Not sure why it was happening, either. It was on both XP and 7. Everything with MSE was the default settings. I've seen malware fiddle with hosts files before, but it seemed odd that it would assume that all modifications are malicious.
I was using hosts for web filtering for a small business client of mine. They wanted some computers to have limited access to the web, while allowing others full access. Hosts files were the easiest solution. But not long after I implemented it, MSE flagged them all as viruses and removed my modifications.
This was several months back, though. Maybe MSE has had an update that resolved the issue since then.
Another problem with the Windows hosts file: if you're running Microsoft Security Essentials, it will view modificaitons to the hosts file as a virus and remove them.
"You fail again in your understanding of the issue. The issue is that ISPs are hiring a company to do deep packet inspection to spy on a user's browsing habits. Adblock plus cannot help with this issue."
This is the part that scares the hell out of me. I use a number of addons to stop websites from tracking me (Ghostery, AdBock, NoScript, RequestPolicy, etc.). But DPI is horrfying, and I don't understand why it's legal. The postal service isn't allowed to open our mail and read our letters. It's a felony for anyone to tamper with your mail at all. So why should ISPs be allowed to inspect our packets? It's no different.
This is why you need to use non-logging VPNs and TOR. Don't giver your ISP an opportunity to inspect your packets. Plus, for the love of FSM, DO NOT use your ISPs DNS servers, or your ISPs email.
This is the bit I don't understand. What makes ARM so inherrently different that it must be locked down? Why is MSFT pushing lockdown on ARM, with both software installation and UEFI restrictions? Why is it any different than x86/64?
It's not, in any way at all. MSFT is creating a false dichotmy so consumers will continue to think of ARM and other mobile devices as appliances that you have no control over, instead of the general purpose computers that they actually are. The last thing Apple and MSFT want is consumers realizing that tablets and smartphones are just as much computers as your desktop and laptop. They want people to see mobile devices differently so they can control them.
I used to feel the same way. But no one makes netbooks anymore. I've seen Acer Aspire One's in stores, but that's it. Browsing on the web to find older ones gets you prices where you might as well buy a full sized laptop.
I agree with this completely. I've had absolutely no luck at all with Dell's offerings. HP's laptops have been total crap for ages. And everything else just feels like bottom-of-the-barrel consumer grade options. Lenovo's ThinkPads are one of the most consistently amazing machines out there.
When the hell did people stop creating art for the sake of creating art? That's what I want to know
Precisely. This is the problem. No one wants to do what they enjoy, just for the sake of it. Everyone is just chasing money. To so many people, music is just another get rich quick scheme. They think they can cut a few tracks, get discovered, get a record deal, and make millions.But it doesn't work that way.
The current state of pop music is a bunch of pretty faces who can look good on magazine covers and on the red carpet. It doesn't matter if they can sing or not. They don't write their music, they don't write their lyrics. They're given the lyrics, put in front of a mic and told to sing. They auto-tune them so they actually sound good and then the record labels cash in.
It's sad to see art become a money game. It destroys everything art is. If you're not doing what to do because you love it and because you feel a deep desire to create something amazing, then you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Art isn't a clock punching cash machine. If that's what someone wants, then, like you said, they should do something else.
The thing is, the old model is nearly dead. There are not going to be "rock stars" and big record company profits anymore. Those days are done. And it's a good thing. The record companies kept a strangle hold on the distribution of music for decades. They used that hold to make millions of dollars and made it look like they were a good thing for artists. But they aren't. And their hold is now broken. But instead of trying to adapt, the labels are taking more and more money from the artists.
Are we going to see millionaire musicians anymore? Absolutely not. Those days are done. But is music dead? Certainly not. But the record labels are no longer needed. An artists can make it on their own. Will they make the same money? No. But this is the point: yes it's less money than before, but it's either that or nothing. The old days are gone and people are going to have to accept it. But it's good because now the artists will own their own creations and can sell directly to the fans and keep all of the profits.
