It is very very likely that Win2k will be certified as Secure (the capital S is due to the fact that this is a title, and not a state of being). NT was certified as C2 Secure (in the scenarios required for C2 Security) by the NSA, and Win2k will most likely be rated the same.
Plenty of other info from google. This is a very exact definition, so if you change one thing, video driver, processor, etc, you no longer have a certified secure installation.
No, but Pepsi pays the grocery store when they get placed at the end of an aisle, which has significantly higher pull through on sales. This is an implicit, if not explicit, endorsement. Same deal.
Did you even read this article? He's saying the exact opposite of what you claim he's saying to prove a point about how absurd it is. Talk about attacking a strawman...
Somehow I get a feeling that both companies are living under the heavy cloud of Microsoft.
I found this little tag line to be unnecessary and wrong. From the below text from the article:
I thought Intel dominated the Microsoft relationship.
We call it x86-64 [architecture]; it supports all of the x86 instructions. We've added 64-bit capability and instructions that Windows NT64 from Microsoft will support. This is unprecedented in history--Microsoft supporting x86 instructions other than those developed by Intel. This means anybody can run existing 32-bit applications with higher performance and move to 64-bit [applications] seamlessly.
MS is actually HELPING AMD to compete. How do you figure they're living under a cloud?
Suffice it to say you have no idea what it's like running a large project, and why would any maintaner EVER release a product? Why not just keep it beta forever?
The bug you point out on MS's console is a great example of one which is broader than you understand. So what, too many backspaces... too many backspaces = kill the application = Windows uses that application to drive the display to the console window, without that it can't = Windows sees that that app is gone and bombs out. The backspace bug didn't kill windows, the cascade did. If there was an alternatively error in the same console driver, it would also crash windows. So what would need to be fixed in order to avoid liabilities?
First, let me say it's a real pleasure to actually be responding to your comment on my response. I feel honored!
Second, I am very familiar with the broken window fallacy, and did not mean to over simplify to the point where that became the only primary point. What I am saying is that OSS is done primarily by people with free time and money due to their employment for very large institutions (universities/large corporations) as indicated in this study. Their time/money and education is funded through some method, and, in this case, it is generally the sales of commercial software (and generally not services), and university salaries. I'm not saying we should raise taxes 100-fold so that we can increase open source development, but at the same time, the system is the way it is. People have the free time and knowledge to contribute to the system not available if the tax/sales revenue were not otherwise available. This contributes to the overall GOODS of the economy, not just jobs. This is where I believe it diverges from the broken window fallacy. Research (not just in the area of software, but all sorts of research) creates knowledge rather than just places for people to work. That adds to the overall value of society.
Third, though the $1.9 B number has gotten a lot of press, the numbers seem to be a lot of smoke and mirrors. Last night I worked on patching a driver for my Ethernet card because it wasn't working. I submitted that patch back (as to whether or not it will be accepted is another matter). I normally bill out at $150/hr. I spent 2 hours working, does that mean that I have contributed $300? No, my time was free, and it is unlikely that I would have put $300 into a fund. The entire equation where # of lines of code * dollar value per code = value of work put into it does not equate to actual investment dollars. ESPECIALLY given the fact that many many packages are included that the average person would not need/use and redundant counting (e.g. all the lines for make files) are included. Calling something man-hours dedicated and something $s invested are two different things. And the worst is that the man-hours invested may not even be as valuable as when a centralized firm puts dollars towards something. If Quicken spends 1000 hours developing something, they will have most likely done market research, customer profiling, etc so that the product is appropriate for the most amount of people. The same almost universally cannot be said for an OSS project, where, to paraphrase ESR, each developer is scratching their own itch. That is not to say OSS development is bad in anyway, but the two time investments are just apples and oranges.
As to the point that MS doesn't pay taxes (from elsewhere in the thread), from a corporate level, you are absolutely right, they don't pay income taxes. HOWEVER, every option that allows them to write off that income tax IS taxed (capital gains et al), MS spends billions of dollars each year on goods and services (sales tax), among hundreds of other taxes not included in the federal corporate income tax. There are lots of ways to tax a company; federal income tax is only one of them.
With all due respect, I do not feel this was the best piece of argument ever put forward.
