I've just installed Wordpress on my own server to replace the blogspot.com thing I had before. I'm not sure I'll keep this any more up to date than I did the last time round, but I was curious to see what the software is like and I like having control over these things myself.
When it comes to computing, I try to be quite platform-agnostic - I used Windows, then switched to Linux, then had a short-lived Mac and now I'm back to Linux but dual-booting XP every now and again. My XP install has the stuff that comes with a Thinkpad by default, and then everything else is open source. It means I have exactly the same applications no matter what operating system I happen to be using. IMAP email, Subversion and Bloglines preserve state from one system to another which is a neat trick. I think the ideal of computers becoming terminals that connect to the Internet where everything you use is hosted is going to appear sooner rather than later. Google are definitely moving in this direction, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with. However, I'm a bit of a control freak, and I like running my own services myself - I run my own mail server, my own webmail, and now my own weblog on my own Web server. Unless Google or whoever can guarantee that they're not going to give my data away, lose it irrecoverably, or keep it locked up behind their own proprietary APIs and databases, I'm not going to be that keen on using their tools for anything serious. It's a bit of a problem.
I've been amused by the admission by a Microsoft spokesman that the only way to recover from a lot of viruses and other malware is to blank the machine and start from scratch. I've been doing this for a while. It's just not worth the time and effort in a lot of cases to try and recover a machine that is full of viruses and assorted adware. It can bring a brand new machine with a ridiculously fast processor and masses of RAM down to a crawl, at which point some inexperienced users will assume the machine is at fault, and throw it out and get a new one. This is even easier in the days of ã300 Dell machines. If things carry on the way they are, more and more people are going to get annoyed with Windows in general and jump to one of the other operating systems - perhaps Apple, maybe Linux, or even one of the BSDs. It will end up destroying the Windows platform unless something major is done to stop it. Ideally, adware suppliers would keep using intrusive methods of installing their unwanted software on people's machines, and people will stop using the OS that lets them do these things and they won't be able to any more. I doubt this will happen. In any case, the other operating systems available today are not going to be invulnerable. People just haven't spent time trying to attack Linux or MacOS in this way. I do believe though that they are generally more secure out of the box than a Windows machine is.
Microsoft appear to be showing they're more committed to security than before. Hopefully Vista will be better. I don't say this as a user - at my job, I spend a lot of time running systems to protect Windows machines. We have email servers with virus scanning, and virus scanners on the Windows machines themselves, and even then machines will end up with some random bit of spyware or a trojan that we then need to spend ages removing. I have far better things to do with my time than fix these problems. Another problem is that a lot of the time people will dislike the protections we put in place. Too many people just cancel the virus scan as soon as it starts running and making the computer a bit noisier and perhaps slower. Users need to be educated that security cannot be completely transparent, and there are going to be some restrictions on what they can do so that in the long run we don't have to waste more time fixing machines.
That'll do for now. I have more stuff to spout nonsense about but it can wait.
Here is an overview of the "content protection" features that Windows Vista is going to incorporate. The phrase "Defective By Design" has never been so apt.
Some of it is ridiculous:
For example communications between user-mode and kernel-mode components are authenticated with OMAC message authentication-code tags, at considerable cost to both ends of the connection.
So data going between the software playing the video and the video card's driver has to be cryptographically signed - that's going to be great for performance. On a related note:
In order to prevent active attacks, device drivers are required to poll the underlying hardware ever 30ms to ensure that everything appears kosher. This means that even with nothing else happening in the system, a mass of assorted
drivers has to wake up thirty times a second just to ensure that... nothing continues to happen. In addition to this polling, further device-specific polling is also done, for example Vista polls video devices on each video frame displayed in order to check that all of the grenade pins (tilt bits) are still as they should be.
This waking up will prevent the CPU from being able to enter a sleep state properly (the HLT instruction in modern CPUs is used for this) so battery life on the laptops will take a hit. The CPU is quite likely not to be idle too often though, with all this encryption going on. In fact, later in the document it describes how video cards will more than likely have to have dedicated hardware video codecs for MPEG and Windows Media formats in order to compensate.
On-board graphics create an additional problem in that blocks of precious content will end up stored in system memory, from where they could be paged to disk. In order to avoid this, Vista tags such pages with a special protection bit indicating that they need to be encrypted before being paged out and decrypted again after being paged in.
Swap space on disk is slow enough as it is. There is really no need to make it even worse. Oh wait, it gets better:
Vista doesn't provide any other pagefile encryption, and will quite happily page banking PINs, credit card details, private, personal data, and other sensitive information, in plaintext. The content-protection requirements make it fairly clear that in Microsoft's eyes a frame of premium content is worth more than (say) a user's medical records or their banking PIN.
Nice.
Tha mi ag ionnsachaidh Gà idhlig còmhla ri Sabhal Mòr Ostaig - tha mi a deanamh an Cùrsa Inntrigidh.
For those who haven't a clue what I said I am currently learning (Scottish) Gaelic through the Cùrsa Inntrigidh distance-learning course run by Sabhal Mòr Ostaig in Skye. I will probably start posting in Gaelic as I start to get more confident - we'll see.
While browsing around Sabhal Mòr Ostaig's site, I came across a link to a company called IleTec who, amongst other things sell a word processor called Sgrìobh. I had a quick look at the site, and thought it looked familar - I recognised the GTK-type theme and what I think is the Tango icon set. It turns out that it's based on Abiword. This is quite cool - an entirely Gaelic desktop application. However, it appears that you can't get hold of it without paying £40 for the privilege, and it comes with a Gaelic keyboard (I wonder how this works) and a screensaver. Legally this is fine, there is nothing to stop anyone charging money for distributing GPL software to cover media costs etc. but if you then look at the price list the screensaver itself costs £5 and the keyboard £20. Basically the money seems to be to cover the cost of the dictionary and the localization work. It seems to me that this isn't quite in line with the spirit of the GPL - though that might just be me. Still, it looks well done.
I'd quite like a Gaelic translation for my desktop, preferably GNOME though KDE would be fine, as it would probably help me learn more faster. I suspect that asking for a Gaelic translation for Windows is a bit less likely. I've already taken to using Google in Gaelic, though it's more or less a matter of typing something in a box and hitting Enter, and there's not really much of an interface there to translate. Canonical's Rosetta system looks pretty good for doing translations of software, however I'm not yet in a position where I'd be able to contribute much. Looking at the Dapper Drake entry for Gaelic in Rosetta indicates that 3 out of a possible 326711 items have been translated. I'd love to kick off a project to get this started, either by the community or by professionals - or perhaps some combination of the two?
On a related note, I have bodged the OpenOffice.org Gaelic spellchecking dictionary to install into Firefox 2 and Thunderbird > 1.5, once I have cleaned it up and made it a bit more robust I'll release it.
Edit: I've updated it with some more information from Graham from Iletec, who commented below. Thanks!