Doesn't signing up to be a peer reviewer give you access to the 'trade secrets' patents are supposed to protect?
Tell me if I'm wrong- but I thought one of the strengths of the old system was the fact that only a patent reviewer saw what your idea was, compared it to other like ideas, and made a decision. That way the competition never knew the in's and out's of your idea, and therefore could never correctly copy it.
Sounds like with this idea, if your competition signs up as a peer reviewer, you're giving them everything you can about how your system works- the only thing that's keeping them from duplicating it is patent law, which is a pretty scary thing when you're a small company trying to take on the big boys.
I work for a small company, and we *almost have* a patent on our very unique method of assigning work to workers. So far our method as proved unique against quite a few challenges sent back from the patent examiner. Our method is our business- I really don't like the idea of showing it to anyone, even if they are 'obligated' to not gain some insight from it. My lack of faith in the current patent law only solidifies that belief.
approach to fighting Phishing. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( x ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( x ) It will stop phishing for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( x ) Requires too much cooperation from phishers ( x ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( x ) Asshats ( x ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( x ) Huge existing investment in anti-phishing methods ( x ) Susceptibility of DNS to attack ( x ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of phishing ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( x ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with phishers ( x ) Dishonesty on the part of phishers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( x ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( x ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( x ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( x ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( x ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( x ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( x ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
With our current MO towards encryption, there is always a way to break it- it's just a matter of computing power, and that's a metric that's ever-increasing. It's no longer sufficent to think a method is strong simply because of the amount of power it takes to break it- because that power will be available to the public next week.
We need to rethink encryption as a whole, or rethink what information we transmit electronically.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( x ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( x ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( x ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( x ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( x ) Asshats ( x ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( x ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( x ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( x ) Extreme profitability of spam ( x ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( x ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( x ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( x ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( x ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( x ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( x ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( x ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Instead of doing a Desktop Environment, do a whole OS.
Ok guys, go ahead and flame me, I know that's a bad idea for a variety of reasons - but hear me out.
Build an OS that runs on low-end devices and gives you nothing but a browser (with multiple profiles, perhaps, to allow multiple users). That's it, nothing else. Build the OS for, and perhaps the device for (Mozilla just may have enough money to do so), a real Internet Appliance. Yes, I'm talking about the things that have been tried many times in the past and have put several good companies out of business.
Why I am advocating doing it again? Well, things have changed. With a fully-functional browser you can do almost everything a full PC can do- thanks to Google apps and others. All the functionality that people look for in a low-end PC can now be provided via a browser. However, the hardware to make these things happen could end up costing significantly less than your run-of-the-mill Dell.
Heck, use the $100 laptop as a reference design, and make Google fund the OS development. The internet appliance can happen now, the technology has caught up to the idea. Make it happen. You'll sell tons of them to all the people who are about to retire.
You're right, both products have their bonuses- but my point wasn't to compare products, it was to compare business practices and corportate care and support for the users.
That being said I will procede to flame you back now.
Apple did VERY LITTLE when it comes to transitions making life easier on users. Their idea of compatibility was basically using a System9 VM on OSX. This is not creative, nor easy on the end users. MS on the other hand back in 1992 implemented the Win16 subsytem for application compatibility with Win 3.x while developing Windows NT. This was NOT an emulation environment, but a seperate Win16 subsystem that runs on the desktop side by side Win32.
When has Microsoft transitioned processor platforms? Apple had done that twice, and both times it was fairly painless for the user. Sure it involved some virtualization, which, agreed, is ugly- but when moving platforms it's pretty much the only choice. In many cases, however, Apple has avoided VMs. The Win16 API you describe here is kinda like Carbon; which was Apple's API for building applications that could be easily compiled for OS 9 or OS X. They started implementing carbonlib as early as OS 8.5, because they knew their current system was going to need to be totally replaced eventually. Carbon was introduced early, and is still a valid API today, even through a total OS rewrite. And yes, there are apps that will run on OS 9 and OS X natively if they were compiled that way; but Apple provided a nice VM for those that didn't work.
A PPC Mac can run applications that were originally written in the late 80s, and (for the most part) you can't say that about Windows apps. An Intel Mac can't go back quite that far, but can still run PPC binaries in transparent emulation. That all being said, it's unfair to say that Apple has done very little for it's developers and customers.
MS is already doing this to a certain extent with.NET and other technologies like WPF. However, when MS decides to move away from Win32, as they HAVE DONE on the 64bit version of XP and Vista, it runs as a separate subsystem along side the replacement, and again with emulation.
Have you used XP x64? Why are there no apps for it?
NT's subsystem model allows for MS to move in or out any Subsystem that is equal to the main OS subsystem,
So that's why viruses can hose things that they shoudn't have access to.
Microsoft doesn't do any of the above because they don't have to.
Again, this is simply not true. First, XP64 and Vista 64bit do NOT USE the Win32 subsystem as the main OS subsystem. So they have done this, not only 1992 with the Win16 subsystem, but today on the 64bit versions.