A large number of my clients are medical offices/facilities that I've been working with for years. Right now, the biggest push is electronic medical records. And let me tell you, it's a nightmare. All of the doctors that I work with are computer illiterate and have no desire to work with computers. But when you go with an EMR system, you're using computers front to back, for every single task. And they balk. It diminishes patient care because the doctors are more worried about making typos and clicking the right boxes, rather than paying attention to the patients. The EMR that the doctors wanted deployed at one particular office required a specific Toshiba tablet for the doctors to use. These things were $2,500 tablets,. And they stopped using them after a month. They hated them because, well firstly they're terrible tablets, and secondly the doctors have no idea how to use a computer. Computer illiteracy in the medical field is a very big problem. Medical workers especially are going to have to become more knowledgeable about computers. They're going to have to be more flexible, and they're going to have to be able to adapt. If you can send an email in Outlook, you can send an email in Thunderbird. Look for "Inbox" to see your messages, look for "Compose" or "Write" or something like that to write a message. It's not difficult. Same with word processors. If you know the basics of one, just look for those things in the other. They're there. With medical increasingly becoming an electronic only field, medical employees (including doctors) are going to have to learn how to adapt.
But not only is computer literacy a problem, but EMR companies are the epitome of vendor lock-in and control. They specialize in holding back features and charging you $10,000 for implementing something incredibly simple and common sense. Data portability is also nearly non-existent. Even with HL7, interacting with other EMRs (and Odin forbid you have to interact with another office or provider), it's still a mess.
The medical field is a mess. The promise of EMR is not being realized. Greed has already destroyed everything good that EMR was supposed usher in, and has instead made a complete and total disaster of the industry. There is no data portability. There is no go-to-one-doctor-and-have-records-easily-transferred-to-another. That's the last thing EMR developers want. Not to mention that everything is harder, slower, and prone to failure. If the power goes out, or the server is down, or if your internet connection is down (a problem with cloud-based EMRs) then you're nearly dead in the water. An office can't function anymore without these things.
Precisely. I recently built a network for a surgical center. The owners wanted to keep costs down as much as they could, so i setup LibreOffice and Thunderbird for the users. Every single person there went nuts, calling me, yelling at me, yelling at the owners, wanting "the regular email program", meaning Outlook. Even though Thunderbird is, IMO, far easier to use than outlook, they apparently had no idea whatsoever how to use Thunderbird, even after I tought everyone how to use it. So we had to spend hundreds more dollars to supply each user with a copy of MS Office.
User preference is a big deal. Of course, this office is the most computer illiterate bunch of people I have ever encountered in my entire life. So a different crowd might be more welcoming to applications that aren't from Microsoft.
Even if you were getting the speed they promise, you're not allowed to use it. For example, if you get 5 Mbps down and actually saturate that connnection, Comcast calls you a "heavy user" and will warn you about your usage and even throttle you. The problem is that they oversell their lines, like overbooking planes. Most of the time it's not a problem because most people don't even come close to saturating their connection (like there will almost always be cancellations and no shows on planes), but it is a problem when everyone booked on that flight shows up. Same for ISPs. They're promising you something they can't deliver and when you try to use what they promise, they punish you for it.
There need to be regulations in place to prevent this. Stop over selling the service. Give customers the speeds you advertise. And allow people to saturate the connection. If i have 5 Mpbs down, I should be able to download 5 Mb of data every second, all day, every day. That's what I'm paying for, and i should be able to use it.
It may not save energy, but dark backgrounds save my eyes. I always love when sites use darker themes. Bright white backgrounds on a 24 inch monitor are very very painful, no matter how far I turn down my backlight.
If they hadn't left XP and IE 6 out in the wild for 6 years before updating it, this would never have happened. Microsoft got complacent and users got complacent. And developers figured it was ok to require IE6 and ActiveX and all that other crap for their mission critical applications and now they're fucked.
This is why you should always develop applications with open standards. HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MYSQL, Python, Perl, CGI are so ubiquitous for a reason: they're awesome. And you can do everything you need to do with those instead of using Microsoft-only languages and protocols.
