Nothing. But they have to say it as themselves. No more quietly contributing to the campaigns of various politicians. No more opportunities to funnel money into "advising" the politicians of the right course of action (this is nominally what lobbying is, but in practice it looks an awful lot like bribery) behind the scenes. Anybody who wants to, and can get screen time on TV, may express a political opinion... but they can't conceal that it's *their* opinion. They can't hide where the money for that torrent of advertising the Ed Murray campaign (yes, I live in WA) comes from, not even by making concerned people go find it in public records. Everything out in the open...
Actually, they are offering that; the plans in TFS aren't the only ones. It's a bit complicated, though... How about 5Mbps/1Mbps (Down/Up) for FREE for 60 months after that $350 installation? That works out to less than $6/month, and after the five years are over you can switch to the 10/10 for $10/month plan.
Note that all of this is contact-free; aside from the up-front $350 cost for this option, you can stop using it (or buy something better) at any time.
IE has a built-in "tracking protection" feature that is disabled by default, but effectively makes a workable ad blocker when enabled.
It has three modes of operation, which can be combined as you wish. The default (block any third-party content requested by more than a given number of pages) heuristic is a little bit of a problem on some sites (things like jquery will find themselves blocked almost as fast as doubleclick does) but is very hands-off
The second mode, manual blocking, lets you fix that; whitelisting certain URLs (and blacklisting others, if they fall below the threshold that the automatic blocking is set at) to allow only what you want to see (I, for example, block Facebook from following me across the 'net; it's nice).
The third mode, and the most ad-block-ish one, is to subscribe to "Tracking Protection Lists" that supply block/allow rules and update automatically. Your own rules override those from TPLs, you can subscribe to multiple TPLs, and EasyList (one of the better known ad-blocking lists for ABP) has a TPL that they keep synched with their ABP list (there are other anti-ad lists too).
The blocking can be disabled on a site-by-site basis, with two clicks, if needed. Enabling the feature actually noticeably speeds up browsing (because no more ads / tracking pixels / etc.) and reduces bandwidth use as well. It's been built in since IE9; IE8 had a basic version of the same function called something like InPrivate Blocking (not InPrivate Browsing mode, AKA Porn Mode, which is something else entirely).
RT is salvageable, though. The 8.0 version has a very nice jailbreak that allows running Win32 apps (recompiled),.NET apps (unmodified), (many) Python / Perl / Java / Ruby / etc. apps (via recompiled or.NET-based runtimes), DOS apps (via recompiled DosBox), and even some x86 Win32 apps (via dynamic recompilation). It even allows third-party drivers. Unfortunately, MS broke this hack in 8.1 (deliberately), so it's taking a while to get it back; there's a couple hacks that works for 8.1 though, and a new jailbreak installer will hopefully be available Soon(TM).
Of course, if MS really wanted RT to be truly successful, they wouldn't have hobbled it in the first place... but they can change their tune, sometimes, and a high-level shakeup like they're going through now is a good opportunity for such change. We Shall See... but I bought a gen 1 RT purely to hack on it and see if I could break its lockdown, and it didn't take that long (not that I was actually a big part of developing the first major jailbreak, but I'm part of the community that was). It runs whatever code I want it to, pretty much, and it makes a nice ultra-lightweight, long-battery-life general purpose computer.
No, of course Windows is not nearly as restrictive of background processes (which is one reason, among many, why comparing iPads and Surface Pros is bullshit and the author is a moron for posting it). As for the Flash storage thing, I'm not sure about that... XP was terrible about constantly paging stuff out of main memory (comes of trying to meet a 128MB minimum requirement in an era when that was a lot for a desktop PC, yes, XP is that old), but Vista and later are better about it. Most of the disk activity is reads, pre-caching data into unused RAM. SSD reads don't take that much power.
Because the Apple-provided Windows drivers for power management on their hardware are shit. They always have been, for as long as Boot Camp has existed. They tolerate running Windows, but they don't put much effort into making it run well (and/or they are just incompetent at NT drivers, which admittedly are a pain in the rear). Things like the fans being always at 100%, non-variable, is just one of the hassles Windows users of Apple hardware have to put up with. It's not just the power management either; everything from the storage drivers to the video drivers (for their not-quite-standard video cards) has had issues. 40% battery life loss isn't a showstopper; it's a marketing point for running their OS instead.
