I can kind of agree with that. I have a client that is still running Office 2K. On the other hand, I dealt with a situation where a company was running NT 4 and they were forced into an upgrade because their accounting package needed to be upgraded. It might not always be Microsoft that directly forces the upgrade, but sooner or later, something will come along. Usually it will be some sort of database that hits a record limit.
Thanks for the realistic perspective on what working for the FBI might really be like. I hadn't even considered all of the priority given to kiddie porn and the like. I think that I will stick with my current DBA job.
A good software developer with no criminal history and no drug use could be a narrow field.
It is certainly too narrow of a field for me.;) I was never evil genius level good enough to get snatched up by the NSA like a couple of guys I know. Those are the kind of jobs where they almost prefer you to have as shady of a background as possible.
Excel seems to be the driving app for people requesting Office 2007 in my environment, so apparently it does SOMETHING that the older versions don't do.
That mirrors my experience with it so far as well. My understanding from talking to the users is that it handles graphs a lot better than 2003 does.
Microsoft has stated, repeatedly and loudly, that Public Folders are on the way out. If I had to guess, I'd say that they're likely moving that kind of functionality into a new/different product - something like SharePoint maybe.
This issue completely sums up my one beef with Microsoft. They take something that works perfectly well and they fuck with it. I have used SharePoint. It is a huge PITA to setup and get working. Public Folders already work great in Exchange. They provide all of the functionality that is needed. But Microsoft wants to push Office 2007. The only "killer feature" in Office 2007 from Microsoft's point of view is the Sharepoint integration. So they rip the functionality out of Exchange, toss it into SharePoint and by the time Office 2009 rolls around, you are going to "have to" have it if you want Public Folders to keep working. The forced upgrade juggernaut will keep rolling on. It pisses me off, big time. I'm perfectly happy with the way my network functions right now. Exchange 2003, Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2005, XP SP2 on the workstations, some Mac OSX boxes for the "creative" department, an Ubuntu Linux box for the web department and life is good. But noooo... can't just leave it at that. We're going to be rail roaded into Vista, Exchange 2007 and Office 2023 because Microsoft will never leave well enough alone.
Working for the FBI you'd get to put all of the knowledge that you have to use, your peers would look up to you for leveraging knowledge that you consider to be trivial, you'd get to go after spammers and botnet operators, AND you get to carry a firearm. Sure the pay kind of sucks, and the hours are probably pretty brutal at times, but all in all it would probably be a pretty good job.
The states are saying is that since the market situation hasn't changed, neither should the oversight -- that, essentially, until such time as the market diminishes their monopoly through whatever means, they will have to be monitored to ensure they don't abuse it the ways they have in the past.
At what point do you throw in the towel and acknowledge that the market isn't going to diminish their monopoly. Five years? Ten years? Fifteen years? The juggernaut isn't standing still. They are constantly coming up with new technologies and adopting technologies from other platforms and incorporating them into the Microsoft offering. I'm going to think about this post in ten years and probably realize how wrong I am, but for the time being I'm going to say that there isn't enough room left in "the market" for any sort of innovation to unseat Microsoft. Microsoft operating systems and applications do what the majority of people need their computer to do. The only thing that is going to happen in the long run is that Microsoft is going to become less profitable as alternatives spring up. Those alternatives will be just that... alternatives. At the end of the day it all comes down to crunching numbers, or formatting and presenting some text and graphics. Beyond that are the groupware products that allow people to collaborate as they crunch numbers and format and present their text and graphics. Slashdot is the perfect example. I'm typing this reply on PC. I became aware of the replies to my original post on my Blackberry. I'm sure that the people who replied to this did so using a combination of IE, Opera, Safari, Firefox running on Windows, OSX or Linux. I could have conjured up this reply on the Blackberry if I had the patience to work with the little keyboard. There are so many ways to accomplish the same task in this day and age that at this point we are literally arguing semantics and making value judgements.
Given that Google maps only finds my location on my GPS equipped Blackberry 8800 about 25% of the time, it will be nice to have an alternative. Now if they could just get traffic information that was worth a damn and actually works consistently. I haven't been able to get traffic information for my commute for the last two days. It says "No Traffic Information Available." despite the fact that I'm in downtown Los Angeles. Trust me, there is all sorts of traffic info available... I'm sitting in it.;)
I think their point is that Microsoft doesn't have significant competitors in the two areas in which they feel Microsoft had a monopoly: operating systems and browsers.