Though IIRC, I think Microsoft intended XP to be this sort of ongoing thing. They weren't going to have new operating systems after that, it was supposed to be an "experience" that you subcribed to for updates and whatnot. And while they took their sweet time figuring that out, people got complacent and decided they never wanted change.
My reasons for using OSS are mostly along these lines. It's great to be able to modify the software if I wanted to, but as only a mediocre coder, I rarely would, but it's nice to know that I can if I wanted. However, the lock-in and control factor is my main reason. I like to know that the software I use is mine and that I'm the one in control of my digital life. I can use whatever software I need and not worry about licensing issues, or being locked to a platform or piece of software. I can roll my own solutions for whatever problem I need to solve. And since the code and development cycle are open, there's no mystery as to what is going on with the software.
So I guess, in a way, my thoughts do sort of mirror the "value the things I create myself" theory of TFA.
Giving the benefit of doubt, I'm assuming that you mean that you have a purpose, but have spare processing power and would like to put it to use. In that case I would recommend maybe seeing if you could help out with Folding@home, SETI@home or CERN distributed computing.
I had the same problem with electronics sections of stores. CRT TVs and monitors were PAINFUL to be around. But it wasn't a matter of RF sensitivity, it is an auditory sensitivity. And it's not just electronics. I can hear incredibly high frequency sounds that nearly everyone I know cannot hear.
Except for when your graphics card is shot or you're using an older machine that doesn't have the right 3D compositing. Or when you need to get to it from a non-Mac OS and you can't because the backup is in a proprietary format. Or when you need to backup anything else but Mac OS-based files.
The thing with FLOSS is that you see the development process. You see the bastard kids. You see the failed ideas. You see the brainstorming-throw-shit-at-the-wall development until they reach a rev where everything works. You don't see that with closed development processes. You just see an end product and never see the "failed" bin.
The positive in that is that someone might like rev 3.2 that you threw out. And they can take that rev, fork it, and have a product that loads of other people love as well. It gives people freedom and choice that the closed systems deny you. People may hate Unity and GNOME 3.0. So someone comes along, forks GNOME 2, keeps it alive, and people are happy. And maybe by version 1.5 or 2.3, Unity gets really good. And maybe by 3.6 GNOME gets really good. KDE 4.0 was unusable. But the latest release is really great. The whole process lets people have the choice of using what they like instead of being told what to use and how to use it.
For example the NT architecture is way better than UNIX by realy fscking far
I'll grant that NT was better than the old Windows-as-a-GUI-for-DOS architecture, but not better than UNIX. NT shined when it came to networking. The DOS-based Windows systems simply couldn't handle themselves in a networked environment, because MS-DOS was never meant to network.
But UNIX at the time had been running on mainframes, minicomputers and desktops for nearly 30 years. It had maturity and stability behind it. Everything about UNIX was ahead of NT. UNIX had been a multi-user, multi-tasking, networked operating system years before NT was a glimmer in Gates' eye.
I'll give Microsoft a lot of credit for their contributions over the years, but this is whitewashing.
The problem is that there are entire segments of goods that are not manufactured in the US at all. There are no electronics manufacturers here. So if you want a computer, phone, tablet, television, dvd player, etc., you have zero choice but to buy foreign. You can't just say "buy american" and it solves all our problems. Most of the things we consume simply aren't made here.
So if one's motherboard cannot handle more RAM, are they supposed to just buy a new one? Is the fact that you have 16 GB RAM an excuse for shotty app development? "Oh, we have plenty of RAM, who cares about system resources?" I have 8 GB of RAM on my rig, but I don't want Firefox taking up 2-3 GB of it just because it can. And there's no reason it should, except for lazy developers.
Your "buy more RAM" attitude is snobbish at best, and justifies lazy developers at worst.
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Not sure why it was happening, either. It was on both XP and 7. Everything with MSE was the default settings. I've seen malware fiddle with hosts files before, but it seemed odd that it would assume that all modifications are malicious.