On the flip side, try running a bare-metal Hackintosh. The power management is abysmal, because Apple doesn't make drivers for anything except their own machines. Windows will do much better on such a platform.
Only on Apple hardware, which requires Apple drivers for power management, and surprise surprise, Apple sucks at Windows drivers (and always has). In one particular, the Windows power management drivers for my friend's MBP don't suppose variable fan speed control. It always runs full speed. No shit, that's going to waste battery life... On the flip side of the coin, though, Hackintoshes get worse battery life than Windows on the same hardware. This entire "article" is stupid; anybody who isn't blinded by fanboyism and has used the systems in question could tell you that.
Surface Pro [2] has worse battery life than an iPad or Android tablet for a simple and bloody obvious reason: Core i5 CPU. Not some power-sipping little ARM chip with passive cooling, but full laptop-grade 64-bit processor. Even completely leaving aside the obvious (to anybody who is not an idiot, which apparently excludes the submitter) differences between a desktop OS (Win8.x) and a mobile one (Android or iOS), there are very obvious reasons for the battery life difference.
It's possible that their "big infrastructure" stuff is less hopeless than their commercial-grade (note: not consumer-grade) routers. More likely, though, they're simply harder to attack. The holes might be different, and they might be harder to find or to get yourself in a position to exploit them, but they're probably still there. Nobody who publishes expensive, business-oriented products with code that shitty can be trusted to do better elsewhere.
As for being smarter, it's entirely possible that I am better informed now than the governments in question were when they ordered that infrastructure, yes. Stupid of them to not get a good security audit of it, but hey, that costs money and takes time and people weren't so paranoid about the Internet in those bad old days. The US government (and several others) are currently refusing to allow Huawei to even submit bids, and have been since approximately the time that the results of this research broke, so it's entirely possible that they are also better-informed now and have acted as they saw necessary.
Exactly. In fact, if I recall a story a few years back correctly, the main concern was not about the firmware but about backdoors built into the silicon. Even if they turned over their HDL files (something no hardware vendor would do), the same problem exists there that it does for software: short of uncapping the chips and examining them in impossible detail, there's no way to know that there wasn't a backdoor inserted into the chip design later in the synthesis (compilation) or manufacturing process anyhow.
I'd mod you up but I already commented on this thread, so hopefully others will do it for me.
Nobody in their right mind uses Huawei kit, because it will cheerfully send packets to anybody who asks. DEFCON 20 had an eye-opening presentation on exactly how shitty their code was, at least on their networking equipment. The upshot? There's no need for a government backdoor when the code quality is so abysmal. A pair of hackers were able to find laughably easy (think 80s- or early 90s-grade vulnerabilities, things like strcpy into small buffers and such) remote exploits and the devices have no exploit mitigations or privilege separation, so anybody who wanted to could root them with ease. Huawei didn't even have a system in place for taking reports of security issues; they just didn't care.
The government stuff is irrelevant. If you use Huawei, the Chinese can spy on you, the NSA can spy on you, the Papua New Guineans can spy on you, I can spy on you, and I'm pretty sure my cat is smart enough it could spy on you. Their security is that abysmal.
Huawei's software is shit (who needs government backdoors when the on-device management webserver will strcpy the request body into a buffer allocated based on the content-length header?) and could benefit from open-sourcing (of course, the whole thing is just a shitty re-implementation of Cisco software anyhow), but the risk is of malicious stuff in the silicon itself. That's actually not too hard; hardware design is tricky in different ways than software design, but a basic backdoor or espionage function is easy enough to embed in the silicon.
I write equal amounts native and managed code. I'll grant that managed ha seen a resurgence, but the only way you could call it the "main" framework is to note that the last few tool versions have added more updates to native-oriented tools than managed-oriented ones... which sounds good until you realie that the native tools were left to languish for so long that these updates have been almost entirely a matter of catching up, while.NET has still gotten a bunch of cool new stuff like async.