Well, that's awesome, but really doesn't matter- because as I eluded to earlier, no one uses x64 MS products- because they suck.
I don't really care what you think of MS, as they both suck and do things well depending on what you look at. However to try to use Apple as a 'shining' example when it comes to OS architecture or API implementation it is VERY laughable.
It was meant as an example of OS arch or API. It was meant as an example of corporate dedication to developers and customers. Sure, Apple's had problems. Apple's still got problems. But at least they are working on them, very quickly, and are willing to make the efforts help their install base transition to newer technologies. The only reason we are still using Win32 is because Microsoft isn't willing to do that work.
Even Quartz2D continues to fall on its face with no default hardware accleration, pushing developers to use the very old QuickDraw API to maintain performance in applications.
I don't know of any apps that still use Quickdraw. . . I could be wrong. QuickDraw has been retired in Leopard. There are huge advancements in video APIs in L
Then write some libraries that make Win32 apps compile nicely and run as a.net app.
And/Or write something that emulates Win32 so that binaries built with it can run with fewer intrusive, ugly, or otherwise bad things going on.
Apple has done both of the above- a few times. It can be done, and it can be made transparent to the user. It allows the OS to advance without screwing developers or customers, and that is why OS X has grown so much (and had 5 major releases) over the last 6 years or so.
Microsoft doesn't do any of the above because they don't have to. They don't need to make developer lives easier, they don't need to make their customers happy, and so they don't. That's the benefit of being a monopoly, and that's why they're evil.
It's no longer about knowing the answers - it's about knowing how to find or figure out the answers. Ability to learn has become more important than being learned.
The reason the third party developers assume people run as admin is because Microsoft has built the OS assuming they do. Basically the MS security stack is backwards- they start with an admin user and then restrict rights (in many different ways) down to whatever level is desired- the unix way is to start with a totally restricted account, and then add rights as needed. A fresh user on a unix box doesn't even have access to the optical drive by default.
If the thinking was right at the OS level, developers would follow suit.
Or we could just us a unix security model, and when something wants to sudo, force it to ask the console user for a password.
Microsoft steals ideas all the time. Why can't they steal the unix model, and be done with it?
Slashdot Mirror
This is what sucks about being a monopoly.
To serve as a Windows development / testing platform for iPhone apps.
Doesn't signing up to be a peer reviewer give you access to the 'trade secrets' patents are supposed to protect?
Tell me if I'm wrong- but I thought one of the strengths of the old system was the fact that only a patent reviewer saw what your idea was, compared it to other like ideas, and made a decision. That way the competition never knew the in's and out's of your idea, and therefore could never correctly copy it.
Sounds like with this idea, if your competition signs up as a peer reviewer, you're giving them everything you can about how your system works- the only thing that's keeping them from duplicating it is patent law, which is a pretty scary thing when you're a small company trying to take on the big boys.
I work for a small company, and we *almost have* a patent on our very unique method of assigning work to workers. So far our method as proved unique against quite a few challenges sent back from the patent examiner. Our method is our business- I really don't like the idea of showing it to anyone, even if they are 'obligated' to not gain some insight from it. My lack of faith in the current patent law only solidifies that belief.
What are people on slashdot doing, commenting about parenting? It's not like any of us here have (or ever will have) the requisite experience.
HDCP.
Your post advocates a
( x ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting Phishing. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( x ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( x ) It will stop phishing for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( x ) Requires too much cooperation from phishers
( x ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( x ) Asshats
( x ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( x ) Huge existing investment in anti-phishing methods
( x ) Susceptibility of DNS to attack
( x ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of phishing
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( x ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with phishers
( x ) Dishonesty on the part of phishers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( x ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( x ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( x ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( x ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( x ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( x ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( x ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Are we going to start calling it "Tunnel-ware" instead of "Vapor-ware?"
Is there a "Made In China" sticker under Minnie's skirt?
Your cashiers say "Have a nice day?"
You must have bought your DVD somewhere other than Wal*Mart.
Tits or GTFO.
And now: The Man, sticking it to the Man.
Is dead.
With our current MO towards encryption, there is always a way to break it- it's just a matter of computing power, and that's a metric that's ever-increasing. It's no longer sufficent to think a method is strong simply because of the amount of power it takes to break it- because that power will be available to the public next week.
We need to rethink encryption as a whole, or rethink what information we transmit electronically.
Your post advocates a
( x ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( x ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( x ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( x ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( x ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( x ) Asshats
( x ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( x ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( x ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( x ) Extreme profitability of spam
( x ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( x ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( x ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( x ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( x ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( x ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( x ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( x ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Ok guys, go ahead and flame me, I know that's a bad idea for a variety of reasons - but hear me out.
Build an OS that runs on low-end devices and gives you nothing but a browser (with multiple profiles, perhaps, to allow multiple users). That's it, nothing else. Build the OS for, and perhaps the device for (Mozilla just may have enough money to do so), a real Internet Appliance. Yes, I'm talking about the things that have been tried many times in the past and have put several good companies out of business.
