Dear Microsoft, Please shutter the part of your company that makes money, and provide us updates and support as a charitable donation for the life of my computer.
Thats right! Everyone still rocking Red Hat 7.3 on their workstation, unite! 2002 OSes are so the rage!
Somehow you dont hear so much derision about the "upgrade treadmill" from Linux / Mac users. Wonder why that is, particularly if their choice OS is so perfect as to never need an upgrade.
Its two OS versions back. Having updated regularly at each release from Ubuntu 6.04 to 9.04, I had breakage at each step of the way. Heck, when I was testing Fedora (10?) on my laptop, the very first package upgrade broke several things.
Expecting everything written for a 2001 OS to work on a 2008 OS (plus a service pack) with no problems is hopelessly optimistic. Windows 7 works in a great many cases-- far better IMO than what ive seen with Linux-- but the reality is that OS upgrades do tend to break things.
This is a stupid meme, and it needs to die. If you dont understand how and why infections occur, or better yet if you dont regularly deal with IT security, its probably best not to even comment on it.
There is a decent amount of new stuff in Windows 7, but upgrades will rarely be sexy to the end user. Its a little amazing that Apple gets users to even care about updates, and even there I dont know many people outside of Apple geeks who really care about Lion vs Mountain Lion vs Mavericks (other than that they do tend to upgrade right away, much to the IT dept's chagrin).
The interface is IMO a huge improvement for productivity (hot-keyable pinned taskbar icons, window snapping, improved start menu + indexing). the graphics layer was much improved (particularly the ability to multi-monitor across different GPU vendors), the networking side had a bunch of cool new toys (setting up virtual adapters, acting as a WiFi AP), and the built in Powershell is quite nice for administrators (hooray, vbscript / batch is dead!).
Most of that stuff people dont care about, then you start using it, and it becomes kind of hard to live without. I find Windows 8 annoying as all get-out and have done my best to make it look like windows 7, but if I had to pick between XP and 8 Id take 8 in a heartbeat.
For office drones? Really? That 3.5GB RAM limit was a bit of a nuisance for some specific things, but realistically how many office computers ever run up against it?
1) Anyone doing heavy duty spreadsheet, graphics, or database work is going to need a decent chunk of RAM 2) Modern webpages absolutely gobble up RAM. You can blame the browser, and that works, until you look at the competition and see that, wow, 5 tabs really does eat up ~500MB RAM no matter what browser you use 3) On my prior work computer, with 4GB RAM, I was booting to 3.2GB consumed off the bat. It was windows 7, granted, but the lions share of it was security and compliance crap. Start up my powershell environment, open a few browser tabs, and open a document or two and Im eating into the page file like disk thrashing was going out of style.
Realizing that success lies in doing what you're good at, instead of what you enjoy, is the first of many sacrifices needed for earned success. If you happen to love what you happen to be good at, hey, nice for you: people should feel good about that sort of thing.
Being someone who is both good at technical stuff and loves it, ive never really understood this. A lot of the reason I am good at what I do is because I love doing it; I would not know how to decipher a wireshark dump if I hadnt been curious so many years ago as to "what does a packet look like?"
I see a lot of people in the IT field who do not care about IT, and they are invariably bad at IT. Why should you ever strive to learn things not directly related to your job if you dont care about the field? And how can you ever be good in a field that demands a very wide base of knowledge if you dont learn those things? So those people tend to always say "I dont know, Ive never done it before,ask someone else" when tasked many things, and wonder why their enthusiastic colleagues tend to be moving so far ahead.
It sounds somewhat arrogant of me to say this, and I apologize: but it is the truth. All of the things I have been complimented / praised for in terms of my expertise came from random side experiments where I spent a weekend learning something. I guess I just dont see how one could be more than mediocre if they were in a field they didnt enjoy.
The "What If" scenarios arent so that you specifically in a specific mugging can pull out a particular gun and shoot someone; theyre so that your would-be mugger has to think carefully if he wants to try mugging a citizen. If the populace is disarmed, its not a problem. If a quarter of the population is carrying a concealed weapon, hes probably going to think twice.
