I always bang on about this. But Southampton University's Quartz Crystal storage claims "360 terabytes of information on nanostructured quartz for up to 14 billion years".
This would seem best to developed for this type of application.
This is the real question. The PC isn't going to die, but if we aren't careful it will die as an open platform.
The DRM lockdown of the HW. Some nasty vendor specific HW on laptops that has closed drivers.
The nasty Intel Management Engine that is a whole seperate computer running in your PC, that can read all its memory. It OS,code and API are fully locked down, the machine will not boot without this stuff loading. A true Ghost in the machine. I imagine the 3 letter agencies must just love this stuff, if its not backdoored they would be fools. Amazed geeks aren't more concerned about the ME.
Whenever I here of W10 market share improvements, especially with people who rave about it. I just think, go ahead sheeple and get pwned by Microsoft, so long as *I* keep being able to use alternatives.. don't care if they get 95% market share with it.
Some posters seem to think this has been difficult for Linux/Red Hat/Fedora users. It hasn't been, the mp3 support is in third party repos that are easily added.
This is simply moving it from these to a core repo. This will eventually happen with all patented things (NTFS, exfat, h264, h265 etc), just some will take a very long time.
User's of other platforms should be more concerned with their lacking support for open codecs e.g flac, taking until Windows 10 or still not in iTunes. But can be added as trivially to Windows as mp3 can to Fedora.
And allow us to use files called CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9.
Or use of <, >,:, ", |,?,* characters.
Or the other strange arbitrary rules, e.g. spaces allowed in names but a filename must have something other than spaces in it. There are many others.
But Linux also should probably not limit file paths to 4096, I'd have thought that might start to be an issue for people using a lot of Unicode.
1/ OOXML: I'm not saying you can't get some level of interop. Not being able to fully use OOXML in anything else is a huge inhibitor to adoption of a competing product. Putting a disclaimer on a product will massively inhibit adoption. The standard is now OOXML, if you don't have support that fully, people will be much less likely to use your product. There is a huge fear with end users of it not working perfectly.
What I'am saying, is that the signal MS is putting out by still not using an fully interoperable file format (by default) is MS doesn't embrace open standards but lock in. This isn't helping their case!
3/ Bundling: It maybe good business, but so is the mob's protection racket! This has been looked badly on by various courts around the world, including the Italian Supreme court that said (from Wikipedia) "a commercial policy of forced distribution" and slammed this practice as "monopolistic in tendency".
Again we are talking message here, this policy that makes free operating systems MORE expensive the commercial ones on the same hardware, just doesn't sit well with people who might value freedom over being abused cause someone thought good business. Well guess what this is now bad business as it makes us want to give MS a wide berth.
4/ FAT patents: Wow. Just Wow. Long file names on FAT, everyone who know this field thinks this technology was obvious. It's a very obvious engineering hack to make long file names on FAT. There were companies doing long filenames on FAT fully compatibly before MS (using a variety of methods, and often more backward compatibly than MS), it's just that MS could make the standard. I'm afraid you are just plain wrong on this one!
Even ignoring the rights and wrongs of software patents. There are companies that like Google that have patents on software, that only use them defensively, not MS they are using them aggressively on rather obvious technologies because they are exploiting their monopoly. Put another way, they are making a ton of cash on a something that probably took comparatively little thought (read R&D expenditure) to come up with.
If Microsoft want Linux people to trust them they have a lot of ground to make up. And they claim they want this for Azure. Here are a few little things:
1/ Stop loading standards committee with your goons, then back genuine open document standards. Thereby showing you embrace openness and want your products to compete on features not just lock-in.
2/ Stop deprecating the few Linux desktop products you have or give them limited functionality (e.g. Skype) . Okay so you are interested in Linux on a server. But your desktop nastiness just makes us all think you aren't sincere on the server either. How about releasing some other Linux desktop products, if you really want to show willing.
3/ Stop being nasty to PC vendors that want to ship OS free or Linux based PC's (increasing price of Windows licenses).
4/ Stop threatening Linux/Android vendors with patents for obvious things e.g. FAT long file names., exFAT which is also pretty straight forward. And make them open standards, they are pretty obvious anyway! That just looks grasping and controlling. Lets face it MS, the only reason you have a patent of any value is you have a Desktop monopoly.