As far as the taxes issue, something that taxes do, in many cases, is aggregate a small incremental cost in a lot of areas into something that can be very meaningful. This is something that Perens wholly ignores. There are lots of places taxes will be lost: a) Taxes on all the individual workers at companies that manufacture commercial software and in corporations world wide who install/maintain that software b) Sales taxes on purchased software c) Taxes on infrastructure for selling software all together
As a result money IS lost to the economy. Tax money recovered to the individual will either find its way back into our pockets (unlikely), or we will be taxed at an incrementally higher rate to make up for it. Many recessions are caused by the reduction in consumer spending, to which erasing all money spent on software would be an economic equivalent. Let's face it, the service economy around software will never be as robust as license sales, for the simple fact that end users will be unable to hire service people (it will be too difficult for companies to support the mass amount of end users for open source software). Tax money recovered by corporations WILL have extra money, but they'd rather pay for software that off the shelf worked than dedicate manpower to it (which is a lot more costly in the long run)... and the second that you have an advantage provided to someone who offers a better off the shelf package than another, you're right back to forcing people to develop proprietary software. Why would I open source the one thing that gives my distro an advantage over yours?
As for the $1.9 B number... If you're going to give that number credit, then you probably also believe that number for world wide piracy. Both suffer from the same fallacy. If people were ACTUALLY willing to pay $1.9 Billion for the development, then they would have done so. They didn't. QED. The fact that it exists is because, in the exact same way that taxes have the ability to aggregate amounts of money so small that they would not amount to anything on their own, open source aggregates developer time. Its economic viability does not factor into it at all.
I almost don't want to get into the Liberty argument, since that's a mess unto itself. Some central authority needs to sign all these certificates. MS has stepped forward, though it easily could have been anyone else. I actually thought that Verisign would be the one to step forward, since they have such a large infrastructure for signatures and all. I'm all for multiple offerings, but it looks like the Liberty Alliance is going after the wrong thing all together. Perens is wrong here, MS is claiming they're providing the infrastructure, that's all.
All in all, it's not a very good representation of Open Source argument when Perens engages in the exact same strawman attacking that he claims Mundie is guilty of.
A: Open source didn't help solve the bug (though it may have helped FIND the bug, and identify it to such a degree that it was quickly solveable). The OpenSSH people corrected the bug in their own source, which they would have had access to even if it was closed.
B: The vendor was notified ahead of time, which is one of the things that MS has been campaigning for. Why aren't we beating up on the guy who released this to the vendor first and not to the community immediately? Answer: it was the responsible thing to do! eEyes should take note.
The book may be good or not. The content may be good or not. The authors may have had insight or not. Too bad no one could possibly know after this review. There are entire paragraphs that make absolutely no sense. I quote:
"I can't cover each chapter because I want John and Gary to write more books , so they need to sell a few copies!
Why do they do this? Isn't this giving the bad guys what they need? The bad guys have the information already. There is belief in the security community of full disclosure. This means not keeping things security and calling it secure. "Full disclosure means that hackers publicly disseminate information about your security problem, usually including a program that can be used to exploit it (sometimes even remotely)." (page 81)"
The first line here starts with a ridiculous comment about why the review is so short. Thanks for telling me you're lazy. Then, the review jumps to the middle of some paragraph that apparently only partially made it on the page. Why do they do what? Could someone please explain to me what "This means not keeping things security and calling it secure." means? I could go on to the rest of the paragraphs which are two line summaries rather than any analysis of quality, but the point is made.
We are a technical audience, and could have had a much more in-depth review without the nuances being lost on us. Even more so, PLEASE get an editor to at least LOOK at the reviews. Now I have to go elsewhere to find a review so that I can figure out whether or not this book is worth buying. The author's positive review sounds like it came right out of:
For those who care, you should probably mod this person up. If he is who he claims he is, he's Steve McGeady, former VP of Intel who testified during the Anti-trust trial about MS pushing Intel to kill their multimedia product. I'd say he has a very good understanding of the case.
Holy cow, as a believer in many things free, let me just say i believe he not only does not represent many people in the EFF, but he may actually alienate a fair amount of them with the hard line he does take. Obviously, it's his right, but i don't put MS anywhere near the totalitarian regime he describes, and I do not place them in the AOL/TW, Vivendi, Newscorp group at all. For better or worse, MS does not have the capability to influence the message in the world (barring some simplistic alterations of the message based on the browser). AOL/TW has the power to make news go away. MS is just a software company, they don't control any kind of reporting.