Missing relative to other tools? Not terribly much, honestly; I wouldn't use VS for Java (by preference, I'd use NetBeans) or for POSIX native code, but both are possible. Some VS extensions are very handy; there's a tool for finding, installing and updating them called NuGet (should be built into current versions of VS, I think); you may want to check them out although it sounds like you've already found some plugins that you like. The git integration will probably improve over time; there has already been an update or two. Eclipse has slightly more refactoring power than is built into VS, but there are plugins for that and the Eclipse UI drives me nuts when I try to use it. The only major thing that comes to mind is that VS isn't going to run on anything except Windows (unless Wine support for it is a lot better than I remember) so, although there are Linux-compatible IDEs that can read its project files, it might not be the ideal tool for mixed environments.
What have *you* been huffing?.NET, in one form or another, is *the* main development framework Microsoft has been pushing the last few years, honestly.
Windows desktop pre-Win8: Native code or.NET. Win8 / Windows RT apps:.NET (via the subset usable in WinRT), native code (same caveat), or HTML5/JS. Windows Phone 7:.NET (via Silverlight) or.NET (via XNA). Windows Phone 8:.NET (via WinRT subset for phone) or native code (WinRT). Xbox 360 indie games:.NET (via XNA).
This goes back even further, actually, but those are just Microsoft's major ISV-facing platforms of this decade.
That's mostly a problem of team, not tools. Lots of open source developers are shit at bug tracking too. TFS isn't my first choice of tool, but it works.
Also, to the extent that the tools are the problem, that's largely because you're using tools that are 3-5 years old. Updating to newer versions won't make them any more familiar to you (as if ability to adapt to tools isn't a vital skill for a professional coder...) but it will add a lot of functionality that you may be looking for.
It won't fix team stupidity, though. There's really no solution for that one.
I'd offer suggestions, but you completely neglected to explain what (in terms of the tools) you were having problems with, so rather than give a full course of "MS Dev Tools 101: Tutorial for the Anonymous Coward Who Thinks it is "Dross" I think I'll just suggest looking up online anything that you're trying to do and can't figure out; you're hardly the first person to use this software, even coming from a background like yours.
SSH only "has the same architecture" if you use password auth instead of public key auth. The latter is considerably safer. Additionally, there are *still* other, better options, such as SRP.
I don't know where you get "less connection to reality" from, but whatever. As for propaganda, I've yet to see anything else in recent American history that compares to the "USA PATRIOT" act, but propaganda is a fact of life. Learn to see through it if you want to participate in the political process.
CenturyLink does by default but you can get them to allow it. Clear allows it. I think the GP is a bit... confused, and thinks that Comcast = "pretty much all residential connections". No, thank you!
... I almost respected you until this post, but now you sound like an idiot. The tradeoff of freedoms is safety, and to an extent, civilization. I do not have the freedom to manufacture sarin in my basement, to hire assassins (what, *I* am not killing anybody...), to procure and detonate nuclear explosives for fun, or to run red lights.
The correct balance is certainly up for debate, and In my opinion it involves vastly less government surveillance than we have today, indeed less than we've had at any point in the last twelve years. I wouldn't want to live in a world without *any* government surveillance, though; just limit it to people who are justifiable suspects (of crimes or foreign spy agencies), gain a warrant based on that suspicion, survey them only so long as is necessary to fulfill the warrant, have strict limits on how long the warrants can remain in effect, no secret courts, etc.
Amusingly enough, the ATIV S was also the first WP8 device to have its security cracked open; an "interop-unlock" hack (not quite root, but much closer than before) is available for it, but not for any other non-Samsung WP8 handset at this time.
Um, no. You are wrong, the people who modded you Informative are wrong, and you are part of the problem here. The three investors are part of a group of 20 that collectively hold 5%. Unless those three are an incredibly disproportionately large portion of the group of 20, their combined percentage will be tiny relative to what Gates holds.
