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Do you really think the average user is going to notice a lack of green bar? Internet Explorer is going to accept this certificate as valid for https://www.paypal.com/ and there will be no hints to the user that it's actually illegitimate.

There are some things that should be taught in every school in America. Just as there are mandatory classes in sex education and home economics, there ought to be a mandatory class (at least a short one) about basic computer safety. This isn't a complete list, but it's a start:

• Never type a password into a site unless you see a lock icon in your browser.
• If you're used to seeing a green bar, and it disappears*, something is wrong.
• Don't click "ignore" when your computer gives you some gibberish about a certificate. That means something is wrong.
• Never open emailed attachments.
• Never click "yes" to dialogs you weren't expecting.
• Really, there is no prince wanting to give you millions of dollars for nothing.
• ...No, this particular prince isn't different.
• The dancing bunny isn't worth seeing.
• If a site asks you for personal information, ask yourself, "is this the kind of site that would legitimately ask for this kind of information?"

* browsers should warn about this case.

It could be that online game that was featured on Coding Horror a few weeks ago:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001286.html

It's a pain in the ass since it gets classed as a game but shows women in bras on the ads.

But who would maintain the whitelists? Either end users maintain it and they whitelist a trojan just to see the dancing bunnies, or a big company maintains it and all free software is banned like on the game consoles.

Well, they can still make fun of Joel, the software was written and implemented by Jeff Atwood (who is also dead wrong on his blog, but usually has the grace to accept when his readers put him right).

Jeff Atwood's blog is http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/

I believe Joel was involved more in the marketing and design stages, but its interesting how everyone has assumed stackoverflow is all down to him. Like how lots of people think Bill Gates wrote all that Microsoft software.

I've tried explaining computer technology to my retired relatives..

Me: "Ok, here's your power cable - that plugs into the back of the base unit just like your DVD player. The cable here goes to the screen just like the SCART connctor to the TV. Now this is the keyboard which is just like a typewriter keyboard, and this is the mouse...."

Relative: "What? Where's the mouse? That plastic thing there? It doesn't look much like a mouse to me. Where are it's whiskers, feet and tail?"

Me: "OK, let's call it an input device. You hold it in your hand and move it around like this. When you want to select something, you press or click the button here..."

And you don't even want to try to explain to them why they can't just use the TV remote to type in the letters of the channel they want to watch (e. C..N...N ) rather than having to type in and remember the desired channel number.

Who remembers Operating System lectures where the professor talked about semaphore signals, monitors and deadlock, or scanners

Sounds like the ebay customer service rep has met the requirements of the prestigious Works on my machine certification program.

Granted, the first one isn't a true open source project in that they don't accept patches from the community

There's nothing about open source that says that the original maintainers have to accept patches from outside the initial group.

True. Although I prefer Jeff Atwood's definition of open source:

• The project must use an OSI approved license
• The project must use a commonly available method of public source control
• The project must provide public evidence that it accepts and encourages code contributions from the outside world.

"As to the OP's question... whatever happened to using a KVM?"

Still requires a video card.

My question is has he tested the motherboard to see if it'll boot without a video card? I've seen many a board that would error if a card wasn't found. If a card is required then just deal with the $6 a month, or if you really wanna do something get a 9 watt Geforce 7300 for under $20 on ebay which would use $8 in electricity a year at 10 cents/kw-hr.

But according to this chart even the greatest 3D video cards of 2006 only used 30 watts at idle, which is $26 a year, and if this is a old P4 then it's probably not even using a 3D card as modern as that. I'd say just leave the card in there and not worry about it, it's probably costing a dollar or two a month at most.

"As to the OP's question... whatever happened to using a KVM?"

Still requires a video card.

My question is has he tested the motherboard to see if it'll boot without a video card? I've seen many a board that would error if a card wasn't found. If a card is required then just deal with the $6 a month, or if you really wanna do something get a 9 watt Geforce 7300 for under $20 on ebay which would use $8 in electricity a year at 10 cents/kw-hr.

But according to this chart even the greatest 3D video cards of 2006 only used 30 watts at idle, which is $26 a year, and if this is a old P4 then it's probably not even using a 3D card as modern as that. I'd say just leave the card in there and not worry about it, it's probably costing a dollar or two a month at most.

Actually a quick google (I had to shove on the year to get relevant content..) I found this: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000692.html which seems to backup the claim a little bit.

This post was generally full of speculation, but made me aware that there's a lot more I could be doing to add on protections to my general surfing.

There's really only one thing you need to do to "add protections". Ready? Don't click the dancing bunnies. Only download software from trusted locations, when it's something you're specifically seeking out. In my last 25 years of computing, I've managed to not get any viruses or trojans I did not actively want to install for research purposes. Malware scanning disabled,"safe surfing" and its annoying ilk disabled, and no antivirus except manual clamav scans once a month to make sure I didn't do something stupid.