Though I prefer avoiding using labels, he seems a lot more communist/socialist than I feel comfortable with, and it annoys me when movements get painted with the views of some of their more extreme members. My $0.02.
You are wrong. An exclusive agreement means that you must install our OS on every machine you ship. This is not illegal. If Fujitsu signed an exclusive agreement, which they most likely have, then of course they couldn't do what you describe. It's an exclusive agreement!
You may be confused about the consent decree which was signed in the early '90s. These were agreements that MS would have the OEMs sign that were not exclusive agreements, but DID charge the OEM for each box shipped, regardless of whether or not Windows was on it. If MS had violated one iota of this, the government would be all over them like white on rice. It's clear they haven't, just based on the fact that the government did not bring this up once.
Exclusivity is not illegal. What's illegal is bundling, and that's what the antitrust suit is about.
When you have a monopoly, it's not illegal to sign exclusive agreements, though you're absolutely right, it is illegal to strong arm the competition. You've said some things which, if true, are certainly grounds for a lawsuit. But Be is not alleging what you describe.
Menlo Park, California-based Be, most of which was acquired last year by handheld computer maker Palm Inc. , said in a filing with federal court in San Francisco that Microsoft struck deals with PC makers barring them from installing more than one operating system on computers they sold.
"Microsoft harmed Be through a series of illegal exclusionary and anticompetitive acts designed to maintain its monopoly in the Intel-compatible PC operating system market," Be said in the statement
It's not clear what illegal exclusionary and anticompetitive acts Be is talking about, but if it's JUST signing agreements to allow one OS to be the sole OS that you deploy, that's not illegal at all. And that's pretty much what it sounds like from the language above.
I disagree. Not with the fact that MS is a monopoly in Windows, that's been established in court. But having a monopoly is not illegal. The antitrust decision was about bundling of two products (which putatively had nothing to do with each other -- MS and the justice dept have different opinions on that). If Dell signs an exclusive agreement with MS, and Be can't break into it, there's absolutely nothing illegal that has gone on as long as MS doesn't bundle (there's that word again) other products to the monopoly (e.g. changing the price on Office for those that are in exclusive agreements v. those who aren't). If Be was suing on these grounds, I might even support the lawsuit (unlikely... i'm a libertarian). But they're not, they're suing on terrible grounds.
The antitrust decision was about BUNDLING, not about exclusive agreements. They were found guilty of using monopoly power to bundle their browser and drive a competing browsing application out of business. It did not have anything to do with exclusive agreements with PC manufacturers.
Look, i'm sorry but this is complete crap. What if OS/2 had won and driven MS out of Windows... would that have meant that MS could have sued IBM? Signing exclusive agreements is NOT illegal! What is illegal is saying you're going to pay for a copy of the OS regardless of whether or not you ship a copy of the OS on the machine (this is what the consent decree from the early '90s was about, before Be had shipped an OS at all). Further, if they added x or y to prevent Be from booting/installing/whatever, that's LEGAL. They're competing products!
Please folks... substituting MS for a society where companies cannot compete due to fear of lawsuits is about 100x worse. Be messed up bad, and now they want a lawsuit to recover as much as they can. I hope that the libertarian folks among you can see this at least.
I realize this is an unpopular opinion, but embrace and extend is not illegal or unethical. MS thinks that they have a better solution to a problem and solves it themselves. The OSS community believes that no one company should solve a problem because this leads to solutions controlled by one company. Mod me overrated or flamebait but it's not illegal or unethical, it's just a way of solving a problem.
Re:Tone of the article
on
.NETly News
·
· Score: 1
That seems a rather bizarre way to react. Articles are part fact part opinion, and they're bound to have some kind of slant. If.NET impressed this guy, then why wouldn't he say so? Just because it's MS? Publications hire people with opinions, not mindless automotons who report just quotes.
Slashdot Mirror
MS content management server is also an option, though much more expensive. xbox.com and some various other sites run on it.
It is very very likely that Win2k will be certified as Secure (the capital S is due to the fact that this is a title, and not a state of being). NT was certified as C2 Secure (in the scenarios required for C2 Security) by the NSA, and Win2k will most likely be rated the same.