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Nothing. But they have to say it as themselves. No more quietly contributing to the campaigns of various politicians. No more opportunities to funnel money into "advising" the politicians of the right course of action (this is nominally what lobbying is, but in practice it looks an awful lot like bribery) behind the scenes. Anybody who wants to, and can get screen time on TV, may express a political opinion... but they can't conceal that it's *their* opinion. They can't hide where the money for that torrent of advertising the Ed Murray campaign (yes, I live in WA) comes from, not even by making concerned people go find it in public records. Everything out in the open...
Actually, they are offering that; the plans in TFS aren't the only ones. It's a bit complicated, though...
How about 5Mbps/1Mbps (Down/Up) for FREE for 60 months after that $350 installation? That works out to less than $6/month, and after the five years are over you can switch to the 10/10 for $10/month plan.
Note that all of this is contact-free; aside from the up-front $350 cost for this option, you can stop using it (or buy something better) at any time.
IE has a built-in "tracking protection" feature that is disabled by default, but effectively makes a workable ad blocker when enabled.
It has three modes of operation, which can be combined as you wish. The default (block any third-party content requested by more than a given number of pages) heuristic is a little bit of a problem on some sites (things like jquery will find themselves blocked almost as fast as doubleclick does) but is very hands-off
The second mode, manual blocking, lets you fix that; whitelisting certain URLs (and blacklisting others, if they fall below the threshold that the automatic blocking is set at) to allow only what you want to see (I, for example, block Facebook from following me across the 'net; it's nice).
The third mode, and the most ad-block-ish one, is to subscribe to "Tracking Protection Lists" that supply block/allow rules and update automatically. Your own rules override those from TPLs, you can subscribe to multiple TPLs, and EasyList (one of the better known ad-blocking lists for ABP) has a TPL that they keep synched with their ABP list (there are other anti-ad lists too).
The blocking can be disabled on a site-by-site basis, with two clicks, if needed. Enabling the feature actually noticeably speeds up browsing (because no more ads / tracking pixels / etc.) and reduces bandwidth use as well. It's been built in since IE9; IE8 had a basic version of the same function called something like InPrivate Blocking (not InPrivate Browsing mode, AKA Porn Mode, which is something else entirely).
Not to mention Windows Phone... it's a minor platform, but if you're going to include iOS you may as well include WP as well.
RT is salvageable, though. The 8.0 version has a very nice jailbreak that allows running Win32 apps (recompiled), .NET apps (unmodified), (many) Python / Perl / Java / Ruby / etc. apps (via recompiled or .NET-based runtimes), DOS apps (via recompiled DosBox), and even some x86 Win32 apps (via dynamic recompilation). It even allows third-party drivers. Unfortunately, MS broke this hack in 8.1 (deliberately), so it's taking a while to get it back; there's a couple hacks that works for 8.1 though, and a new jailbreak installer will hopefully be available Soon(TM).
Of course, if MS really wanted RT to be truly successful, they wouldn't have hobbled it in the first place... but they can change their tune, sometimes, and a high-level shakeup like they're going through now is a good opportunity for such change. We Shall See... but I bought a gen 1 RT purely to hack on it and see if I could break its lockdown, and it didn't take that long (not that I was actually a big part of developing the first major jailbreak, but I'm part of the community that was). It runs whatever code I want it to, pretty much, and it makes a nice ultra-lightweight, long-battery-life general purpose computer.
No, of course Windows is not nearly as restrictive of background processes (which is one reason, among many, why comparing iPads and Surface Pros is bullshit and the author is a moron for posting it). As for the Flash storage thing, I'm not sure about that... XP was terrible about constantly paging stuff out of main memory (comes of trying to meet a 128MB minimum requirement in an era when that was a lot for a desktop PC, yes, XP is that old), but Vista and later are better about it. Most of the disk activity is reads, pre-caching data into unused RAM. SSD reads don't take that much power.
Because the Apple-provided Windows drivers for power management on their hardware are shit. They always have been, for as long as Boot Camp has existed. They tolerate running Windows, but they don't put much effort into making it run well (and/or they are just incompetent at NT drivers, which admittedly are a pain in the rear). Things like the fans being always at 100%, non-variable, is just one of the hassles Windows users of Apple hardware have to put up with. It's not just the power management either; everything from the storage drivers to the video drivers (for their not-quite-standard video cards) has had issues. 40% battery life loss isn't a showstopper; it's a marketing point for running their OS instead.