All of the protections you can install, all of the blacklists you can use -- they're all a case of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.

so in all 3 cases we spent so much trouble getting the libraries to do the task the exact way we needed it, that it would have been just as easy to create the whole thing from scratch ourselves.

Beware the eternal optimism of the developer ;) http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001284.html

On the upside, if you're fixing bugs or adding features to open projects, you at least have some chance of making progress as a community, vs. inevitably introducing new and interesting bugs in hope of avoiding old and frustrating ones. (unless all of the current choices were really *that* bad...)

Hey, if I had my way it would just be VLC and done. Sadly there are many customers that insist on using WMP no matter what. So by using Kilte Mega ( which I eat my own dogfood and test it on my own machines and it does allow WMP to play just about anything a user is liable to run into) I am able to tell them "if something says you need a codec it is a lie and is spyware. Do NOT install!" and am able to cut down on virus infections.

Of course if it was a perfect world I'd be able to give them Noscript and they would actually learn to use it, thus wiping out JavaScript related malware, but until NoScript makes an "easy" mode where there is just a "play the video" button I have to stick with what works for my customers. You know the customer is always right, even when they are wrong. if they insist on using WMP for everything then the least i can do is make sure WMP works out of the box.

What would you suggest I do, give them nothing and let them install every fucked up untested codec in WMP themselves? Would probably get me more repeat business but I take pride in my work. When I set up a PC it is done, and short of them ignoring every warning just to see the bunnies a machine built/fixed by me will "just work" out of the box and keep right on working, no thinking required.

Bullshit. If you are the sole copyright holder, you can relicense your code any way you want. What you can't do is relicense someone else's code either that you used in addition to your code, or that somebody contributed to your project.

This is Bullshit! This is what got Tivo in trouble. They took GPL code, Linux, and tried to close source their modifications. You are not allowed to change the license of code you contribute to GPL code. But you are allowed to close your source when you modify BSD code.

Falcon

The recent Coding Horror post demonstrates that games are still a laughing matter.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001286.html

I was hoping that your "Jesus, I could probably code their whole damned site in a day" was sarcasm, but you are getting modded as insightful so I am thinking that perhaps you were being serious. I have met a depressingly low number of developers who don't think that they can do something "in a day" without thinking about how large the actual problem is. You could write an application that is a) highly accessible, b) useable, c) clean (talking about the data here ... lots of numbers and whatnot that are coming from various sources), d) secure, e) stable, with the ability to handle a high number of simultaneous connections (including folks who will likely be using automation to mine the datasets) and an uptime in the upper 99th percentile while dealing with the requirements shifting in a largely bureaucratic environment? In one day?

Atwood wrote a blog about this same thing the other day ... you should check it out. I could be wrong, and you could be a total ninja programmer, but I have a strange feeling that the hyperbole is strong in this one. Everything is trivial to those who don't have to do the work.

All that being said, $9.5 million in six months does seem to be a lot of cash. I am curious how much of it will be spent on hardware / connectivity / data-cleansing, etc, and how much of it is going to programmers and dba folks, and how much is going to project managers (is everyone in their company's management stack getting billed out as a "consultant" or PM?) ...

That article you linked to is one of the craziest things I've ever read. RDBMSs are powerful enough to do anything -- but so many engineers are too lazy to learn proper SQL.

Actually there are plenty of engineers who know not only SQL but other query languages too! Proper SQL doesn't help you get extra parallelism in a write-intensive environment.

If you need to handle more transactions or queries, buy a bigger box. You can have hundreds of TB in a nice enterprise-grade server. If you HAVE to run your data across multiple machines, just spend some time and actually *think* about what data you want where, and then write a little code to send it to the right database.

And all that disk does you how much good when you need to read ALL the data into RAM to run a query? Oh, right.

Even Google used a ton of MySQL boxes for a long time to deliver their searches. Scale-out architecture is a lot more of a lie than its proponents make it out to be, check out this post on CodingHorror.

Emphases on "used" rather than "currently uses." If you've got more than a few TB worth of data scaling out is really the only good way to go. And Jeff Atwood takes a simplistic look at licensing fees (and assumes that you're not using FOSS).

Eventually, all these new "databases" will need to actually be used in a *real* environment, and they'll have transactions, SQL support, indexing, a good UI, and everything else. All MS or Oracle need to do is a little tweaking to make their multi-box configurations more robust, and they'll crush everything else.

You know what? You're right. In fact, Google and Yahoo are currently in the process of converting BACK to SQL right now. They did the whole scale-out thing and it totally sucked. While it was good enough to run the company and ensure that everything worked reliably and whatnot, it wasn't good enough to appease the automatic report generator machine. That and pretty GUIs are what really matter in life. Not simplicity, robustness, and CERTAINLY not scalability.