If all it comes down to is operating systems and browsers then there are alternative operating systems and alternative browsers that "do it (support standards) better than Microsoft does." I think that real crux of the complaint against Microsoft is that despite all of the Web 2.0 and other nonsense that is coming out, there still isn't a compelling reason for MOST PEOPLE to leave the Windows-centric world. For most people in the corporate world, Windows desktop and server technologies "just work" when they are deployed by people who have half a clue about the technologies that they are implementing. Just like Apple claims to not give two craps about the enterprise environment, I think that Microsoft has shown a similar philosophy toward the consumer market. So long as they keep getting those fat software contracts from governments and enterprises, they will let the consumers rot. I say more power to them. Let everyone run Apple and Linux at home. Just support an open document standard so that people can take their work home if need be and leave it at that. When it comes down to Exchange/Outlook/Office and Sharepoint server, there aren't any real alternatives that tie everything together into a seemless "workflow" (as the Apple people are so often harping about). I think that if Microsoft can setup their application stack to take input as and generate output to ODF or a similar standard, they can give on the pushing the MS Office requirement on the world. I doubt that it will happen, but that is just because they are greedy.
Does this mean he fails to vote AGAINST legislation which is obviously un-constitutional? Inquireing Minds...
Fails to vote against legislation that is un-Constitutional. WTF does that mean? Fails to vote against = votes for. Un-constitutional = against the constitution. Does Ron Paul vote for unconstitutional legislation? No, he doesn't. He has the nickname "Dr. No" in the House because he is constantly voting against legislation that he perceives to be unconstitutional.
How did this crap get moderated insightful? Ron Paul isn't an isolationist. Stop repeating that stupid meme. He wants free trade with EVERYBODY and entangling alliances WITH NOBODY. I guess if you're against huge amounts of military aid to prop up third world dictators (I'm looking at you Pakistan) and oppressive regimes (Ya, that's you Israel), then you must be an isolationist. As for hard drugs... Ron Paul is smart enough to realize that drug addiction is a medical problem. It is a spiritual problem (those are my words, not his). Drug abuse isn't a legal problem. Selling drugs, ya... that's a legal problem. Gang violence, yup... legal problem there. Using drugs is a medical, psychological, and spiritual issue. Locking up people for non-violent offenses at the expense of letting violent offenders out of prison is stupid. I'm not a liberatian but I have seen people waste away on hard drugs. Locking them up isn't going to save them from themselves. Either they realize that there is more to life than running away from it, or they waste away. That's natural selection at work. If they want to get violent and steal from me to support their drug habit, there are laws to deal with those crimes and I fully support the enforcement of those laws. But if someone doesn't have the will to live and wants to squander the most precious gift of all, bah... let them. One less mouth to feed and one less person competing for resources that can be put to better use by those with a will to live and to make the most of their lives.
Between the rabid fanboys and the clueless MS phucks there's a middle road. And we don't run BIND. And somehow despite all hints to the contrary our dns just works and works and works and requires a lot less effort to keep it running than that bind thing.
And how does your DNS work? What is your DNS? Does it support Active Directory domain controllers and automatic zone updates from Windows DHCP servers?
This is what I was thinking. Perhaps the real audience for this technology isn't even in the United States, or the developed world for that matter. Maybe they are planning on selling these things to people like the UN, the United States military and other similar organizations that need to quickly establish a presence in parts of the world that are not condusive to the kind of long term investments that are required to build a traditional data center in a more stable part of the world. I'm sure that with the modernization of the military and all of the real time intelligence gathering that they are doing, their data storage and processing needs are growing at an exponential rate. The network links in those environments are probably rather slow (packet radio, encrypted, channel hopping, etc.) They would need something like a mobile data center in the field to send all of the information back to for analysis.
As population density increases and the raw materials required to generate power become more difficult to obtain in face of increased demand for them, the likelyhood of brown outs and rolling blackouts becomes more and more of a reality every year. Do you think that the ability to move a data center from one location to another might have anything to do with that? Data centers suck up a lot of power. Just because a data center might be in a place where it has a favorable spot on the rolling brown out schedule right now doesn't mean that the power company can keep providing those kind of assurances indefinitely.
