Slashdot Mirror
An Interview with 180 Solutions
Paperghost writes "Here's a great interview between Jimmy Daniels and an anonymous ex-employee of 180 Solutions, who portrays the company as being somewhere between turmoil and meltdown. There's so many notable quotables it's scary, but here's one that really sets the tone:
'Shutting down these rogue distributors turned out to be a lot more difficult than they expected though. When you lose them, your daily installs go down drastically and the revenue goes to hell. The layoff in September could be laid directly at the feet of this effort.'"
How can they have so many "rouge distributors" and not notice? It seems like someone had to say "Oh, this doesn't look right". I guess it's hard when you're a spyware company.
echo YOUR_OPINION >
By far the worst thing about slashdot editors--worse than the dupes, the typos, the mischaracterizations--is their apparent inability to write headlines and summaries that mean a damn thing to readers who don't already know every bit of obscure trivia about what's being discussed. I'm longstanding geek, I read slashdot more or less daily; I'm smack in the middle of the target audience. And yet, at least once a week I see a "summary" that's completely incomprehensible gibberish to me.
One has to wonder why, if the editors submit writeups that are meaningless to anyone who doesn't already know exactly what's being said, they bother writing anything at all.
"Who sets up Vmware as a permanent use type of solution like this?"
I do. I run a few public access computer centres, and this is the only way to keep them intact. The computers run Ubuntu by default, but if someone absolutely positively needs Windows (e.g. Teaching a class about Word), they run XP in a VM, which reverts to its initial state the moment it's powered off. Thank heavens for snapshots!
In public access situations, I really do have an 'infinite number of monkeys' at the keyboards, and this is the best way I've found to guarantee that things never break.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Complaining about advertising and then he pastes advertising at the end of his post. Typical of 2006 astroturfers.
Setting up to run Vmware simply to surf because you're afraid of spyware is absolutely ridiculous.
You can make a very good case that the exact opposite is true, especially if you're dealing with someone who insists on using Internet Explorer. IE has had a large number of flaws that allow hostile remote websites to do silent installs of arbitrary software. It quite likely still has some. I'm also not prepared to say Firefox doesn't have any, even though I'd expect it to be somewhat better.
So what, you say? You only browse the safe websites? I respond, oh, you mean you absolutely, positively never make a typo in the location bar? The websites you browser are absolutely guaranteed to not be hacked?
Heck, I've accidentally clicked on links in my spam when my touchpad acts up. I use Linux so I'm not too worried, but in Windows, that could have been enough!
It certainly ought to be ridiculous, but if you really examine the facts of the case as they are rather than as they should be, setting up a VM for browsing makes quite a lot of sense in any situation where the user can't be trusted to re-install their OS if necessary. If that includes home use for some family where all the members have better things to do with their time than learn the arcana of Windows, so be it. The only downside is memory consumption and the fact that it makes downloading things for the host system that much harder... something in that scenario I'd be inclined to call a feature anyhow.
How can an interview with an ex-employee be regarded as "An Interview with 180 Solutions?"