That article you linked to is one of the craziest things I've ever read. RDBMSs are powerful enough to do anything -- but so many engineers are too lazy to learn proper SQL.

If you need to handle more transactions or queries, buy a bigger box. You can have hundreds of TB in a nice enterprise-grade server. If you HAVE to run your data across multiple machines, just spend some time and actually *think* about what data you want where, and then write a little code to send it to the right database.

Even Google used a ton of MySQL boxes for a long time to deliver their searches. Scale-out architecture is a lot more of a lie than its proponents make it out to be, check out this post on CodingHorror.

Eventually, all these new "databases" will need to actually be used in a *real* environment, and they'll have transactions, SQL support, indexing, a good UI, and everything else. All MS or Oracle need to do is a little tweaking to make their multi-box configurations more robust, and they'll crush everything else.

Saying RDMS's map object data well is a bit of a stretch, they map relational data well and that's it.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000621.html for some good background on the problems.

For me using an RDMS as the persistence layer for an object-oriented application has ALWAYS felt like a bit of a kludge. Like we're using it just because it's what we have, rather than the best tool for the job.

That's works fine in some giant corp, but what about an smb? What if Velma is the boss?

True story, my buddy Glenn nearly got fired out of a cushy admin job because he went over his PHB manager's head. Here is what the PHB told him-"You have NO RIGHT to tell me who I can speak to! I am YOUR BOSS and I ORDER you to let all my emails from Melissa through right this minute or YOU ARE FIRED!"

If the PHB had been the head, or if the guy above him wouldn't have had a brain? Glenn would have been out on his ass. The simple fact is you can't protect the stupid and the greedy from themselves, no matter how good your security is. That is why social engineering works. As long as the user wants to see the bunny unless you have given them a thin client with no rights at all they WILL see the bunny. They just don't care about security as much as they do the bunny. Again, that is human nature.

But if you think having all the Velma's of this world on Linux won't turn it into a malware invested swamp, sorry but your friends at the RBN and their friends in Nigeria and China simply haven't bothered writing for you yet. Windows has all the Velmas and they are easier to trick than a Linux admin. But if you bring them, they will come. Oh yes, they will come.

Ahhh.....You are making a classic mistake, did you catch it? Here it is if you didn't-you see Velma is your BOSS when you are working for her, and if you tried that kind of shit you would be fired! Let me tell you another true story. Yes I like stories, because I'm southern and that is how we do things dang it!

This is another true story illustrating your catch-22 told to me by my friend Glenn the server admin. He actually had to go over his bosses head(risking losing a seriously good paying job) to the regional director, which was a serious no-no in that company, after having this conversation with his PHB- "You have NO RIGHT to tell me who I can and can't correspond to, do you hear me? I AM YOUR BOSS and you will let through my emails from Melissa right this minute or I WILL fire you!"

Now lucky for Glenn the regional director turned out to know a thing or two about computers and had more importantly seen the papers on the spread of the Melissa worm. If he hadn't, then Glenn would have been out of a good paying job. You see the catch with dancing bunnies is the user WANTS the bunnies. Not only will they NOT thank you for blocking the bunnies, they will actually fire your ass if they can. This is why security doesn't work. It doesn't work because your friends at the RBN and their friends in China and Nigeria have long since figured out how to make the bunnies attractive. And for the Windows home user THEY are the boss and they WILL fire your ass if they can't see the bunnies.

So in the end all you can do is make this face and clean up the mess, along with cashing the check, of course. It is a capitalist country, after all ;-)

You are talking about servers which have these things called Linux administrators, or Guru if you will, that actually read security bulletins, patch on time, have IT experience, etc. This makes them a lot harder target than Velma.

Everybody, meet Velma. Say hi Velma-(Hi Y'all!)

Working in PC repair and sales since the days of Win3.xx, when dinosaurs roamed the earth as my oldest puts it, I have found Velma to be a VERY typical Windows user. She rarely if ever patches because it scares her that it might "break" something, if it wasn't for me should would be running the Norton that expired in 2004 for an AV, and worst of all, like WAY too many of my customers, she has a serious weakness. In Velma's case it is her BFF Kim. You see, her BFF Kim is what some of us in the biz call a "click whore", in that she will click on ANYTHING. Spam attachments, chain letters, you name it. And Velma will ALWAYS trust her BFF Kim no matter what to tell her. Now please enjoy an ACTUAL account of my working with Velma-

/Me/Velma, that is a password protected zip file. It is even telling you to turn off the AV before opening! It is a Virus, do NOT open that!
(Velma) Ohh...You worry too much. It is from my BFF Kim! She wouldn't send me anything bad! See, it says "happy puppy pics!" Isn't that nice?