The thing is that when you run AD ontop of DNS it wants to create a whole bunch of subzones (_msdcs, _sites, etc) to store information about all the domain controllers. It also wants to allow updates to the zone file when DHCP hands out leases to the client workstations. That functionality is built into Windows DNS and it's easier to run Windows DNS to handle it as opposed to trying to hack the functionality into something like BIND.
In this day and age, a good IT team needs a bunch of competent people. There are too many systems and too many things to know to rely on a single guru kind of person who knows it all. It sounds like you're working in a good shop.
The Windows admins I've encountered are hopeless when it comes to DNS (blaming every strange issue they encounter on DNS, for example). Best current practice over here is to never have Active Directory and public DNS interact. The Windows types can break Active Directory all they want, and the real DNS service is managed by people with a clue.
This is a very true statement. As a pretty much clueless when it comes to DNS Windows admin I would never try to host internet facing DNS with Windows DNS. What I do is setup all of the AD domains with.local and use forwarders that point to real DNS servers to resolve anything that isn't on the local network. Like everything else Microsoft related, the MS version of the technology is there to let the MS boxes talk to each other. When you want your boxes to go play in the real world, it is best to hand that responsibility over to something running *nix.
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I don't have one lick of proof to say that our friends in Maryland or their cousins in Langley set this thing up from the beginning, other than it's an obvious slam dunk for them. I don't think the NSA is monitoring certain ports, I think they own the whole thing.
You don't really need any proof. My recollection is that the author of the program admitted that he created it while under contract to US Naval Intelligence as a means of obfuscating their traffic.
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And well , Tor never claimed that it couldn't be abused.
Very true. During one of the original presentations done at Defcon it was mentioned that Tor was already being abused by the government to obfuscate emails for political purposes. It was also mentioned that at the time of the presentation, the potential for both an entry and exit node to be on machines connected to a Level3 connection. One of the big concerns at that point was that with the increased consolidation of backbone providers, it will become more and more difficult to achieve the aims of anonymity.
His theory is full of shit! How does this crap get posted on Slashdot? Everyone who responds to this story is a fucktard. I'm going to go play WoW in my Whine window running on a virtualized copy of Ubuntu that I'm running on my bug free OSX Leotard 10.5 uber super shiny silver box. And oh yeah, I'm going to call the author of this story on my iPhone and give him a piece of my mind about why the gPhone blows chunks.
First of all, thanks for reply. This is a good discussion.
Sorry, but MS has little or no credible competition in the desktop OS space.
I agree with you there. Do you think that is something new? Did Microsoft EVER have any credible competition in the desktop OS space? What happened to that competition? Current monopolies aside, at one point MS wasn't a monopoly. They didn't just get there over night. How much of their monopoly status has to do with the fact that they were just outright better capitalists than their competitors? And by better I mean in all areas, marketing, R&D, strategic vision, etc.
Engineering good security costs time and money. MS can devote time to working on security, but they've had lousy security for years and it has had very little impact on their market share or bottom line. If they devote that same time and money to expanding their monopoly into a new market, they payoff is much, much greater. Given that MS is a for-profit corporation, I don't think it is unreasonable to assume they will continue to focus on more profitable ventures.
I completely agree with you there. There isn't much profitability in focusing the bulk of their R&D into security when they can be directing those resources elsewhere. I don't buy into the logic that just because it won't be a priority doesn't mean that they can't roll out new products AND improve security at the same time. What do you think about the fact that it might not even be possible for them to focus too heavily on security, because of the fact that they are a monopoly. I'm sure you remember what happened recently when they made changes to the kernel that required AV vendors to recode their applications. I'm sure you remember the stink that was raised when Microsoft came out with their own AV software (even though the software completely blows). Given the huge third party market that has sprung up to secure Microsoft products, can they even make too many radical changes to their architecture without being raked over the coals when those changes "break" functionality (for the better) that some third party has built their own mini-empire on?
The wrost part is, the majority of what our products do would not even be needed if MS had done a good job with security in the first place.
Once again I agree with you here. I spent the last seven years of my life consulting to the SMB market. From a technical point of view, you are completely right... if Microsoft had done it right, there wouldn't be a need for X product. On the flip side, if there hadn't been a need for X product, the company that you worked for wouldn't have even been in the business that they were in. On a larger level, I think we all need to recognize that Microsoft, for better or worse, has made the computing landscape what it is. They rushed the technology out there and put it in the hands of the unwashed masses. The fact that they didn't do it right has enabled a HUGE industry to spring up around doing it right. That's the positive side of it. The negative side of it is that if you found a company that does TOO right, Microsoft is either going to absorb you (like they did with SysInternals), or they are going to squash you for rocking the boat.