5/ Don't release new Linux products with functionality crippled compared to the Windows versions, and give some commitment to it's long term future.Not giving equivalent functionality (at the same time) makes me think you will move me over to Windows if I need a particular feature. And the lack of commitment makes us old Unix heads remember IE on Solaris and HP-UX which disappeared as soon as you destroyed Netscape in the market. Not forgiven yet for this piece of obvious nasty behaviour. Otherwise people like me who work in corporate IT will not touch Linux SQL Server with a long pole, we only use it now on Windows where we have no choice.
6/ And a little contrition wouldn't hurt, "we know we haven't been fair to this community in the past etc" style. Maybe you'll realise that the whole world will one day not be running Windows!!
Anyone who doesn't get why the above has really annoyed the Linux community, is probably the definition of a MS shill. These changes would benefit Windows users too!
When Windows NT first made an appearance all the Unix people were told your obsession with terminals is so outmoded that we haven't put support into NT.
I think the Unix guys are getting the last laugh...
1/ With Android they "only" log my activity when I interact with Google. I can avoid this, or at least I know when (using maps, Google Now, gmail etc). I can use my own mail services, Firefox, etc W10 logs *everything* , i've tried that experiment of watching it phone home when firing up the calculator.
2/ MS are moving to uninstall software automatically. Google have never done this.
3/ Even if I don't like this level of containment of Google I can replace their Android with Cyanogenmod. Even though a bit of a faff, there is no option to do this with W10.
4/ This is my PC, was an open device, I've come to expect this. I expect more from this than my phone or tablet. This makes W10 so much worse.
How long until media companies etc ask for undesirable programs to be removed or at least who has them so they can sue people?
And maybe not even MS's. Use the telemetry to report use of non-authorized versions of movies, TV shows, music to MPAA etc. They can send you the bill...
Or just blocking 'piracy' software that they consider unacceptable...EAC etc
Not this year, not next, but 5 years time?
Once MS has this data and everyone is over to these Malwared versions. Even if MS don't want I can see them being sued to enable this.
Couldn't agree more. This legislation is just to satisfy the Conservatives constituency of one foot in the grave grey haired that find this Internet stuff a bit scary.
I host my own email server. I have it on a domestic connection with dynamic IP so no reverse IP and that makes outbound problematic to some sites. So I signed up to an Outbound SMTP service for that piece ( I picked a mysmtp.eu), my Postfix TLS's to them and they TLS outbound so acceptable security, for my purposes. Inbound SMTP for me works fine with dyndns holding my A and MX records (IP changes pushed to dyndns automatically from my router), even with my self signed cert (mainly just want the link encrypted). I have a VPS on a fixed IP as a secondary MX, that can hold my email when my IP changes and people's DNS TTL's take a little while to catch up with my dyndns changes. Also I can flip the secondary to primary if my home server is due to be down for a while (e.g. moving house, ISP outage etc).
Using an outbound service makes it easier to set an SPF record for your domain. This and reverse DNS (as other people have said) cause the issues with other sites accepting.
People say that Windows 10 is just doing what Android does. Just not true.
Firstly this is my PC so I do more on it.
But mainly as far as I'm aware Android is reporting back to Google only when I use Google services, so I'm aware they are doing this (gmail, maps and Google now etc). Not when I'm using non Google apps. I can guarantee this with Cyanogen. But even the base Android source is examanable.
But with Windows 10 it seems to be reporting from the base OS (illustrated by even reporting back when running something like calc. There is no source to examine or Windows Cyanogen.
This is a big difference that no one is pointing out. And the reason Win10 is truly nasty don't for privacy.
I hate how a lot of posters on here these days criticise people for still saying MS is evil. They assume this is all ancient history.
In the last few years they have threatened to sue Android phone sellers unless they sign a licensing agreement with MS. Based on unspecified patents being infringed in the Linux kernel. The ones that have leaked out look very dubious.
Not very long ago they corrupted the ooxml standards process. We could all have been using open document formats by now.
Still can't buy from a large vendor a non-server PC without an OS.
It was discussed at a conference recently that there was concern the kernel was too big for a lot of possible IoT applications, this may eventually hurt Linux's future in this area. Some people were looking at optimising the kernel to make it a lot smaller, but they had limited resources. Any thoughts on optimising the kernel for these very small IoT applications before a new pretender OS may appear to challenge Linux in this?