/Me/ Velma, it isn't pics. Pics end with .jpg. That is Happ_Pup.exe! That is a virus! Do NOT run that! (Velma) Oohhh...drink decaf, it'll be fine! See it has Kim's name on it and everything! /Velma turns off and ignores AV warnings, runs .exe, popups start sprouting everywhere and the network crashes from all the activity/

(Velma) Whoops. But it MUST be a trick, because my BFF Kim wouldn't do that! /Me/.....

NOW do you see why Linux "security" wouldn't be worth a bucket of warm spit if Linux got all the Velmas of this world? If you ever do manage to get Velma and Kim and all their little buddies onto Linux your good friends at the Russian Business Network and their friends in China and Nigeria would be sending "Happ_Pup.sh" along with easy to follow instructions on how to run it. And Velma and Kim WOULD run it, no matter how many times you told them not to. It is simply the dancing bunnies problem and short of forcing Velma and all her kind to run locked down thin clients with no rights at all to their own machines Linux will NEVER fix it. Sorry.

I know you are probably just trying to troll, but there isn't anything wrong with Windows if you have even a tiny bit of common sense. Making my living building, selling, and repairing Windows PCs and networks I can show you plenty of customers who have been running for years without a single bug.

The reason you get so damned many bugs on Windows is because you have so many dingbats like my customer Velma. Say hi Velma(Hi y'all!). You see Velma has a BFF Kim. And anything her BFF Kim sends her HAS to be good, as her BFF Kim is her friend and they go to Branson together once a year and anything bad must be a trick because her BFF Kim just wouldn't do that. let us watch as I interact with little Velma-

/Me/ I don't care if that is from your BFF Kim Velma, if it is a password protected zip file it is a virus! Do NOT open that!(Velma)Oh...You worry too much! My BFF Kim wouldn't do anything like that! And see? It says happy puppy pictures! Ain't that nice? /Me/Velma as you can see that is a "happ_puppy.jpg.exe" that is a virus! Do NOT RUN THAT! (Velma) Would you calm down, drink decaf or something,it will be fine! It is from my BFF Kim! /Velma opens and runs the .exe, porn popups start flooding the screen while the network crashes from all the activity/ (Velma)Whoops. But .....It must be a trick! My BFF Kim wouldn't do something bad! /Me/.....

So you see Zerth THIS is why Windows has so damned many bugs. It is because your friends at the Russian Business Network and their friends in Nigeria and China have figured out that it is real easy to get the Velmas to run just about anything as long as you use the right carrot. But in this case we are talking about servers, which tend to be run by somebody with a little more common sense than dear old Velma. but blaming MSFT for Velma is like blaming Winnebago for you having a wreck because you put on the cruise at 70 and went back to make a sandwich. And I'm sure if you get all the Velmas switched over to Linux your friends at the RBN will be more than capable of cooking up a "Happ_Puppy.SH" along with easy to follow instructions that Velma will happily follow if she thinks it is from her BFF Kim. It is just the dancing bunnies problem and NO OS short of a BOFH locked down thin client will help with the bunnies.

It isn't just the training. If it were with the constant news of the latest nasty even hitting the MSM they would be at least a little cautious. The problem is you have WAY too many like Velma. You see, for Velma life outside the PC is all flowers and candy. Everybody thinks she is cute, and always have a smile for her and a "great to see you" and life is just happy puppies and sunshine.

You will just never convince a trusting sort like Velma that life inside the PC is full of nasties who would want to hurt her or give her a bad day. Especially if something is from her BFF Kim, who is one of the "click on anything you send her, has more viruses than a Bangkok whore scratching her crotch" types, because she KNOWS Kim. Kim is her friend. Kim wouldn't do anything bad to her, and if something bad comes from Kim it MUST be a trick, because "Kim just wouldn't do that!".

It is a classic case of the Dancing Bunnies, which is a disease very common in Windows and sadly there is NO known cure. You can put up 400 UAC dialog boxes, you can make them run as restricted users, and jump through a dozen hoops. If it is Velma and she thinks it is from Kim, or if it is the "hot pron" guy and he thinks it is a new sex vid, or the teen is convinced that it is the new Britney Spears song they WILL bypass all your security barricades and bone the machine. There is nothing you can do but clean up the mess.

Linux will NOT solve the dancing bunnies problem because the users WANT the bunnies. The RBN and the scammers in China and Nigeria simply haven't targeted Linux because they know the Velmas are running Windows. Put the Velmas on Linux and their "BFF Kim" would be sending them "happy puppies.sh" with step by step instructions on how to run it that they WILL follow. So Linux users, be glad that you don't have the Velmas of this world. Drop down on your knees and thank Linus and RMS that the Velmas think your OS is "weird" and won't use it. Because I don't care how good your security is, let Velma and all her little trusting friends on it, let the RBN and their friends in China and Nigeria figure out that Velma is now on Linux, and your days of being malware free will officially be history. Because you will never teach Velma and her friends not to click on that. All you can do is giver her the face and break out your repair tools.