Until MS starts losing money when users are compromised, I don't see them devoting the time and money to fixing it.
They do lose money. Not just when users are compromised, but when their products don't perform. Like I said a paragraph or two back, before landing my current job, I spent the seven years before that as a consultant making $150 an hour to support Microsoft networks. Rarely did more than a few months go by without a client of mine asking me about alternatives. I'm not biased, despite what these posts I make might lead you to believe;). I'm all about giving people the best tools for the job. I'd never force a graphic artist to work on a PC for example... they can have their over priced,
I think this is one of those situations where the saying, "Don't attribute to malice what can be explaiend by stupidity." fits in. These are Microsoft coders that we are talking about here. According to your logic, DOS was huge security hole because they left that damn autoexec.bat functionality in there. There wasn't any way around it. Every time you started the computer, it read that damn file and just went through and loaded whatever was in there. I can almost guarantee that the same logic that brought us the horrors of the autoexec.bat file and allowing files to run automatically is the same logic that brought us run-on-open macros in Office applications.
I think it's funny that this subject still comes up and that we still talk about it. Microsoft realized what a problem it was and they have since fixed it. Run-on-open macros now require user approval. I remember once upon a time I could just point my mail program at any server on the internet and it would send my email for me. Those malicious sendmail coders who built some of the foundation of the internet knew damn well what they were doing when they were working in a trusted environment and allowed ANYBODY to send mail to anybody else. How dare they be so freaking naive!! Cure you internet forefathers! I hate your stupidity that has brought me spam.
Microsoft knowingly dropped the security holes and really good documentation on how to use them in front of a large fraction of the computer-literate and -semi-literate teenage boys on the planet.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. On one hand, everything is black box, you can't get source code, the documentation sucks. On the other, they are too open, they tell people how to actually leverage the functionality that they build into the product, it is irresponsible of them.
I think I'm starting to see where you are coming from. You have a huge axe to grind with Microsoft because of their monopoly. If that's what you want to spend your life and energy doing, go on with your bad self. I have similar beefs with our government foreign policy. We all choose the battles that we think are important to fight. When it comes to computers and what I need to do with them, and what the people around me need to do with them, I don't see any reason to buck the status quo. It works. No matter what OS you work with, you are going to have to code around problems and implement fixes to make things work. It is the nature of the beast.
Since they don't have to keep users happy, MS has literally no financial motivation to fix the security problems ActiveX creates and they have significant financial motivation to not fix it.
On one hand you profess to have some pretty solid understanding of business dynamics and monopolies and what drives the market place. Then on the other hand you come up with statements like this that leave me scratching my head. It seems to me to be more like a meme that you are repeating. I'd contend that they do have to keep users happy in the face of increasing competition and alternatives that are springing up. There are so many users out there who are so unhappy with Microsoft that they are influencing entire governments and major organizations to adopt alternatives. If you don't think that Microsoft perceives that as financial incentive to get their house in order then you're a bit out of touch with the dynamics you profess to understand. But maybe you aren't. Maybe you can further explain your statement that "...they have significant financial motiviation NOT to fix it." ??
Users want security and both will start making real improvements since otherwise the other will be getting the money from consumers. It is my firm belief that until MS's monopoly is broken one way or another, MS will never be able to compete with Apple or Linux when it comes to security. They just aren't motivated.
You seem to be working with the logical fallacy that security isn't possible in a Microsoft environment. It isn't a meme that is by any means yours and yours alone as I have seen it all over the place. Anyone who works within the Microsoft world knows that you can't completely drink the Kool Aid. You need to turn to outside vendors to get the job done. Don't use NTbackup, use Backup Exec (or whatever product you want). Don't use Microsoft VPN, use Cisco. Don't use Microsoft ISA, use a Sonicwall or a PIX box. Don't use Microsoft AV, use Symantec Enterprise, or NOD32, etc. You might notice the trend that Microsoft has created a huge swath of third party vendors who do "Microsoft" better than Microsoft does. But I just went on a tangent, so back to your logical fallacy. Microsoft networks can be secured. I do it all the time. I'm talking about enterprise level networks. I could give two shits about your cousin's XP box got that pwnd because he downloaded some malicious ActiveX control that claimed to give him access to look at some porn that he wasn't smart enough to pull down with a bitTorrent client. (And as it has been proven recently, porn hounds on OSX can be prompted with popups asking them to install software that will claim to give them access to free porn as well.)