8 ,2 214860,00.html
k b; EN-US;q137018
Here's an out of date link for more info:
http://www.zdnet.com/windows/stories/main/0,472
Here's one from MS's site (NT 4 was also certified):
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
Plenty of other info from google. This is a very exact definition, so if you change one thing, video driver, processor, etc, you no longer have a certified secure installation.
No, but Pepsi pays the grocery store when they get placed at the end of an aisle, which has significantly higher pull through on sales. This is an implicit, if not explicit, endorsement. Same deal.
Did you even read this article? He's saying the exact opposite of what you claim he's saying to prove a point about how absurd it is. Talk about attacking a strawman...
Somehow I get a feeling that both companies are living under the heavy cloud of Microsoft.
I found this little tag line to be unnecessary and wrong. From the below text from the article:
I thought Intel dominated the Microsoft relationship.
We call it x86-64 [architecture]; it supports all of the x86 instructions. We've added 64-bit capability and instructions that Windows NT64 from Microsoft will support. This is unprecedented in history--Microsoft supporting x86 instructions other than those developed by Intel. This means anybody can run existing 32-bit applications with higher performance and move to 64-bit [applications] seamlessly.
MS is actually HELPING AMD to compete. How do you figure they're living under a cloud?
I'm currently planning on renaming myself "The United States of America" and show up the next time this guy spouts out one of these requests.
Though a bit off topic, here's a very good explanation behind this code:
s Gi ft/
http://research.microsoft.com/~tball/papers/Xma
Suffice it to say you have no idea what it's like running a large project, and why would any maintaner EVER release a product? Why not just keep it beta forever?
The bug you point out on MS's console is a great example of one which is broader than you understand. So what, too many backspaces... too many backspaces = kill the application = Windows uses that application to drive the display to the console window, without that it can't = Windows sees that that app is gone and bombs out. The backspace bug didn't kill windows, the cascade did. If there was an alternatively error in the same console driver, it would also crash windows. So what would need to be fixed in order to avoid liabilities?
You're wrong. They have a building (Visio is located there) downtown near Pike's Market.
Second, I am very familiar with the broken window fallacy, and did not mean to over simplify to the point where that became the only primary point. What I am saying is that OSS is done primarily by people with free time and money due to their employment for very large institutions (universities/large corporations) as indicated in this study. Their time/money and education is funded through some method, and, in this case, it is generally the sales of commercial software (and generally not services), and university salaries. I'm not saying we should raise taxes 100-fold so that we can increase open source development, but at the same time, the system is the way it is. People have the free time and knowledge to contribute to the system not available if the tax/sales revenue were not otherwise available. This contributes to the overall GOODS of the economy, not just jobs. This is where I believe it diverges from the broken window fallacy. Research (not just in the area of software, but all sorts of research) creates knowledge rather than just places for people to work. That adds to the overall value of society.
Third, though the $1.9 B number has gotten a lot of press, the numbers seem to be a lot of smoke and mirrors. Last night I worked on patching a driver for my Ethernet card because it wasn't working. I submitted that patch back (as to whether or not it will be accepted is another matter). I normally bill out at $150/hr. I spent 2 hours working, does that mean that I have contributed $300? No, my time was free, and it is unlikely that I would have put $300 into a fund. The entire equation where # of lines of code * dollar value per code = value of work put into it does not equate to actual investment dollars. ESPECIALLY given the fact that many many packages are included that the average person would not need/use and redundant counting (e.g. all the lines for make files) are included. Calling something man-hours dedicated and something $s invested are two different things. And the worst is that the man-hours invested may not even be as valuable as when a centralized firm puts dollars towards something. If Quicken spends 1000 hours developing something, they will have most likely done market research, customer profiling, etc so that the product is appropriate for the most amount of people. The same almost universally cannot be said for an OSS project, where, to paraphrase ESR, each developer is scratching their own itch. That is not to say OSS development is bad in anyway, but the two time investments are just apples and oranges.
As to the point that MS doesn't pay taxes (from elsewhere in the thread), from a corporate level, you are absolutely right, they don't pay income taxes. HOWEVER, every option that allows them to write off that income tax IS taxed (capital gains et al), MS spends billions of dollars each year on goods and services (sales tax), among hundreds of other taxes not included in the federal corporate income tax. There are lots of ways to tax a company; federal income tax is only one of them.