Don't you worry, Linux user! I'm sure if the day comes that you manage to get Velma(I needed to move the machine, so I just yanked and now there are wires hanging out. Is that bad?) and all her little friends moved over from Windows I'm sure your friends at the Russian Business network will be able to design new and easy to use Linux viruses that Velma and all her friends can use to turn Linux into a virus laden hunk of malware.

It is inevitable due to the fact of a strange phenomena that goes by the weird name of PEBKAC, or the alternate name of ID10T error. this is why putting an occasional Velma(God I hope she ain't as bad as the real Velma) like your wife on Linux is safe. She is safe because she not only has you there as tech support to do all the nasty CLI stuff that may come up, but also because your friends at the Russian Business Network and their associates in Nigeria and China know that there are about 100,000 Velmas on Windows out there for every possible tuxVelma. After all as of 2006 Windows XP had over 400 million users and guys like me releasing even more on new machines being built every day.

So be glad you have your wife on Linux. I bet that means you have very few occasions to use this face which guys like me pretty much have permanently attached. BTW the Velma story was completely true. That is why Linux won't be safe from the Velmas of the world. Because it doesn't matter how many times you warn her, if Velma thinks something is from her bff Kim(who is one of those chain letter sending, click on anything you email her types) then she will ignore you and keep right on going. A classic case of The Dancing Bunnies problem, which you see way too often in the Windows world.

This site suggests a couple possibilities.

A: A GPU had, until fairly recently, only a 1 high slot. Even with 2 slots, it has less room for cooling than the CPU, where weight actually matters more than size.
B: Transistors. The site dates from 2006, but mentions that my core 2 duo has ~291 million transistors. A G800GTX has 680M, and my research shows that the 4890 this review is about has 959 Million. Even a Core 2 Quad is 582M, and we know they cost a bit more for a given speed rating. A GT200 is listed as 1.4 Million.

That's quite a difference.

I'm surprised after reading the spec and blog that a bunch of this seems to be re-inventing Objective-C and bits of concurrent object oriented C. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=157352.157356

Not only that, but extensions to a language don't really foster supporting a new paradigm. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000169.html

Users do not install viruses. Viruses install themselves trough gaping security holes / backdoors.

During the Trojan War, the people of Troy were said to have installed dancing horses, which came pre-infected with the special forces of Greece. Nowadays, users install dancing bunnies, which come pre-infected with viruses and worms and other sorts of malware.

The lesson? Old tricks work because people don't learn.

During the Trojan War, the people of Troy were said to have installed dancing horses, which came pre-infected with the special forces of Greece.

Damn autorun feature. Allows an Trojan horse to automatically install special forces.

Nowadays, users install dancing bunnies, which come pre-infected with viruses and worms and other sorts of malware.

Smileys used to be big hit. I guess that bunnies are more infectious now. TweakUI seems to be able to prevent user form installing unwanted software ( any software ), however it can't prevent form unintentional infection while surfing script loaded web pages.

Users do not install viruses. Viruses install themselves trough gaping security holes / backdoors.

During the Trojan War, the people of Troy were said to have installed dancing horses, which came pre-infected with the special forces of Greece. Nowadays, users install dancing bunnies, which come pre-infected with viruses and worms and other sorts of malware.

Swoopo analysis by Jeff Atwood

The pirates give us our content and the gamblers give us our bucks!!

Rather than have the internet sink deep into troubles, and open source back into poverty, the guys who have the money to throw around, can actually do something truly helpful.

I should be surprised this got modded up, but it *is* on /.

Linux, as a kernel, does not AFAIK run significantly faster on equivalent hardware vs. NT. Some of the userspace certainly does, but some is also a lot slower - searches always take longer even though there's a lot less installed on my Linux partition (I keep it pretty clean), and without superfetch it feels that applications like WarCraft 3 (in Wine) or even Firefox take ages to start.

Viruses are a wild goose chase - they have existed since before Windows, and they will probably exist long after unless there's a drastic change in the fundamental capabilities of computers (i.e. mor ethan just an apprximate Turing machine). Security holes do still exist for *nix applicaitons and even kernels - for better or worse, I get more security patches per month on Linux than I ever do on Windows, although only occasionally are they at kernel or base library level - but even if malware authors can't xploit those, they'll fall back to the standard approach that has worked so well against Windows (itself a rather hard target these days) for the past few years: the user. There is absolutely nothing in *nix security that can protect against the dancing bunnies problem, especially if that user can get root access (although lots of damage can be done even without).