When I read your statement about Apple and Linux and their security, and then I take that to a logical conclusion, it almost seems like you'd advocate vendor specific lockin to Apple or Linux (as much as vendor/platform specific lockin is possible on Linux). Am I wrong there? Do you think that Apple should do everything from soup to nuts and they would if it wasn't for that evil Microsoft getting in the way and brain washing people against Apple?
Taking the risk here of completely derailing this already derailed conversation any further, I'm going to throw this out there for contemplation. Microsoft already won. They started competing with IBM, Apple and a whole bunch of others back in the early 1980s. They didn't exactly start off as a monopoly. There were all sorts of companies out there that had the opportunity to prevent Microsoft from becoming the company that they are today. They didn't. By the time Netscape came around the war was already over. When those companies couldn't compete with Microsoft, they turned to the courts. Those companies that failed had access to the same customers and same market place that Microsoft came to dominate. That was capitalism at work right there. I remember when I was a kid my friend had a Tandy, my other friend had a 286 and I had a Compaq box. All o
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I can kind of agree with that. I have a client that is still running Office 2K. On the other hand, I dealt with a situation where a company was running NT 4 and they were forced into an upgrade because their accounting package needed to be upgraded. It might not always be Microsoft that directly forces the upgrade, but sooner or later, something will come along. Usually it will be some sort of database that hits a record limit.
Thanks for the realistic perspective on what working for the FBI might really be like. I hadn't even considered all of the priority given to kiddie porn and the like. I think that I will stick with my current DBA job.
It is certainly too narrow of a field for me. ;) I was never evil genius level good enough to get snatched up by the NSA like a couple of guys I know. Those are the kind of jobs where they almost prefer you to have as shady of a background as possible.
That mirrors my experience with it so far as well. My understanding from talking to the users is that it handles graphs a lot better than 2003 does.
This issue completely sums up my one beef with Microsoft. They take something that works perfectly well and they fuck with it. I have used SharePoint. It is a huge PITA to setup and get working. Public Folders already work great in Exchange. They provide all of the functionality that is needed. But Microsoft wants to push Office 2007. The only "killer feature" in Office 2007 from Microsoft's point of view is the Sharepoint integration. So they rip the functionality out of Exchange, toss it into SharePoint and by the time Office 2009 rolls around, you are going to "have to" have it if you want Public Folders to keep working. The forced upgrade juggernaut will keep rolling on. It pisses me off, big time. I'm perfectly happy with the way my network functions right now. Exchange 2003, Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2005, XP SP2 on the workstations, some Mac OSX boxes for the "creative" department, an Ubuntu Linux box for the web department and life is good. But noooo... can't just leave it at that. We're going to be rail roaded into Vista, Exchange 2007 and Office 2023 because Microsoft will never leave well enough alone.
Working for the FBI you'd get to put all of the knowledge that you have to use, your peers would look up to you for leveraging knowledge that you consider to be trivial, you'd get to go after spammers and botnet operators, AND you get to carry a firearm. Sure the pay kind of sucks, and the hours are probably pretty brutal at times, but all in all it would probably be a pretty good job.
At what point do you throw in the towel and acknowledge that the market isn't going to diminish their monopoly. Five years? Ten years? Fifteen years? The juggernaut isn't standing still. They are constantly coming up with new technologies and adopting technologies from other platforms and incorporating them into the Microsoft offering. I'm going to think about this post in ten years and probably realize how wrong I am, but for the time being I'm going to say that there isn't enough room left in "the market" for any sort of innovation to unseat Microsoft. Microsoft operating systems and applications do what the majority of people need their computer to do. The only thing that is going to happen in the long run is that Microsoft is going to become less profitable as alternatives spring up. Those alternatives will be just that... alternatives. At the end of the day it all comes down to crunching numbers, or formatting and presenting some text and graphics. Beyond that are the groupware products that allow people to collaborate as they crunch numbers and format and present their text and graphics. Slashdot is the perfect example. I'm typing this reply on PC. I became aware of the replies to my original post on my Blackberry. I'm sure that the people who replied to this did so using a combination of IE, Opera, Safari, Firefox running on Windows, OSX or Linux. I could have conjured up this reply on the Blackberry if I had the patience to work with the little keyboard. There are so many ways to accomplish the same task in this day and age that at this point we are literally arguing semantics and making value judgements.