I was using hosts for web filtering for a small business client of mine. They wanted some computers to have limited access to the web, while allowing others full access. Hosts files were the easiest solution. But not long after I implemented it, MSE flagged them all as viruses and removed my modifications.
This was several months back, though. Maybe MSE has had an update that resolved the issue since then.
Another problem with the Windows hosts file: if you're running Microsoft Security Essentials, it will view modificaitons to the hosts file as a virus and remove them.
"You fail again in your understanding of the issue. The issue is that ISPs are hiring a company to do deep packet inspection to spy on a user's browsing habits. Adblock plus cannot help with this issue."
This is the part that scares the hell out of me. I use a number of addons to stop websites from tracking me (Ghostery, AdBock, NoScript, RequestPolicy, etc.). But DPI is horrfying, and I don't understand why it's legal. The postal service isn't allowed to open our mail and read our letters. It's a felony for anyone to tamper with your mail at all. So why should ISPs be allowed to inspect our packets? It's no different.
This is why you need to use non-logging VPNs and TOR. Don't giver your ISP an opportunity to inspect your packets. Plus, for the love of FSM, DO NOT use your ISPs DNS servers, or your ISPs email.
This is the bit I don't understand. What makes ARM so inherrently different that it must be locked down? Why is MSFT pushing lockdown on ARM, with both software installation and UEFI restrictions? Why is it any different than x86/64?
It's not, in any way at all. MSFT is creating a false dichotmy so consumers will continue to think of ARM and other mobile devices as appliances that you have no control over, instead of the general purpose computers that they actually are. The last thing Apple and MSFT want is consumers realizing that tablets and smartphones are just as much computers as your desktop and laptop. They want people to see mobile devices differently so they can control them.
Gibberbot is an XMPP/Jabber client for Android that also supports OTR messaging.
My Nexus S is rooted and running cyanogenmod and Netflix works just fine and dandy.
I used to feel the same way. But no one makes netbooks anymore. I've seen Acer Aspire One's in stores, but that's it. Browsing on the web to find older ones gets you prices where you might as well buy a full sized laptop.
I agree with this completely. I've had absolutely no luck at all with Dell's offerings. HP's laptops have been total crap for ages. And everything else just feels like bottom-of-the-barrel consumer grade options. Lenovo's ThinkPads are one of the most consistently amazing machines out there.
When the hell did people stop creating art for the sake of creating art? That's what I want to know
Precisely. This is the problem. No one wants to do what they enjoy, just for the sake of it. Everyone is just chasing money. To so many people, music is just another get rich quick scheme. They think they can cut a few tracks, get discovered, get a record deal, and make millions.But it doesn't work that way.
The current state of pop music is a bunch of pretty faces who can look good on magazine covers and on the red carpet. It doesn't matter if they can sing or not. They don't write their music, they don't write their lyrics. They're given the lyrics, put in front of a mic and told to sing. They auto-tune them so they actually sound good and then the record labels cash in.
It's sad to see art become a money game. It destroys everything art is. If you're not doing what to do because you love it and because you feel a deep desire to create something amazing, then you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Art isn't a clock punching cash machine. If that's what someone wants, then, like you said, they should do something else.
The thing is, the old model is nearly dead. There are not going to be "rock stars" and big record company profits anymore. Those days are done. And it's a good thing. The record companies kept a strangle hold on the distribution of music for decades. They used that hold to make millions of dollars and made it look like they were a good thing for artists. But they aren't. And their hold is now broken. But instead of trying to adapt, the labels are taking more and more money from the artists.
Are we going to see millionaire musicians anymore? Absolutely not. Those days are done. But is music dead? Certainly not. But the record labels are no longer needed. An artists can make it on their own. Will they make the same money? No. But this is the point: yes it's less money than before, but it's either that or nothing. The old days are gone and people are going to have to accept it. But it's good because now the artists will own their own creations and can sell directly to the fans and keep all of the profits.