Surprised that no one pointed out (or no one I can see) that the article says "Nest has since released an intelligent CO2 detector, called Nest Protect". This would be a Carbon Dioxide detector, when we know Nest has a Carbon Monoxide detector i.e. CO not CO2.
Couldn't agree more . I found DD-WRT to be very dependant on a few people's branches for progress. Tomato seemed good but just wasn't as popular as OpenWRT. I'd always look for a router that supported as many of these as possible.
Also OpenWRT I found to be closer to a standard Linux distrib, with a package manager and a fully modifiable filesystem. Much easier to work with than DD-WRT IMHO.
I switched to a TP-Link N900 with OpenWRT. I've found it very stable.
I had an N66U and loved it. Sadly OpenWRT doesn't support it (I wanted to switch due to a bug in DD-WRT I had). This is due to requiring a closed source driver for it's WiFi. So I bought a similar spec'd TP-Link N900 and have been very happy with that.
"Eight leading Internet firms, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Yahoo, have formed an alliance called Reform Government Surveillance group."
As someone else pointed out "Seven leading Internet firms" and AOL
Who's still using AOL , or is still paying for it and actually uses their service. I'm sure I read somewhere that a large percentage of their users are unaware that they no longer needed their AOL subscription to get online via broadband?
We save about 10% of our Internet bandwidth by running all http traffic through a caching proxy. This would seem to prevent this bandwidth saving for things that just don't need encryption. This would be any public site that is largely consumable content. All in favour of it for anything more personal.
Also how are companies supposed to effectively web filter if everything is HTTPS. DNS filtering is, in general, too broad as brush. We may not like our web filtered, but companies have a legal duty that employees shouldn't be see questionable material, even if on someone else's computer. Companies have been sued for allowing this to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
I always bang on about this. But Southampton University's Quartz Crystal storage claims "360 terabytes of information on nanostructured quartz for up to 14 billion years".
This would seem best to developed for this type of application.
Before they could have dropped the single patch causing the issue.
The price *you* pay for MS to desperately force you to take their spyware in Windows.
This is the real question. The PC isn't going to die, but if we aren't careful it will die as an open platform.
The DRM lockdown of the HW. Some nasty vendor specific HW on laptops that has closed drivers.
The nasty Intel Management Engine that is a whole seperate computer running in your PC, that can read all its memory. It OS,code and API are fully locked down, the machine will not boot without this stuff loading. A true Ghost in the machine. I imagine the 3 letter agencies must just love this stuff, if its not backdoored they would be fools. Amazed geeks aren't more concerned about the ME.
Whenever I here of W10 market share improvements, especially with people who rave about it. I just think, go ahead sheeple and get pwned by Microsoft, so long as *I* keep being able to use alternatives.. don't care if they get 95% market share with it.
I always hope this Quartz Glass storage that can last for claimed billions of years can make it to a product.
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
We then get into the file formats issues but solving half the problem is a good start.
Some posters seem to think this has been difficult for Linux/Red Hat/Fedora users. It hasn't been, the mp3 support is in third party repos that are easily added. This is simply moving it from these to a core repo. This will eventually happen with all patented things (NTFS, exfat, h264, h265 etc), just some will take a very long time. User's of other platforms should be more concerned with their lacking support for open codecs e.g flac, taking until Windows 10 or still not in iTunes. But can be added as trivially to Windows as mp3 can to Fedora.
Is the potential of Quartz Glass Storage for archive not better http://themindunleashed.org/2014/02/data-storage-crystal-quartz-will-change-everything.html Stable for longer won't get eaten by bacteria
And allow us to use files called CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9.
:, ", |,?,* characters.
Or use of <, >,
Or the other strange arbitrary rules, e.g. spaces allowed in names but a filename must have something other than spaces in it. There are many others.
But Linux also should probably not limit file paths to 4096, I'd have thought that might start to be an issue for people using a lot of Unicode.
1/ OOXML: I'm not saying you can't get some level of interop. Not being able to fully use OOXML in anything else is a huge inhibitor to adoption of a competing product. Putting a disclaimer on a product will massively inhibit adoption. The standard is now OOXML, if you don't have support that fully, people will be much less likely to use your product. There is a huge fear with end users of it not working perfectly.
What I'am saying, is that the signal MS is putting out by still not using an fully interoperable file format (by default) is MS doesn't embrace open standards but lock in. This isn't helping their case!