On the flip side, try running a bare-metal Hackintosh. The power management is abysmal, because Apple doesn't make drivers for anything except their own machines. Windows will do much better on such a platform.
Only on Apple hardware, which requires Apple drivers for power management, and surprise surprise, Apple sucks at Windows drivers (and always has). In one particular, the Windows power management drivers for my friend's MBP don't suppose variable fan speed control. It always runs full speed. No shit, that's going to waste battery life... On the flip side of the coin, though, Hackintoshes get worse battery life than Windows on the same hardware. This entire "article" is stupid; anybody who isn't blinded by fanboyism and has used the systems in question could tell you that.
Surface Pro [2] has worse battery life than an iPad or Android tablet for a simple and bloody obvious reason: Core i5 CPU. Not some power-sipping little ARM chip with passive cooling, but full laptop-grade 64-bit processor. Even completely leaving aside the obvious (to anybody who is not an idiot, which apparently excludes the submitter) differences between a desktop OS (Win8.x) and a mobile one (Android or iOS), there are very obvious reasons for the battery life difference.
It's possible that their "big infrastructure" stuff is less hopeless than their commercial-grade (note: not consumer-grade) routers. More likely, though, they're simply harder to attack. The holes might be different, and they might be harder to find or to get yourself in a position to exploit them, but they're probably still there. Nobody who publishes expensive, business-oriented products with code that shitty can be trusted to do better elsewhere.
As for being smarter, it's entirely possible that I am better informed now than the governments in question were when they ordered that infrastructure, yes. Stupid of them to not get a good security audit of it, but hey, that costs money and takes time and people weren't so paranoid about the Internet in those bad old days. The US government (and several others) are currently refusing to allow Huawei to even submit bids, and have been since approximately the time that the results of this research broke, so it's entirely possible that they are also better-informed now and have acted as they saw necessary.
Exactly. In fact, if I recall a story a few years back correctly, the main concern was not about the firmware but about backdoors built into the silicon. Even if they turned over their HDL files (something no hardware vendor would do), the same problem exists there that it does for software: short of uncapping the chips and examining them in impossible detail, there's no way to know that there wasn't a backdoor inserted into the chip design later in the synthesis (compilation) or manufacturing process anyhow.
I'd mod you up but I already commented on this thread, so hopefully others will do it for me.
Nobody in their right mind uses Huawei kit, because it will cheerfully send packets to anybody who asks. DEFCON 20 had an eye-opening presentation on exactly how shitty their code was, at least on their networking equipment. The upshot? There's no need for a government backdoor when the code quality is so abysmal. A pair of hackers were able to find laughably easy (think 80s- or early 90s-grade vulnerabilities, things like strcpy into small buffers and such) remote exploits and the devices have no exploit mitigations or privilege separation, so anybody who wanted to could root them with ease. Huawei didn't even have a system in place for taking reports of security issues; they just didn't care.
The government stuff is irrelevant. If you use Huawei, the Chinese can spy on you, the NSA can spy on you, the Papua New Guineans can spy on you, I can spy on you, and I'm pretty sure my cat is smart enough it could spy on you. Their security is that abysmal.
Huawei's software is shit (who needs government backdoors when the on-device management webserver will strcpy the request body into a buffer allocated based on the content-length header?) and could benefit from open-sourcing (of course, the whole thing is just a shitty re-implementation of Cisco software anyhow), but the risk is of malicious stuff in the silicon itself. That's actually not too hard; hardware design is tricky in different ways than software design, but a basic backdoor or espionage function is easy enough to embed in the silicon.
I write equal amounts native and managed code. I'll grant that managed ha seen a resurgence, but the only way you could call it the "main" framework is to note that the last few tool versions have added more updates to native-oriented tools than managed-oriented ones... which sounds good until you realie that the native tools were left to languish for so long that these updates have been almost entirely a matter of catching up, while .NET has still gotten a bunch of cool new stuff like async.