Given that Google maps only finds my location on my GPS equipped Blackberry 8800 about 25% of the time, it will be nice to have an alternative. Now if they could just get traffic information that was worth a damn and actually works consistently. I haven't been able to get traffic information for my commute for the last two days. It says "No Traffic Information Available." despite the fact that I'm in downtown Los Angeles. Trust me, there is all sorts of traffic info available... I'm sitting in it. ;)
If all it comes down to is operating systems and browsers then there are alternative operating systems and alternative browsers that "do it (support standards) better than Microsoft does." I think that real crux of the complaint against Microsoft is that despite all of the Web 2.0 and other nonsense that is coming out, there still isn't a compelling reason for MOST PEOPLE to leave the Windows-centric world. For most people in the corporate world, Windows desktop and server technologies "just work" when they are deployed by people who have half a clue about the technologies that they are implementing. Just like Apple claims to not give two craps about the enterprise environment, I think that Microsoft has shown a similar philosophy toward the consumer market. So long as they keep getting those fat software contracts from governments and enterprises, they will let the consumers rot. I say more power to them. Let everyone run Apple and Linux at home. Just support an open document standard so that people can take their work home if need be and leave it at that. When it comes down to Exchange/Outlook/Office and Sharepoint server, there aren't any real alternatives that tie everything together into a seemless "workflow" (as the Apple people are so often harping about). I think that if Microsoft can setup their application stack to take input as and generate output to ODF or a similar standard, they can give on the pushing the MS Office requirement on the world. I doubt that it will happen, but that is just because they are greedy.
Fails to vote against legislation that is un-Constitutional. WTF does that mean? Fails to vote against = votes for. Un-constitutional = against the constitution. Does Ron Paul vote for unconstitutional legislation? No, he doesn't. He has the nickname "Dr. No" in the House because he is constantly voting against legislation that he perceives to be unconstitutional.
How did this crap get moderated insightful? Ron Paul isn't an isolationist. Stop repeating that stupid meme. He wants free trade with EVERYBODY and entangling alliances WITH NOBODY. I guess if you're against huge amounts of military aid to prop up third world dictators (I'm looking at you Pakistan) and oppressive regimes (Ya, that's you Israel), then you must be an isolationist. As for hard drugs... Ron Paul is smart enough to realize that drug addiction is a medical problem. It is a spiritual problem (those are my words, not his). Drug abuse isn't a legal problem. Selling drugs, ya... that's a legal problem. Gang violence, yup... legal problem there. Using drugs is a medical, psychological, and spiritual issue. Locking up people for non-violent offenses at the expense of letting violent offenders out of prison is stupid. I'm not a liberatian but I have seen people waste away on hard drugs. Locking them up isn't going to save them from themselves. Either they realize that there is more to life than running away from it, or they waste away. That's natural selection at work. If they want to get violent and steal from me to support their drug habit, there are laws to deal with those crimes and I fully support the enforcement of those laws. But if someone doesn't have the will to live and wants to squander the most precious gift of all, bah... let them. One less mouth to feed and one less person competing for resources that can be put to better use by those with a will to live and to make the most of their lives.
And how does your DNS work? What is your DNS? Does it support Active Directory domain controllers and automatic zone updates from Windows DHCP servers?
This is what I was thinking. Perhaps the real audience for this technology isn't even in the United States, or the developed world for that matter. Maybe they are planning on selling these things to people like the UN, the United States military and other similar organizations that need to quickly establish a presence in parts of the world that are not condusive to the kind of long term investments that are required to build a traditional data center in a more stable part of the world. I'm sure that with the modernization of the military and all of the real time intelligence gathering that they are doing, their data storage and processing needs are growing at an exponential rate. The network links in those environments are probably rather slow (packet radio, encrypted, channel hopping, etc.) They would need something like a mobile data center in the field to send all of the information back to for analysis.