As for things you can do on Windows that you can't on Wine: well, try Exchange for starters. No other groupware solution has yet come close to the integration, feature set, and market deployment levels. Office 2007 is another; OO.o is an impressive project but they're still far behind in a number of areas (although Office 2008 does run on Mac, so that might not count). Then there are the games (wine is doing wonders here, but new stuff that doesn't work right is coming out all the time too), the Windows-only drivers (my modem *still* doesn't work in Linux, nor does the WiFi on one of my older laptops), and all the thousands of custom-written programs, only ever tested on their target machines, that businesses and other organizations have been creating for the last decade or so to run on Windows. Oh, you might also want to look at power management; with the proprietary nVidia driver (since the FOSS one is nowhere near ready yet), suspend-to-RAM in Linux quite simply does not work (on my current system, or the last two before it). This is, to put it mildly, a problem on a laptop.

Forgot to mention Hotdog Stand.

Even better: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/images/middle-mouse-button-press.png

3) They have a hiring problem. If a company is forcing their employees to do 16 hour days they really are trying to do all the work with half the people they need.

It doesn't work that way. I suggest you read the Mythical Man Month.

That being said, I think they most likely do have a hiring problem. How the hell are you supposed to sharpen your saw when you work 80 hour weeks?

Is the quality of a game and the morale of the team worth sacrificing to deliver the product on its arbitrarily chosen completion date?

there will be viruses because people, dammit, want to see the dancing bunnies.

That's what virtual machines are for. Run your personal entertainment in a separate folder from your business, and viruses that land in your entertainment VM can't easily cross to the business VM. Jeff Atwood agrees with me.

This is what all OS makers bang into. The http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000347.html "dancing bunny" security hole. They can do their best, but if a user is determined to make a process run as root, they will, barring a "trusted" environment where even root/administrator doesn't completely control the system.

Or, since the barrier to entry is so low as far as blackhats are concerned, ALL systems end up being more insecure and virus-ridden and no one benefits.

Or virus-writers will pick, instead of the top 1, the top 5, or the top 50% of systems, and target those. Unless it were a truly heterogeneous network, with every single person having their own hand-crafted OS and application set, there will be viruses because people, dammit, want to see the dancing bunnies.

Reference: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000347.html

I don't think that's true at all, lots of important sites can be easily remembered, and that's a good thing. Otherwise, we place all of our information, some of it vital, into the hands of a few big companies, like Google, who would then hold the keys to the castle.

Except we do. And we already know what happens to websites not in googles indexes. Nothing.

And its whitehouse.gov

I don't think that's true at all, lots of important sites can be easily remembered, and that's a good thing. Otherwise, we place all of our information, some of it vital, into the hands of a few big companies, like Google, who would then hold the keys to the castle.

Except we do. And we already know what happens to websites not in googles indexes. Nothing.

And its whitehouse.gov

The problem with making the OS more secure is the dancing bunnies which is of course a PEBKAC problem. No matter how secure you make the OS ultimately it comes down to the user. If the user happily clicks through your warnings and does something stupid, well stupid is as stupid does. Unless you are ready to allow MSFT to hand out thin clients that THEY control and manage then extra security just won't work. I have many customers as well as this going on 9 years old Win2K box I'm typing on that has NEVER had a bug. Not one. Zilch nada squat. Why? Because I don't open email attachments, or go to warez or pron sites, or allow stupid folks on my machine, that's why.

And all the security in the world won't save MSFT from the seriously fucking dumb users you have out there. Believe me, as a Windows repair man, I know this. I have found this can be broke up into 3 main categories. 1-The "my BFF Jill sent me this so I know it is safe" 2- The "I'll click on anything that'll give me teh hot lesbos" guy, and 3- The "Kid running some P2P that will click on any .mp3.exe if it is labeled as whatever trashy pop hit of the day they want to hear".

Notice a pattern there? In all 3 of those major cases of Windows pwnage extra security would NOT help. They would bitch and moan and keep right on clicking through warnings until they got the dancing bunny and a nice infection to boot. But I do know the feeling, I too once believed that "if it was just made secure" but then I learned the hard way. I have a customer that is one of the "I'll click on anything for teh hot lesbos" types, so i talked him into trying Linux. I can't remember which distro off hand but I think it was either PCLOS or Mepis. Whichever one had released a new version later. Anyway, Linux is more secure, right? Surely that will fix the problem, right? WRONG. He STILL managed to completely bone the system to beyond bootability in less than a week. How? Because he didn't like getting software through the package manager so he typed in "Linux Software" into Google and downloaded a bunch of stuff off Freshmeat and ended up in dependency hell. So now I just keep him in a locked down XP account and clean it out a couple of times a year when he fills it with malware.

The point is you just can't build foolproof anything, much less a foolproof OS where the users have the right to install software, because the fool will out dumb you every single time. It doesn't matter about education level either, as I had a buddy that manages a fairly big company have to go to the regional head because his PHB was threatening to fire him because "You WILL stop blocking my emails from Melissa right this instant! I am your boss and you have NO RIGHT to tell me who I can talk to!". And the simple fact is more and more attacks on Windows is using the SOCIAL engineering tricks to get installed. because you will never write a virus that will be able to jump through as many hoops as a user trying to see the bunny. All you can do is try to clean up the mess. Just as I think JavaScript is a mistake of ActiveX proportions but I can holler that on the roof tops until hell freezes over but it ain't gonna keep places from using it. And if you look up "JavaScript infection" in Google the amount of hits you get is simply staggering. But as long as places like Youtube use it I can't block it on my customers because they want the bunny. All the security in the world ain't gonna help if the user happily turns it off.

amen.