But thats not even remotely the most important part, in my eyes (and I'd hazard, the eyes of the folks who drafted it). The idea that I as a person can defend myself and my house is a pretty fundamental thing; it was famously enshrined as the castle doctrine, and its somewhat meaningless if youre not permitted the means to defend yourself and your house with lethal force. Theres also the whole idea that we as citizens should not be wholly reliant on "the government" to defend our land from invaders; this gets made light of, but guerrilla forces have historically been notoriously effective against invading armies.
Do you think the "militia" has the power to take on the police and military?
I dunno, ask the vietnamese how their attempts went vs the most powerful military in the world.
Tell that to the people of Cambodia, the USSR, China, Spain, Vietnam, and North Korea. Oh, and those in western europe (Poland and France in particular). Im sure theyd totally agree with you.
I'm just tired of hearing about how sure people are that I'm wrong and they're right based on "faith".
Everyone does this with every ideology. I have democrat friends who are convinced Im off my rocker in some of the political beliefs I have, while my conservative friends would say the same regarding the democrats.
The key is not to get all bent out of shape that each group is convinced that the other is deeply and fundamentally wrong; its to recognize that fact and accept, and if it must be discussed, to do so in a way that doesnt assume that the other person is a caricature of what they believe.
Best quote I've ever read, "Religion is like a penis. It's fine to have one and it's fine to be proud of it, but please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around... and PLEASE don't try to shove it down my child's throat."
Quotes like that sound witty and clever, but Id remark that it would be an odd religion indeed where you on the one hand professed that your eternal fate was on the line, but on the other that its much too controversial to bother your friends with.
Penn famously remarked on how glad he as a fairly committed atheist was that a christian cared enough to try to proselytize him: how much would that person have had to either hate or be apathetic towards Penn, in order NOT to tell him of the eternal danger they perceived?
Im no expert, and cant really debate it beyond this point-- but that attack appears to be somewhat similar to attacks on AES: get a huge number of ciphertexts from a given plaintext and different keys, and you can start to recover some of the plaintext.
Its an attack, but Im not sure that thats considered "broken". The issue is that most of the current encryption schemes used in SSL have problems; I wasnt aware of this one in RC4, but Im not sure of how serious it is.
Yes, and that protocol has NOTHING to do with chrome. That is used by websites, if you read their usage examples.
In fact, the SafeBrowsing2 protocol-- which I described-- specifically mentions that it is used by firefox and chrome.
You can rightfully mention that the lookup protocol has privacy issues; in fact they specifically go over the privacy implications of that. But to criticize them for merely offering that service is a bit crazy, and its offtopic in a discussion on chrome because it is not used in chrome.
Theyre not comparing anything. Safebrowsing protocol has your computer download their database, and you do the comparison locally. The server never knows anything except that youre using safebrowsing.
RC4 was chosen because it was the recommended choice for quite some time recently due to attacks on AES-CBC. In fact, Google hopped onto RC4 before anyone else when BEAST hit.
For the record, RC4 is not broken, it still works, and its still immune to BEAST. IIRC criticisms of it stem from its age, simplicity and speed.
You're right to be skeptical; the headline is nonsense.
Article indicates that the NSA has used "some quantity" of these radio devices, and has in addition planted 100,000 software bugs on computers across the world. Run it through the slashdot submission process, and that becomes "NSA plants 100,000 radio spy kits in your kitchen computer"
Im at the point where I assume any article about the NSA was written by someone who doesnt understand or care about the actual issues, and is just looking to fan the flames as much as possible.
but just because regular religious people take their marching orders from a central pillar,
Sorry to burst YOUR bubble but many (most?) religious people do not take their marching orders from a central pillar either. In theory, Catholics do, but as I recall that was one of the primary issues of the reformation (hence "sola scriptura"). In fact, as a southern baptist, I dont really take marching orders from anyone except the bible.
And frankly, in practical terms Catholics do not either; compare the official stance on abortion / contraception to the 70+% of catholics who express approval of those things.
It seems like youre objecting to me lumping all atheists in with Pol Pot, which is great because I likewise object to lumping all protestants in with the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusaders.
The only way I would be willing to even entertain the question of
killing gun rights would be if the other party were concerned enough to advocate an amendment. Gun control I would be willing to discuss if it were extremely limited in scope, and I view it as terribly dangerous in either case due to the precedent for ignoring the bill of rights it would enforce.