As population density increases and the raw materials required to generate power become more difficult to obtain in face of increased demand for them, the likelyhood of brown outs and rolling blackouts becomes more and more of a reality every year. Do you think that the ability to move a data center from one location to another might have anything to do with that? Data centers suck up a lot of power. Just because a data center might be in a place where it has a favorable spot on the rolling brown out schedule right now doesn't mean that the power company can keep providing those kind of assurances indefinitely.
In this day and age, a good IT team needs a bunch of competent people. There are too many systems and too many things to know to rely on a single guru kind of person who knows it all. It sounds like you're working in a good shop.
This is a very true statement. As a pretty much clueless when it comes to DNS Windows admin I would never try to host internet facing DNS with Windows DNS. What I do is setup all of the AD domains with .local and use forwarders that point to real DNS servers to resolve anything that isn't on the local network. Like everything else Microsoft related, the MS version of the technology is there to let the MS boxes talk to each other. When you want your boxes to go play in the real world, it is best to hand that responsibility over to something running *nix.
You don't really need any proof. My recollection is that the author of the program admitted that he created it while under contract to US Naval Intelligence as a means of obfuscating their traffic.
Very true. During one of the original presentations done at Defcon it was mentioned that Tor was already being abused by the government to obfuscate emails for political purposes. It was also mentioned that at the time of the presentation, the potential for both an entry and exit node to be on machines connected to a Level3 connection. One of the big concerns at that point was that with the increased consolidation of backbone providers, it will become more and more difficult to achieve the aims of anonymity.
His theory is full of shit! How does this crap get posted on Slashdot? Everyone who responds to this story is a fucktard. I'm going to go play WoW in my Whine window running on a virtualized copy of Ubuntu that I'm running on my bug free OSX Leotard 10.5 uber super shiny silver box. And oh yeah, I'm going to call the author of this story on my iPhone and give him a piece of my mind about why the gPhone blows chunks.
What is your business? What do you do? How many people do you employ? What market are you in? What applications do you use?
Sorry, but MS has little or no credible competition in the desktop OS space.
I agree with you there. Do you think that is something new? Did Microsoft EVER have any credible competition in the desktop OS space? What happened to that competition? Current monopolies aside, at one point MS wasn't a monopoly. They didn't just get there over night. How much of their monopoly status has to do with the fact that they were just outright better capitalists than their competitors? And by better I mean in all areas, marketing, R&D, strategic vision, etc.
Engineering good security costs time and money. MS can devote time to working on security, but they've had lousy security for years and it has had very little impact on their market share or bottom line. If they devote that same time and money to expanding their monopoly into a new market, they payoff is much, much greater. Given that MS is a for-profit corporation, I don't think it is unreasonable to assume they will continue to focus on more profitable ventures.
I completely agree with you there. There isn't much profitability in focusing the bulk of their R&D into security when they can be directing those resources elsewhere. I don't buy into the logic that just because it won't be a priority doesn't mean that they can't roll out new products AND improve security at the same time. What do you think about the fact that it might not even be possible for them to focus too heavily on security, because of the fact that they are a monopoly. I'm sure you remember what happened recently when they made changes to the kernel that required AV vendors to recode their applications. I'm sure you remember the stink that was raised when Microsoft came out with their own AV software (even though the software completely blows). Given the huge third party market that has sprung up to secure Microsoft products, can they even make too many radical changes to their architecture without being raked over the coals when those changes "break" functionality (for the better) that some third party has built their own mini-empire on?
The wrost part is, the majority of what our products do would not even be needed if MS had done a good job with security in the first place.
Once again I agree with you here. I spent the last seven years of my life consulting to the SMB market. From a technical point of view, you are completely right... if Microsoft had done it right, there wouldn't be a need for X product. On the flip side, if there hadn't been a need for X product, the company that you worked for wouldn't have even been in the business that they were in. On a larger level, I think we all need to recognize that Microsoft, for better or worse, has made the computing landscape what it is. They rushed the technology out there and put it in the hands of the unwashed masses. The fact that they didn't do it right has enabled a HUGE industry to spring up around doing it right. That's the positive side of it. The negative side of it is that if you found a company that does TOO right, Microsoft is either going to absorb you (like they did with SysInternals), or they are going to squash you for rocking the boat.
Until MS starts losing money when users are compromised, I don't see them devoting the time and money to fixing it.