Why I am advocating doing it again? Well, things have changed. With a fully-functional browser you can do almost everything a full PC can do- thanks to Google apps and others. All the functionality that people look for in a low-end PC can now be provided via a browser. However, the hardware to make these things happen could end up costing significantly less than your run-of-the-mill Dell.
Heck, use the $100 laptop as a reference design, and make Google fund the OS development. The internet appliance can happen now, the technology has caught up to the idea. Make it happen. You'll sell tons of them to all the people who are about to retire.
When can I get a trenchcoat made out of this stuff?
That being said I will procede to flame you back now.
Apple did VERY LITTLE when it comes to transitions making life easier on users. Their idea of compatibility was basically using a System9 VM on OSX. This is not creative, nor easy on the end users. MS on the other hand back in 1992 implemented the Win16 subsytem for application compatibility with Win 3.x while developing Windows NT. This was NOT an emulation environment, but a seperate Win16 subsystem that runs on the desktop side by side Win32.
When has Microsoft transitioned processor platforms? Apple had done that twice, and both times it was fairly painless for the user. Sure it involved some virtualization, which, agreed, is ugly- but when moving platforms it's pretty much the only choice. In many cases, however, Apple has avoided VMs.
The Win16 API you describe here is kinda like Carbon; which was Apple's API for building applications that could be easily compiled for OS 9 or OS X. They started implementing carbonlib as early as OS 8.5, because they knew their current system was going to need to be totally replaced eventually. Carbon was introduced early, and is still a valid API today, even through a total OS rewrite. And yes, there are apps that will run on OS 9 and OS X natively if they were compiled that way; but Apple provided a nice VM for those that didn't work.
A PPC Mac can run applications that were originally written in the late 80s, and (for the most part) you can't say that about Windows apps. An Intel Mac can't go back quite that far, but can still run PPC binaries in transparent emulation. That all being said, it's unfair to say that Apple has done very little for it's developers and customers.
MS is already doing this to a certain extent with .NET and other technologies like WPF. However, when MS decides to move away from Win32, as they HAVE DONE on the 64bit version of XP and Vista, it runs as a separate subsystem along side the replacement, and again with emulation.
Have you used XP x64? Why are there no apps for it?
NT's subsystem model allows for MS to move in or out any Subsystem that is equal to the main OS subsystem,
So that's why viruses can hose things that they shoudn't have access to.
Microsoft doesn't do any of the above because they don't have to.
Again, this is simply not true. First, XP64 and Vista 64bit do NOT USE the Win32 subsystem as the main OS subsystem. So they have done this, not only 1992 with the Win16 subsystem, but today on the 64bit versions.
Well, that's awesome, but really doesn't matter- because as I eluded to earlier, no one uses x64 MS products- because they suck.
I don't really care what you think of MS, as they both suck and do things well depending on what you look at. However to try to use Apple as a 'shining' example when it comes to OS architecture or API implementation it is VERY laughable.
It was meant as an example of OS arch or API. It was meant as an example of corporate dedication to developers and customers. Sure, Apple's had problems. Apple's still got problems. But at least they are working on them, very quickly, and are willing to make the efforts help their install base transition to newer technologies. The only reason we are still using Win32 is because Microsoft isn't willing to do that work.
Even Quartz2D continues to fall on its face with no default hardware accleration, pushing developers to use the very old QuickDraw API to maintain performance in applications.
I don't know of any apps that still use Quickdraw. . . I could be wrong. QuickDraw has been retired in Leopard. There are huge advancements in video APIs in L
Amen.
And/Or write something that emulates Win32 so that binaries built with it can run with fewer intrusive, ugly, or otherwise bad things going on.
Apple has done both of the above- a few times. It can be done, and it can be made transparent to the user. It allows the OS to advance without screwing developers or customers, and that is why OS X has grown so much (and had 5 major releases) over the last 6 years or so.
Microsoft doesn't do any of the above because they don't have to. They don't need to make developer lives easier, they don't need to make their customers happy, and so they don't. That's the benefit of being a monopoly, and that's why they're evil.
It's no longer about knowing the answers - it's about knowing how to find or figure out the answers. Ability to learn has become more important than being learned.
Genuine Disadvantage
The reason the third party developers assume people run as admin is because Microsoft has built the OS assuming they do. Basically the MS security stack is backwards- they start with an admin user and then restrict rights (in many different ways) down to whatever level is desired- the unix way is to start with a totally restricted account, and then add rights as needed. A fresh user on a unix box doesn't even have access to the optical drive by default.
If the thinking was right at the OS level, developers would follow suit.
Or we could just us a unix security model, and when something wants to sudo, force it to ask the console user for a password. Microsoft steals ideas all the time. Why can't they steal the unix model, and be done with it?
Just look at what comes out of it!
FYI, OS X Leopard *is* Unix, it's been offically certified as such and will be marketed as such, unlike the previous versions which were 'Unix Like'
We used it on a few occations, the most noteable being STS-32, when Columbia brought back the absolutely massive LDEF satellite. http://setas-www.larc.nasa.gov/LDEF/index.html