I prefer quiet keyboards, but obviously not at the expense of key layout and feel...

I can appreciate the quality of the old keyboards, and the fact that they last for a long time, but the noise factor is fairly important for me too, I prefer the relative quiet of my MS Comfort Curve 2000...

The main thing with keyboards is just having a consistent layout, to this end I've purchased a Comfort Curve for work to match the one I have at home so I can be productive either end.

The main thing that irks me about keyboards in general is that the design remains relatively unchanged, for example the MS Ergo keyboard remains one of the few widely-available "Slightly" different designs... and the little feet are at the *back* of most keyboards... which seems counter-intuitive, as I would expect you want the keyboard sloped *downwards* instead of up...

I also agree with most of the points on this blog entry
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001221.html

The Amiga did this twenty years ago.
Yes, in real time.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001073.html

That's a good idea. Although this coding horror post is about a year old, it's a note on how much anti-virus software slows down your machine. Norton leads the pack with an amazing 46% slower boot, 20% slower CPU, and 2400% slower disk access time.

Coding Horror: Choosing Anti-Anti-Virus software

http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000872.html
http://gigaom.com/2007/05/27/desktop-tower-defense/

According to an interview, the Desktop Tower Defense guy is making $8000 a month from ads alone.

The real question is: can you make a game that is as good, as addictive and as simple as this?

If you ask me, I have no problem with monopolies by themselves.. They're the natural result of a capitalistic system.

The problem occurs when the company with the monopoly becomes abusive of its users or detrimental to the industry due to lack of competition.

For example, Microsoft has become detrimental. There are quirky, broken, useless things in Windows because they haven't had to compete on merit for years. They're still using a drive addressing system invented on the VAX. You can't even cd directly to a directory on another freaking drive. It's still a two step process. The font dialogs in Vista are the same ones from Windows 3.1! IE, the worst, most painful, browser on the market came to dominate via coupling with the monopolistic OS, not by merit. Windows Media Player became hugely popular despite being DRM friendly (user abusive) and a steaming bloated pile compared to winamp, once again by being bundled with the OS and harnessing the power of defaults. Vista includes DRM code in the kernel execution path that makes it slower than XP - and this wasn't done for the users of the OS, but for the interests of other big companies.

Adobe has become abusive with their Acrobat reader. Bundling so much crap with it that's is a steaming pile that takes 10s of seconds load, will no longer allow you to disable its automatic updates, etc.

Most Telecoms and ISPs are abusive. The cost of text messages goes up even though their costs didn't. Verizon is particularly bad, they'll deliberately cripple Bluetooth OBEX profiles on phones you get from them to try and force you to buy ringtones & crap at an estimated 20,000% markup, they brand their phones with hideous schemes that reduce usability, they've been guilty of padding HTTP headers with junk data to arbitrarily increase data usage. (I can understand the contract severance penalties since their subsidizing the phones - provided the fee diminishes to zero by the end of the contract).

Even apple has done this. Way back around iTunes 3, you could download songs from the ipod to iTunes. They subsequently removed this functionality that was useful to their users because of interests of third parties.

These are the companies that need investigation.

Google on the other hand seems to have gotten nothing but better as their power grows. Google searches are still fantastic, they've added tons of incredibly useful free services out of the blue. They keep giving more, awesome, free stuff. More importantly, their existing free stuff keeps getting better not abusive. Maybe I missed something awful they're doing, but so far even their use of my pseudo-private data seems more useful than harmful - I get non-abusive, non-intrusive text based ads for things that are actually relevant. This is the key to long term success. Give your customers what they want and they'll keep coming back and telling their friends. It leads to long term profits, not the short quarterly gains that MS, Adobe, Verizon, Sprint, Comcast, Cox, *IAA, etc seem to be more focused on.

1984 I wish...try 1968. When I was born Bobby Kennedy was still alive and LBJ was pres. My first interaction with a "computer" was an Altair 8800 my uncle picked up at a flea market in '79, and my first PC(which I still have) was a VIC 20.

And yes their first machine was a Win98 but no I don't make them run limited user in WinXP now. Why? Because I am teaching a very valuable life lesson called "Don't be the PEBKAC problem." I have showed them how malware works using a test box, I have explained about The dancing bunnies and how malware writers exploit human desires, etc. And if they have a problem I will sit behind them and guide them, but they have to fix it themselves. In all these years they have gotten themselves exactly ONE bug, and that was when the oldest tried IM and got an IM based bug.