A large number of my clients are medical offices/facilities that I've been working with for years. Right now, the biggest push is electronic medical records. And let me tell you, it's a nightmare. All of the doctors that I work with are computer illiterate and have no desire to work with computers. But when you go with an EMR system, you're using computers front to back, for every single task. And they balk. It diminishes patient care because the doctors are more worried about making typos and clicking the right boxes, rather than paying attention to the patients. The EMR that the doctors wanted deployed at one particular office required a specific Toshiba tablet for the doctors to use. These things were $2,500 tablets,. And they stopped using them after a month. They hated them because, well firstly they're terrible tablets, and secondly the doctors have no idea how to use a computer. Computer illiteracy in the medical field is a very big problem. Medical workers especially are going to have to become more knowledgeable about computers. They're going to have to be more flexible, and they're going to have to be able to adapt. If you can send an email in Outlook, you can send an email in Thunderbird. Look for "Inbox" to see your messages, look for "Compose" or "Write" or something like that to write a message. It's not difficult. Same with word processors. If you know the basics of one, just look for those things in the other. They're there. With medical increasingly becoming an electronic only field, medical employees (including doctors) are going to have to learn how to adapt.
But not only is computer literacy a problem, but EMR companies are the epitome of vendor lock-in and control. They specialize in holding back features and charging you $10,000 for implementing something incredibly simple and common sense. Data portability is also nearly non-existent. Even with HL7, interacting with other EMRs (and Odin forbid you have to interact with another office or provider), it's still a mess.
The medical field is a mess. The promise of EMR is not being realized. Greed has already destroyed everything good that EMR was supposed usher in, and has instead made a complete and total disaster of the industry. There is no data portability. There is no go-to-one-doctor-and-have-records-easily-transferred-to-another. That's the last thing EMR developers want. Not to mention that everything is harder, slower, and prone to failure. If the power goes out, or the server is down, or if your internet connection is down (a problem with cloud-based EMRs) then you're nearly dead in the water. An office can't function anymore without these things.
Precisely. I recently built a network for a surgical center. The owners wanted to keep costs down as much as they could, so i setup LibreOffice and Thunderbird for the users. Every single person there went nuts, calling me, yelling at me, yelling at the owners, wanting "the regular email program", meaning Outlook. Even though Thunderbird is, IMO, far easier to use than outlook, they apparently had no idea whatsoever how to use Thunderbird, even after I tought everyone how to use it. So we had to spend hundreds more dollars to supply each user with a copy of MS Office. User preference is a big deal. Of course, this office is the most computer illiterate bunch of people I have ever encountered in my entire life. So a different crowd might be more welcoming to applications that aren't from Microsoft.
Even if you were getting the speed they promise, you're not allowed to use it. For example, if you get 5 Mbps down and actually saturate that connnection, Comcast calls you a "heavy user" and will warn you about your usage and even throttle you. The problem is that they oversell their lines, like overbooking planes. Most of the time it's not a problem because most people don't even come close to saturating their connection (like there will almost always be cancellations and no shows on planes), but it is a problem when everyone booked on that flight shows up. Same for ISPs. They're promising you something they can't deliver and when you try to use what they promise, they punish you for it. There need to be regulations in place to prevent this. Stop over selling the service. Give customers the speeds you advertise. And allow people to saturate the connection. If i have 5 Mpbs down, I should be able to download 5 Mb of data every second, all day, every day. That's what I'm paying for, and i should be able to use it.
It may not save energy, but dark backgrounds save my eyes. I always love when sites use darker themes. Bright white backgrounds on a 24 inch monitor are very very painful, no matter how far I turn down my backlight.