Missing relative to other tools? Not terribly much, honestly; I wouldn't use VS for Java (by preference, I'd use NetBeans) or for POSIX native code, but both are possible. Some VS extensions are very handy; there's a tool for finding, installing and updating them called NuGet (should be built into current versions of VS, I think); you may want to check them out although it sounds like you've already found some plugins that you like. The git integration will probably improve over time; there has already been an update or two. Eclipse has slightly more refactoring power than is built into VS, but there are plugins for that and the Eclipse UI drives me nuts when I try to use it. The only major thing that comes to mind is that VS isn't going to run on anything except Windows (unless Wine support for it is a lot better than I remember) so, although there are Linux-compatible IDEs that can read its project files, it might not be the ideal tool for mixed environments.
What have *you* been huffing? .NET, in one form or another, is *the* main development framework Microsoft has been pushing the last few years, honestly.
Windows desktop pre-Win8: Native code or .NET. .NET (via the subset usable in WinRT), native code (same caveat), or HTML5/JS. .NET (via Silverlight) or .NET (via XNA). .NET (via WinRT subset for phone) or native code (WinRT). .NET (via XNA).
Win8 / Windows RT apps:
Windows Phone 7:
Windows Phone 8:
Xbox 360 indie games:
This goes back even further, actually, but those are just Microsoft's major ISV-facing platforms of this decade.
That's mostly a problem of team, not tools. Lots of open source developers are shit at bug tracking too. TFS isn't my first choice of tool, but it works.
Also, to the extent that the tools are the problem, that's largely because you're using tools that are 3-5 years old. Updating to newer versions won't make them any more familiar to you (as if ability to adapt to tools isn't a vital skill for a professional coder...) but it will add a lot of functionality that you may be looking for.
It won't fix team stupidity, though. There's really no solution for that one.
I'd offer suggestions, but you completely neglected to explain what (in terms of the tools) you were having problems with, so rather than give a full course of
"MS Dev Tools 101: Tutorial for the Anonymous Coward Who Thinks it is "Dross"
I think I'll just suggest looking up online anything that you're trying to do and can't figure out; you're hardly the first person to use this software, even coming from a background like yours.
SSH only "has the same architecture" if you use password auth instead of public key auth. The latter is considerably safer. Additionally, there are *still* other, better options, such as SRP.
I don't know where you get "less connection to reality" from, but whatever. As for propaganda, I've yet to see anything else in recent American history that compares to the "USA PATRIOT" act, but propaganda is a fact of life. Learn to see through it if you want to participate in the political process.
CenturyLink does by default but you can get them to allow it. Clear allows it. I think the GP is a bit... confused, and thinks that Comcast = "pretty much all residential connections". No, thank you!
... I almost respected you until this post, but now you sound like an idiot. The tradeoff of freedoms is safety, and to an extent, civilization. I do not have the freedom to manufacture sarin in my basement, to hire assassins (what, *I* am not killing anybody...), to procure and detonate nuclear explosives for fun, or to run red lights.
The correct balance is certainly up for debate, and In my opinion it involves vastly less government surveillance than we have today, indeed less than we've had at any point in the last twelve years. I wouldn't want to live in a world without *any* government surveillance, though; just limit it to people who are justifiable suspects (of crimes or foreign spy agencies), gain a warrant based on that suspicion, survey them only so long as is necessary to fulfill the warrant, have strict limits on how long the warrants can remain in effect, no secret courts, etc.
Hey now, don't forget Bitcoin and Linux!
T-Mobile has had WiFi calling since at least 2006, probably longer. Republic Wireless is nothing new or innovative.
Amusingly enough, the ATIV S was also the first WP8 device to have its security cracked open; an "interop-unlock" hack (not quite root, but much closer than before) is available for it, but not for any other non-Samsung WP8 handset at this time.
No, you fool, the group of 20 owns 5%. Those three? Small fish, even combined, next to Gates.
Um, no. You are wrong, the people who modded you Informative are wrong, and you are part of the problem here. The three investors are part of a group of 20 that collectively hold 5%. Unless those three are an incredibly disproportionately large portion of the group of 20, their combined percentage will be tiny relative to what Gates holds.