After he had cleaned it up by doing a full format reinstall(I taught him that once a machine is compromised it is ALWAYS suspect) I told him "You did a very good job. Since it took so much time if you want to wait and install AV after you have had a chance to try out your new games it would probably be okay." He looked at me like I grew a second head and said " No thanks. I want to install Avast Home with the full shield including IM this time and then will you show me how to make a disc image so I'll have everything the way I like it if something goes wrong in the future?" needless to say I was SO proud of him! /sniff sniff...wipes away tears of geek pride/ But now I know that if he goes to college halfway across the country instead of down the street(he wants to go to the local and stay close to home) I know that he won't be a PEBKAC spreading malware across the Internet.

While trying to keep the worst of the PEBKAC problems away by placing folks in limited user accounts might work, I prefer to teach them to use their brains to think instead of click. So now the youngest runs FF with Adblock and Noscript and the oldest runs Opera with a HOSTS file that filters most of the malware and they both run Spybot's Tea Timer.They haven't had a problem since. And when something asks for permission to write to the registry or pops up a dialog box they actually read it and ask me questions or Google it if they are unclear as to its meaning. MUCH better IMHO than trying to make PCs "brains free" by using limited user accounts, well in Windows anyway.

I think that firstly, "the year of the linux desktop" will come so gradually that it won't make headlines.

Just like there's no "year of the internet" (discounting eternal September) or "year of the jet engine" etc.

Secondly, until 80% of users can make everything work without editing a text file or running terminal commands Linux isn't ready for the masses. And yes, it's Linux that has to change, the masses simply won't. There are new ones born every minute.

We've come a long way, with Ubuntu but I still find things in the forums where you have to edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf or whatever to fix things. Another example: I still can't use my Razer Diamond back in Linux without it being unusably sensitive. So far the only fix I've found for the garbage mouse pointer behavior requires that I recompile X with a patch file. And even I haven't attempted that yet. It's not that I couldn't figure it out eventually, it's that I'd rather spend the time playing computer games, watching youtube videos, spamming the stumbleupon button, or clicking pretty widgets to kill time.

In short:
Recompiling things = not ready for the masses.
Editing text files to make shit work = not ready for the masses.
Everything works out of the box = ready for the masses. (Defaults are that important)

The Dancing Bunny Problem. There's an aphorism we seem to have forgotten: "never solve a social problem with a technical solution". The answer is more education for users; I don't see how any technical solution* can solve the dancing bunny problem.

* Well, S60-style platform security would go a long way, but I'd rather claw my eyes out with rusty 14.4k ISA modems than live in a world with locked-down computers for everyone

Oh crap...here we go again with the Windows equals viruses BS. As someone who has been building and repairing and selling the things since the old days when folks had to install a third party Winsock just to get to Compuserve, please allow me to enlighten you. Are you ready?

The problem is NOT Windows,okay? It is NOT Windows fault at all. You know why it isn't Windows fault? It is because there are a lot of STUPID people on Windows and as much as you hate Bill Gates I'm afraid he didn't actually invent stupid people. Yes, Windows takes at least a bit of common sense to lock down. Yes, running as Admin is not the smartest of ideas but as my many customers and myself who have done so for years without a SINGLE bug can tell you that is not the problem. Let me explain what it is that causes Windows to be a haven for malware. I have watched a user, with both me AND the AV telling them not to, open a password locked zip file and run "happy screensaver.scr.exe" and infect their machine because "this was from (insert BFF) and she wouldn't send me something bad." I have laughed with my corporate admin buddy who actually had to have a meeting with the head office because the PHB in middle management was threatening to fire him "Because you won't let my emails from Melissa through and you have NO RIGHT to tell me who to talk to. I am your boss!"

So scream about the evil Windows ALL you want. Say that it sucks, avoid it like that clap, whatever makes you happy. But you better pray to whatever deities you believe or don't believe in that the Windows users don't come to Linux or Mac OSX in mass. Because if they do the malware writers will be cranking out "Happy screensaver.scr.sh" and malware like the OSX Codec Trojan at a rate that will make your head spin and then we will be talking about "what a cesspool" Linux and OSX are. Because the problem is NOT the OS, it is strictly a PEBKAC issue and all the security in the world short of making everyone give up their PC for a government controlled thin client will simply not work. They will happily elevate privileges, they will happily input passwords, they will even happily shut down their Av and copy/paste commands if it means they get the Dancing Bunnies. And sadly there is NOTHING that any OS can do if the user is willing to bypass the security to get to the bunny. Sorry, that's just the truth. That is why my business customers and I can run for nearly a decade as admins with no bugs. We keep the stupid people away from our computers. For those of you that can't, I'm sorry. Just take an aspirin and remember like Mr. Gump says "stupid is as stupid does."