With all due respect, I do not feel this was the best piece of argument ever put forward.
As far as the taxes issue, something that taxes do, in many cases, is aggregate a small incremental cost in a lot of areas into something that can be very meaningful. This is something that Perens wholly ignores. There are lots of places taxes will be lost:
a) Taxes on all the individual workers at companies that manufacture commercial software and in corporations world wide who install/maintain that software
b) Sales taxes on purchased software
c) Taxes on infrastructure for selling software all together
As a result money IS lost to the economy. Tax money recovered to the individual will either find its way back into our pockets (unlikely), or we will be taxed at an incrementally higher rate to make up for it. Many recessions are caused by the reduction in consumer spending, to which erasing all money spent on software would be an economic equivalent. Let's face it, the service economy around software will never be as robust as license sales, for the simple fact that end users will be unable to hire service people (it will be too difficult for companies to support the mass amount of end users for open source software). Tax money recovered by corporations WILL have extra money, but they'd rather pay for software that off the shelf worked than dedicate manpower to it (which is a lot more costly in the long run)... and the second that you have an advantage provided to someone who offers a better off the shelf package than another, you're right back to forcing people to develop proprietary software. Why would I open source the one thing that gives my distro an advantage over yours?
As for the $1.9 B number... If you're going to give that number credit, then you probably also believe that number for world wide piracy. Both suffer from the same fallacy. If people were ACTUALLY willing to pay $1.9 Billion for the development, then they would have done so. They didn't. QED. The fact that it exists is because, in the exact same way that taxes have the ability to aggregate amounts of money so small that they would not amount to anything on their own, open source aggregates developer time. Its economic viability does not factor into it at all.
I almost don't want to get into the Liberty argument, since that's a mess unto itself. Some central authority needs to sign all these certificates. MS has stepped forward, though it easily could have been anyone else. I actually thought that Verisign would be the one to step forward, since they have such a large infrastructure for signatures and all. I'm all for multiple offerings, but it looks like the Liberty Alliance is going after the wrong thing all together. Perens is wrong here, MS is claiming they're providing the infrastructure, that's all.
All in all, it's not a very good representation of Open Source argument when Perens engages in the exact same strawman attacking that he claims Mundie is guilty of.
A: Open source didn't help solve the bug (though it may have helped FIND the bug, and identify it to such a degree that it was quickly solveable). The OpenSSH people corrected the bug in their own source, which they would have had access to even if it was closed.
B: The vendor was notified ahead of time, which is one of the things that MS has been campaigning for. Why aren't we beating up on the guy who released this to the vendor first and not to the community immediately? Answer: it was the responsible thing to do! eEyes should take note.
"I can't cover each chapter because I want John and Gary to write more books , so they need to sell a few copies!
Why do they do this? Isn't this giving the bad guys what they need? The bad guys have the information already. There is belief in the security community of full disclosure. This means not keeping things security and calling it secure. "Full disclosure means that hackers publicly disseminate information about your security problem, usually including a program that can be used to exploit it (sometimes even remotely)." (page 81)"
The first line here starts with a ridiculous comment about why the review is so short. Thanks for telling me you're lazy. Then, the review jumps to the middle of some paragraph that apparently only partially made it on the page. Why do they do what? Could someone please explain to me what "This means not keeping things security and calling it secure." means? I could go on to the rest of the paragraphs which are two line summaries rather than any analysis of quality, but the point is made.
We are a technical audience, and could have had a much more in-depth review without the nuances being lost on us. Even more so, PLEASE get an editor to at least LOOK at the reviews. Now I have to go elsewhere to find a review so that I can figure out whether or not this book is worth buying. The author's positive review sounds like it came right out of:
http://www.quartertothree.com/features/editorials/ lackey/game_reviews_gone_bad.shtml
For those who care, you should probably mod this person up. If he is who he claims he is, he's Steve McGeady, former VP of Intel who testified during the Anti-trust trial about MS pushing Intel to kill their multimedia product. I'd say he has a very good understanding of the case.
What about sales tax on software sales. I have no doubt that this is where the majority of "software tax" revenue for the government comes from.