3/ Bundling: It maybe good business, but so is the mob's protection racket! This has been looked badly on by various courts around the world, including the Italian Supreme court that said (from Wikipedia) "a commercial policy of forced distribution" and slammed this practice as "monopolistic in tendency".
Again we are talking message here, this policy that makes free operating systems MORE expensive the commercial ones on the same hardware, just doesn't sit well with people who might value freedom over being abused cause someone thought good business. Well guess what this is now bad business as it makes us want to give MS a wide berth.
4/ FAT patents: Wow. Just Wow. Long file names on FAT, everyone who know this field thinks this technology was obvious. It's a very obvious engineering hack to make long file names on FAT. There were companies doing long filenames on FAT fully compatibly before MS (using a variety of methods, and often more backward compatibly than MS), it's just that MS could make the standard. I'm afraid you are just plain wrong on this one!
Even ignoring the rights and wrongs of software patents. There are companies that like Google that have patents on software, that only use them defensively, not MS they are using them aggressively on rather obvious technologies because they are exploiting their monopoly. Put another way, they are making a ton of cash on a something that probably took comparatively little thought (read R&D expenditure) to come up with.
If Microsoft want Linux people to trust them they have a lot of ground to make up. And they claim they want this for Azure. Here are a few little things:
1/ Stop loading standards committee with your goons, then back genuine open document standards. Thereby showing you embrace openness and want your products to compete on features not just lock-in.
2/ Stop deprecating the few Linux desktop products you have or give them limited functionality (e.g. Skype) . Okay so you are interested in Linux on a server. But your desktop nastiness just makes us all think you aren't sincere on the server either. How about releasing some other Linux desktop products, if you really want to show willing.
3/ Stop being nasty to PC vendors that want to ship OS free or Linux based PC's (increasing price of Windows licenses).
4/ Stop threatening Linux/Android vendors with patents for obvious things e.g. FAT long file names., exFAT which is also pretty straight forward. And make them open standards, they are pretty obvious anyway! That just looks grasping and controlling. Lets face it MS, the only reason you have a patent of any value is you have a Desktop monopoly.
5/ Don't release new Linux products with functionality crippled compared to the Windows versions, and give some commitment to it's long term future.Not giving equivalent functionality (at the same time) makes me think you will move me over to Windows if I need a particular feature. And the lack of commitment makes us old Unix heads remember IE on Solaris and HP-UX which disappeared as soon as you destroyed Netscape in the market. Not forgiven yet for this piece of obvious nasty behaviour. Otherwise people like me who work in corporate IT will not touch Linux SQL Server with a long pole, we only use it now on Windows where we have no choice.
6/ And a little contrition wouldn't hurt, "we know we haven't been fair to this community in the past etc" style. Maybe you'll realise that the whole world will one day not be running Windows!!
Anyone who doesn't get why the above has really annoyed the Linux community, is probably the definition of a MS shill. These changes would benefit Windows users too!
What did people think would happen if you invest in a platform you don't control.
MS have a long history of screwing partners, especially if the partner has started to make real money in an area.
My sympathy for these developers is limited, yes release on Windows but you maybe want to do another platform so you have a plan B.
When Windows NT first made an appearance all the Unix people were told your obsession with terminals is so outmoded that we haven't put support into NT.
I think the Unix guys are getting the last laugh...
Window 10 is so much worse than android:
1/ With Android they "only" log my activity when I interact with Google. I can avoid this, or at least I know when (using maps, Google Now, gmail etc). I can use my own mail services, Firefox, etc W10 logs *everything* , i've tried that experiment of watching it phone home when firing up the calculator.
2/ MS are moving to uninstall software automatically. Google have never done this.
3/ Even if I don't like this level of containment of Google I can replace their Android with Cyanogenmod. Even though a bit of a faff, there is no option to do this with W10.
4/ This is my PC, was an open device, I've come to expect this. I expect more from this than my phone or tablet. This makes W10 so much worse.
How long until media companies etc ask for undesirable programs to be removed or at least who has them so they can sue people?
And maybe not even MS's. Use the telemetry to report use of non-authorized versions of movies, TV shows, music to MPAA etc. They can send you the bill...
Or just blocking 'piracy' software that they consider unacceptable...EAC etc
Not this year, not next, but 5 years time?
Once MS has this data and everyone is over to these Malwared versions. Even if MS don't want I can see them being sued to enable this.
