90s and early 00s. That reached a critical mass some years ago. I hate to burst peoples' bubbles on this but companies do not spend vast sums on having dedicated teams of people continually upgrading Microsoft software and rewriting their own software to run on new platforms nor do they care about people telling them how vulnerable their desktops are. Their current dektops are a known quantity. Microsoft is going to find that out the hard way as they try and squeeze the lemon further over the next few years.
I posted comments here debating slashdotters who feel anyone still running an old IE at work deserves to be hacked who do not understand corporate IT.
You feel free to debate other 'Slashdotters' as much as you like to fit your own arguments. There are other browsers available on XP besides IE since Microsoft claims they can't upgrade it.
Like the mainframes platforms of old there are solutions for them. Citrix and MS terminal servers are just 2 to run older software.
More complexity and more expense to continue running exactly what users were running before. The corporate world has no time for it. However, we still have forty year old COBOL code calculating our bank balances every day and people are not going to be rewriting what they have in .Net to run on a newer platform. There is only so much Microsoft can squeeze from that lemon.
The fact of the matter is new hardware does not like XP very well.
Well it wouldn't would it, you idiot? That's why corporations are virtualising old versions of Windows, but this presents Microsoft with a dilemma. Previously they depended on perpetual hardware upgrades but virtualising Windows allows corporations to continue functioning as normal and upgrade hardware pretty much forever. Enter 'Secure Boot'. Hardware that doesn't have the keys to boot 'foreign' hypervisor platforms and hypervisors implementing Secure Boot that have keys only to boot what they feel like.
These will get EOL'd and you are screwed as they wont run XP anymore by 2014.
People will care little. I know of people running NT 4, many virtualised, on closed off networks because they have applications on there that would take a great deal of time and effort they don't have to upgrade. Iit is simply the way the real world is.
It is a security risk, and the rest of the world who does not have your requirements are moving on.
The numbers in the corporate world who are still running XP tell you otherwise. They aren't moving on.
Already Office 2003 is not fully compatible with the newest .docx files in Office 2013 and sometimes Office 2010.
That's not anyone's problem but Microsoft. No one cares in the corporate world. Many have mail merges and Office BASIC tied into Office 97. They won't be rewritten. They already have all their documents in the old binary doc format and have no time to do conversions or find out if a new version of Office will actually open them.
Did you read about hte newest malware targetting the XP versions of Ie 8, 7, and 6?
The moral of the story? Don't use IE.
Who are you going to get support from after next year?
People are not phoning Microsoft up every day of the week getting support to keep their systems running. Things are a known quantity.
It is time to consider Hyper V, Windows Server 2003 terminals, and Citrix similiar to rally and x3700 IBM terminal software for these must have apps before it is too late.
More complexity the corporate world dislikes. However, those who have needed to virtualise and and run terminal sessions have been doing so. The trick with that though is that you don't need a magical desktop environment to run web or remote applications.
I disagree that a corporate customer wouldn't love to have documents time bomb, lock and encrypt files, and prevent software that is unathorized to steal keystrokes at bootup.
I thought this wasn't about DRM? ;-) Any experience of corporate IT tells you these are accidents waiting to happen. All you'll get is a load of support calls asking you why something doesn't work.
I know it is an uneccesary cost for you but come on? 12 years is a FUCKload A LOT of time and you
The master key in both situations are still secure.
They are not guaranteed to stay that way, that's the OP's point. If I was a serious virus writer this system is a potential boon. If you can find a way of compromising the system so that things appear to be trusted when they're actually not and you can lock out other software as a result you can create a hell of a lot of damage before anyone even notices.
But yes, I was surprised and pleased that MS included those requirements, even if it was just for x86, and I'm sure the FSF was as well.
I wasn't surprised. On x86 they had to because of the stink that would be created if corporations couldn't install existing Windows versions on new hardware or run their ghosting and imaging tools. On ARM they have no such problems and all they want to do is ensure Android cannot run.
Why do people think that no one complained about Apple's lock down? They've had a walled garden in place since iOS 2.0 and it's always been a point of contention. Secure Boot just brings the threat of universal lock down that much closer.
Because secure boot is about locking down the PC platform. It's on a whole different level. People can actually chose not to use iOS. They don't exactly get a choice these days not to use a PC.
So then they're fine with the way Windows 8 handles it? Because that's exactly what Microsoft demands of computer manufacturers who want to be certified for Windows 8
The difficulty is that OEMs will not lose any Windows 8 certification if they do not implement a user configurable key database. If it boots Windows 8 Microsoft won't care. Microsoft tacked that on to their 'mandatory requirements' knowing full well it won't be implemented in just about any case. In another 'mandatory requirement' they specify that the key database contents are to be determined by the OEM.
As for disabling secure boot, that was done so that existing versions of Windows and other platforms can at least be installed for a period without kicking up a stink. Ghosting imaging and other tools are a problem. In a few years new hardware will ship where you can't disable secure boot and anyone wishing to boot up on a PC platform will have to be deemed acceptable by Microsoft in order to get their software booted or even running on Windows itself. Freely available software will be out of the question.
Quite frankly I find the term 'Secure Boot' a greatly misleading term when you consider how this can, and alas will, be used.
This makes the job of a rootkit much harder and is one of the only arguments to give for die hard XP users who are chaining their old systems by their ankles for life afraid to upgrade.
It's not a case of being afraid to upgrade. It's the fact that users, companies and organisations have software and infrastructure that runs and is tested on XP and there is zero benefit to them changing it. Kind of like how a great deal of mainframe code is still written in COBOL. There is no benefit to rewriting it and people do not have the time or the resources. You might not like that but that's the real world.
It is not about DRM at all and is not used. A signed bootloader with the kernel path and device drivers prevent the next aulurion worm/rootkit from taking shape as nothing untrusted can run from the kernel.
Anything can be deemed to be untrusted, that's the problem. I'm afraid the rootkit/virus/security angle to this stuff is just an excuse, plain and simple.
It is great for corporate customers.
It's a disaster for corporate customers. They face a future of new hardware refusing to boot existing versions of Windows or any other operating systems, enforced upgrades and a spiralling in costs, licensing and otherwise. A rootkit is the least of their worries.
1. It heads off anything else that is good enough being installed on to PC hardware that Microsoft deems threatening.
2. It's a lovely form of DRM Microsoft is probably salivating at. It means that future hardware can explcitly refuse to install previous versions of Windows even if it is possible.
3. Manufacturers will probably love it because there is the possibility that they can enforce what hardware can or can't be installed in the system. The net result is that hardware will have an artificially shorter life from now on and things will get a whole lot more expensive for users and for any prospective entrants into the hardware business. In fact, it will be downright impossible. Expect this to turn into one God-awful mess.
4. Everyone talks about Linux and other operating systems, but it will have an interesting effect on virtualisation. Microsoft has long been deeply uncomfortable about non-Microsoft systems running Windows virtual machines. The net effect is that these days you can run NT, Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 and prolong their life on new hardware by virtualising. With 'Secure' Boot Microsoft gets to dictate what hypervisors will run on hardware in future and they'll be able to control the life of their current and future operating systems. Expect to install Windows 8 on Windows Server 2015 with Hyper-V? Nope, sorry. Windows will probably also end up refusing to run as a guest on any hardware it doesn't like.
Basically, it's the end of the PC platform. I don't know whether Microsoft realises it but we'll all look back on this as the beginning of the end for them.