Holy cow, as a believer in many things free, let me just say i believe he not only does not represent many people in the EFF, but he may actually alienate a fair amount of them with the hard line he does take. Obviously, it's his right, but i don't put MS anywhere near the totalitarian regime he describes, and I do not place them in the AOL/TW, Vivendi, Newscorp group at all. For better or worse, MS does not have the capability to influence the message in the world (barring some simplistic alterations of the message based on the browser). AOL/TW has the power to make news go away. MS is just a software company, they don't control any kind of reporting.
Though I prefer avoiding using labels, he seems a lot more communist/socialist than I feel comfortable with, and it annoys me when movements get painted with the views of some of their more extreme members. My $0.02.
FYI, this didn't stop big tobacco.
You are wrong. An exclusive agreement means that you must install our OS on every machine you ship. This is not illegal. If Fujitsu signed an exclusive agreement, which they most likely have, then of course they couldn't do what you describe. It's an exclusive agreement!
You may be confused about the consent decree which was signed in the early '90s. These were agreements that MS would have the OEMs sign that were not exclusive agreements, but DID charge the OEM for each box shipped, regardless of whether or not Windows was on it. If MS had violated one iota of this, the government would be all over them like white on rice. It's clear they haven't, just based on the fact that the government did not bring this up once.
Exclusivity is not illegal. What's illegal is bundling, and that's what the antitrust suit is about.
When you have a monopoly, it's not illegal to sign exclusive agreements, though you're absolutely right, it is illegal to strong arm the competition. You've said some things which, if true, are certainly grounds for a lawsuit. But Be is not alleging what you describe.
Menlo Park, California-based Be, most of which was acquired last year by handheld computer maker Palm Inc. , said in a filing with federal court in San Francisco that Microsoft struck deals with PC makers barring them from installing more than one operating system on computers they sold.
"Microsoft harmed Be through a series of illegal exclusionary and anticompetitive acts designed to maintain its monopoly in the Intel-compatible PC operating system market," Be said in the statement
It's not clear what illegal exclusionary and anticompetitive acts Be is talking about, but if it's JUST signing agreements to allow one OS to be the sole OS that you deploy, that's not illegal at all. And that's pretty much what it sounds like from the language above.
I disagree. Not with the fact that MS is a monopoly in Windows, that's been established in court. But having a monopoly is not illegal. The antitrust decision was about bundling of two products (which putatively had nothing to do with each other -- MS and the justice dept have different opinions on that). If Dell signs an exclusive agreement with MS, and Be can't break into it, there's absolutely nothing illegal that has gone on as long as MS doesn't bundle (there's that word again) other products to the monopoly (e.g. changing the price on Office for those that are in exclusive agreements v. those who aren't). If Be was suing on these grounds, I might even support the lawsuit (unlikely... i'm a libertarian). But they're not, they're suing on terrible grounds.
Welcome to the lawsuit happy USA.
The antitrust decision was about BUNDLING, not about exclusive agreements. They were found guilty of using monopoly power to bundle their browser and drive a competing browsing application out of business. It did not have anything to do with exclusive agreements with PC manufacturers.
Look, i'm sorry but this is complete crap. What if OS/2 had won and driven MS out of Windows... would that have meant that MS could have sued IBM? Signing exclusive agreements is NOT illegal! What is illegal is saying you're going to pay for a copy of the OS regardless of whether or not you ship a copy of the OS on the machine (this is what the consent decree from the early '90s was about, before Be had shipped an OS at all). Further, if they added x or y to prevent Be from booting/installing/whatever, that's LEGAL. They're competing products!
Please folks... substituting MS for a society where companies cannot compete due to fear of lawsuits is about 100x worse. Be messed up bad, and now they want a lawsuit to recover as much as they can. I hope that the libertarian folks among you can see this at least.
Flame on.
So much porn..... aghghghghghghgh.
I realize this is an unpopular opinion, but embrace and extend is not illegal or unethical. MS thinks that they have a better solution to a problem and solves it themselves. The OSS community believes that no one company should solve a problem because this leads to solutions controlled by one company. Mod me overrated or flamebait but it's not illegal or unethical, it's just a way of solving a problem.
That seems a rather bizarre way to react. Articles are part fact part opinion, and they're bound to have some kind of slant. If .NET impressed this guy, then why wouldn't he say so? Just because it's MS? Publications hire people with opinions, not mindless automotons who report just quotes.