Couldn't agree more. This legislation is just to satisfy the Conservatives constituency of one foot in the grave grey haired that find this Internet stuff a bit scary.
I host my own email server. I have it on a domestic connection with dynamic IP so no reverse IP and that makes outbound problematic to some sites. So I signed up to an Outbound SMTP service for that piece ( I picked a mysmtp.eu), my Postfix TLS's to them and they TLS outbound so acceptable security, for my purposes. Inbound SMTP for me works fine with dyndns holding my A and MX records (IP changes pushed to dyndns automatically from my router), even with my self signed cert (mainly just want the link encrypted). I have a VPS on a fixed IP as a secondary MX, that can hold my email when my IP changes and people's DNS TTL's take a little while to catch up with my dyndns changes. Also I can flip the secondary to primary if my home server is due to be down for a while (e.g. moving house, ISP outage etc).
Using an outbound service makes it easier to set an SPF record for your domain. This and reverse DNS (as other people have said) cause the issues with other sites accepting.
People say that Windows 10 is just doing what Android does. Just not true.
Firstly this is my PC so I do more on it.
But mainly as far as I'm aware Android is reporting back to Google only when I use Google services, so I'm aware they are doing this (gmail, maps and Google now etc). Not when I'm using non Google apps. I can guarantee this with Cyanogen. But even the base Android source is examanable.
But with Windows 10 it seems to be reporting from the base OS (illustrated by even reporting back when running something like calc. There is no source to examine or Windows Cyanogen.
This is a big difference that no one is pointing out. And the reason Win10 is truly nasty don't for privacy.
I hate how a lot of posters on here these days criticise people for still saying MS is evil. They assume this is all ancient history.
In the last few years they have threatened to sue Android phone sellers unless they sign a licensing agreement with MS. Based on unspecified patents being infringed in the Linux kernel. The ones that have leaked out look very dubious.
Not very long ago they corrupted the ooxml standards process. We could all have been using open document formats by now.
Still can't buy from a large vendor a non-server PC without an OS.
It was discussed at a conference recently that there was concern the kernel was too big for a lot of possible IoT applications, this may eventually hurt Linux's future in this area. Some people were looking at optimising the kernel to make it a lot smaller, but they had limited resources. Any thoughts on optimising the kernel for these very small IoT applications before a new pretender OS may appear to challenge Linux in this?
Surprised that no one pointed out (or no one I can see) that the article says "Nest has since released an intelligent CO2 detector, called Nest Protect". This would be a Carbon Dioxide detector, when we know Nest has a Carbon Monoxide detector i.e. CO not CO2.
Couldn't agree more . I found DD-WRT to be very dependant on a few people's branches for progress. Tomato seemed good but just wasn't as popular as OpenWRT. I'd always look for a router that supported as many of these as possible.
Also OpenWRT I found to be closer to a standard Linux distrib, with a package manager and a fully modifiable filesystem. Much easier to work with than DD-WRT IMHO.
I switched to a TP-Link N900 with OpenWRT. I've found it very stable.
I had an N66U and loved it. Sadly OpenWRT doesn't support it (I wanted to switch due to a bug in DD-WRT I had). This is due to requiring a closed source driver for it's WiFi. So I bought a similar spec'd TP-Link N900 and have been very happy with that.
"Eight leading Internet firms, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Yahoo, have formed an alliance called Reform Government Surveillance group."
As someone else pointed out "Seven leading Internet firms" and AOL
Who's still using AOL , or is still paying for it and actually uses their service. I'm sure I read somewhere that a large percentage of their users are unaware that they no longer needed their AOL subscription to get online via broadband?
We save about 10% of our Internet bandwidth by running all http traffic through a caching proxy. This would seem to prevent this bandwidth saving for things that just don't need encryption. This would be any public site that is largely consumable content. All in favour of it for anything more personal.
Also how are companies supposed to effectively web filter if everything is HTTPS. DNS filtering is, in general, too broad as brush. We may not like our web filtered, but companies have a legal duty that employees shouldn't be see questionable material, even if on someone else's computer. Companies have been sued for allowing this to happen.
Yeah heaven forbid that MS would lock out a competitor with a technical "fix"
Your heart bleeds for them doesn't it.
Sauce for the goose and screw them leaps to mind (and maybe a boo hoo)
I've had to deal with MS locking out Unix based platforms for the last couple of decades, they've had this coming and deserve tons more!