They do lose money. Not just when users are compromised, but when their products don't perform. Like I said a paragraph or two back, before landing my current job, I spent the seven years before that as a consultant making $150 an hour to support Microsoft networks. Rarely did more than a few months go by without a client of mine asking me about alternatives. I'm not biased, despite what these posts I make might lead you to believe ;). I'm all about giving people the best tools for the job. I'd never force a graphic artist to work on a PC for example... they can have their over priced,
I think it's funny that this subject still comes up and that we still talk about it. Microsoft realized what a problem it was and they have since fixed it. Run-on-open macros now require user approval. I remember once upon a time I could just point my mail program at any server on the internet and it would send my email for me. Those malicious sendmail coders who built some of the foundation of the internet knew damn well what they were doing when they were working in a trusted environment and allowed ANYBODY to send mail to anybody else. How dare they be so freaking naive!! Cure you internet forefathers! I hate your stupidity that has brought me spam.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. On one hand, everything is black box, you can't get source code, the documentation sucks. On the other, they are too open, they tell people how to actually leverage the functionality that they build into the product, it is irresponsible of them.
I think I'm starting to see where you are coming from. You have a huge axe to grind with Microsoft because of their monopoly. If that's what you want to spend your life and energy doing, go on with your bad self. I have similar beefs with our government foreign policy. We all choose the battles that we think are important to fight. When it comes to computers and what I need to do with them, and what the people around me need to do with them, I don't see any reason to buck the status quo. It works. No matter what OS you work with, you are going to have to code around problems and implement fixes to make things work. It is the nature of the beast.
On one hand you profess to have some pretty solid understanding of business dynamics and monopolies and what drives the market place. Then on the other hand you come up with statements like this that leave me scratching my head. It seems to me to be more like a meme that you are repeating. I'd contend that they do have to keep users happy in the face of increasing competition and alternatives that are springing up. There are so many users out there who are so unhappy with Microsoft that they are influencing entire governments and major organizations to adopt alternatives. If you don't think that Microsoft perceives that as financial incentive to get their house in order then you're a bit out of touch with the dynamics you profess to understand. But maybe you aren't. Maybe you can further explain your statement that "...they have significant financial motiviation NOT to fix it." ??
Users want security and both will start making real improvements since otherwise the other will be getting the money from consumers. It is my firm belief that until MS's monopoly is broken one way or another, MS will never be able to compete with Apple or Linux when it comes to security. They just aren't motivated.
You seem to be working with the logical fallacy that security isn't possible in a Microsoft environment. It isn't a meme that is by any means yours and yours alone as I have seen it all over the place. Anyone who works within the Microsoft world knows that you can't completely drink the Kool Aid. You need to turn to outside vendors to get the job done. Don't use NTbackup, use Backup Exec (or whatever product you want). Don't use Microsoft VPN, use Cisco. Don't use Microsoft ISA, use a Sonicwall or a PIX box. Don't use Microsoft AV, use Symantec Enterprise, or NOD32, etc. You might notice the trend that Microsoft has created a huge swath of third party vendors who do "Microsoft" better than Microsoft does. But I just went on a tangent, so back to your logical fallacy. Microsoft networks can be secured. I do it all the time. I'm talking about enterprise level networks. I could give two shits about your cousin's XP box got that pwnd because he downloaded some malicious ActiveX control that claimed to give him access to look at some porn that he wasn't smart enough to pull down with a bitTorrent client. (And as it has been proven recently, porn hounds on OSX can be prompted with popups asking them to install software that will claim to give them access to free porn as well.)
When I read your statement about Apple and Linux and their security, and then I take that to a logical conclusion, it almost seems like you'd advocate vendor specific lockin to Apple or Linux (as much as vendor/platform specific lockin is possible on Linux). Am I wrong there? Do you think that Apple should do everything from soup to nuts and they would if it wasn't for that evil Microsoft getting in the way and brain washing people against Apple?
Taking the risk here of completely derailing this already derailed conversation any further, I'm going to throw this out there for contemplation. Microsoft already won. They started competing with IBM, Apple and a whole bunch of others back in the early 1980s. They didn't exactly start off as a monopoly. There were all sorts of companies out there that had the opportunity to prevent Microsoft from becoming the company that they are today. They didn't. By the time Netscape came around the war was already over. When those companies couldn't compete with Microsoft, they turned to the courts. Those companies that failed had access to the same customers and same market place that Microsoft came to dominate. That was capitalism at work right there. I remember when I was a kid my friend had a Tandy, my other friend had a 286 and I had a Compaq box. All o