If they hadn't left XP and IE 6 out in the wild for 6 years before updating it, this would never have happened. Microsoft got complacent and users got complacent. And developers figured it was ok to require IE6 and ActiveX and all that other crap for their mission critical applications and now they're fucked. This is why you should always develop applications with open standards. HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MYSQL, Python, Perl, CGI are so ubiquitous for a reason: they're awesome. And you can do everything you need to do with those instead of using Microsoft-only languages and protocols. Though IIRC, I think Microsoft intended XP to be this sort of ongoing thing. They weren't going to have new operating systems after that, it was supposed to be an "experience" that you subcribed to for updates and whatnot. And while they took their sweet time figuring that out, people got complacent and decided they never wanted change.
I asked for directions from Florida to South Korea and it told me to drive to California and then kayak to South Korea.
My reasons for using OSS are mostly along these lines. It's great to be able to modify the software if I wanted to, but as only a mediocre coder, I rarely would, but it's nice to know that I can if I wanted. However, the lock-in and control factor is my main reason. I like to know that the software I use is mine and that I'm the one in control of my digital life. I can use whatever software I need and not worry about licensing issues, or being locked to a platform or piece of software. I can roll my own solutions for whatever problem I need to solve. And since the code and development cycle are open, there's no mystery as to what is going on with the software.
So I guess, in a way, my thoughts do sort of mirror the "value the things I create myself" theory of TFA.
Giving the benefit of doubt, I'm assuming that you mean that you have a purpose, but have spare processing power and would like to put it to use. In that case I would recommend maybe seeing if you could help out with Folding@home, SETI@home or CERN distributed computing.
I had the same problem with electronics sections of stores. CRT TVs and monitors were PAINFUL to be around. But it wasn't a matter of RF sensitivity, it is an auditory sensitivity. And it's not just electronics. I can hear incredibly high frequency sounds that nearly everyone I know cannot hear.
Except for when your graphics card is shot or you're using an older machine that doesn't have the right 3D compositing. Or when you need to get to it from a non-Mac OS and you can't because the backup is in a proprietary format. Or when you need to backup anything else but Mac OS-based files.
We could only hope so.
The thing with FLOSS is that you see the development process. You see the bastard kids. You see the failed ideas. You see the brainstorming-throw-shit-at-the-wall development until they reach a rev where everything works. You don't see that with closed development processes. You just see an end product and never see the "failed" bin.
The positive in that is that someone might like rev 3.2 that you threw out. And they can take that rev, fork it, and have a product that loads of other people love as well. It gives people freedom and choice that the closed systems deny you. People may hate Unity and GNOME 3.0. So someone comes along, forks GNOME 2, keeps it alive, and people are happy. And maybe by version 1.5 or 2.3, Unity gets really good. And maybe by 3.6 GNOME gets really good. KDE 4.0 was unusable. But the latest release is really great. The whole process lets people have the choice of using what they like instead of being told what to use and how to use it.
For example the NT architecture is way better than UNIX by realy fscking far
I'll grant that NT was better than the old Windows-as-a-GUI-for-DOS architecture, but not better than UNIX. NT shined when it came to networking. The DOS-based Windows systems simply couldn't handle themselves in a networked environment, because MS-DOS was never meant to network.
But UNIX at the time had been running on mainframes, minicomputers and desktops for nearly 30 years. It had maturity and stability behind it. Everything about UNIX was ahead of NT. UNIX had been a multi-user, multi-tasking, networked operating system years before NT was a glimmer in Gates' eye.
I'll give Microsoft a lot of credit for their contributions over the years, but this is whitewashing.
The problem is that there are entire segments of goods that are not manufactured in the US at all. There are no electronics manufacturers here. So if you want a computer, phone, tablet, television, dvd player, etc., you have zero choice but to buy foreign. You can't just say "buy american" and it solves all our problems. Most of the things we consume simply aren't made here.
So if one's motherboard cannot handle more RAM, are they supposed to just buy a new one? Is the fact that you have 16 GB RAM an excuse for shotty app development? "Oh, we have plenty of RAM, who cares about system resources?" I have 8 GB of RAM on my rig, but I don't want Firefox taking up 2-3 GB of it just because it can. And there's no reason it should, except for lazy developers. Your "buy more RAM" attitude is snobbish at best, and justifies lazy developers at worst.