Perhaps I misread your post, but you appeared to be mocking people who defend gun rights on the ground of personal freedoms. Were you being sincere?
but obviously things have gone badly off the rails in the US
I dont think thats the case at all, at least not regarding gun deaths. Gun deaths are not terribly high in the scheme of things, and they actually tend to be worse in the places with the tightest gun laws (or vice versa; the point remains).
In a free society, one of the risks that you have is that you will be killed in the streets. Reducing the chance that that will happen invariably means cutting down on personal freedoms. Im certainly not going to stand behind any attempt to circumvent the constitution to satisfy some reckless fear that youll be one of the fraction of a percent who get killed in gang violence; I fear government overreach and the descent into authoritarianism far more than I fear gun violence. Look historically at which has been a greater threat, and perhaps youd agree with me.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Microsoft,
Please shutter the part of your company that makes money, and provide us updates and support as a charitable donation for the life of my computer.
Signed,
Irate Engineer
FTFY
Thats right! Everyone still rocking Red Hat 7.3 on their workstation, unite! 2002 OSes are so the rage!
Somehow you dont hear so much derision about the "upgrade treadmill" from Linux / Mac users. Wonder why that is, particularly if their choice OS is so perfect as to never need an upgrade.
Its two OS versions back. Having updated regularly at each release from Ubuntu 6.04 to 9.04, I had breakage at each step of the way. Heck, when I was testing Fedora (10?) on my laptop, the very first package upgrade broke several things.
Expecting everything written for a 2001 OS to work on a 2008 OS (plus a service pack) with no problems is hopelessly optimistic. Windows 7 works in a great many cases-- far better IMO than what ive seen with Linux-- but the reality is that OS upgrades do tend to break things.
No version of windows is safe from the internet.
This is a stupid meme, and it needs to die. If you dont understand how and why infections occur, or better yet if you dont regularly deal with IT security, its probably best not to even comment on it.
There is a decent amount of new stuff in Windows 7, but upgrades will rarely be sexy to the end user. Its a little amazing that Apple gets users to even care about updates, and even there I dont know many people outside of Apple geeks who really care about Lion vs Mountain Lion vs Mavericks (other than that they do tend to upgrade right away, much to the IT dept's chagrin).
The interface is IMO a huge improvement for productivity (hot-keyable pinned taskbar icons, window snapping, improved start menu + indexing). the graphics layer was much improved (particularly the ability to multi-monitor across different GPU vendors), the networking side had a bunch of cool new toys (setting up virtual adapters, acting as a WiFi AP), and the built in Powershell is quite nice for administrators (hooray, vbscript / batch is dead!).
Most of that stuff people dont care about, then you start using it, and it becomes kind of hard to live without. I find Windows 8 annoying as all get-out and have done my best to make it look like windows 7, but if I had to pick between XP and 8 Id take 8 in a heartbeat.
Thats because you were basically running a consumerized server OS. XP 64bit wasnt XP, it was Server 2003 modified to be useful to an end user.
For office drones? Really? That 3.5GB RAM limit was a bit of a nuisance for some specific things, but realistically how many office computers ever run up against it?
1) Anyone doing heavy duty spreadsheet, graphics, or database work is going to need a decent chunk of RAM
2) Modern webpages absolutely gobble up RAM. You can blame the browser, and that works, until you look at the competition and see that, wow, 5 tabs really does eat up ~500MB RAM no matter what browser you use
3) On my prior work computer, with 4GB RAM, I was booting to 3.2GB consumed off the bat. It was windows 7, granted, but the lions share of it was security and compliance crap. Start up my powershell environment, open a few browser tabs, and open a document or two and Im eating into the page file like disk thrashing was going out of style.
..or maybe xp is good enough for them and the newer versions of windows don't offer enough incentive to upgrade.
Except for the lack of maintenance, which is always a good reason in the Linux / Unix world but apparently doesnt fly with windows?
instead of staying on that one-more-patch-tuesday-til-I'm-secure treadmill.
Right. Because Linux / Firefox / Flash / Acrobat dont all need security updates.
You mean by doing what BES has done for more than a decade now?
If the market didnt give a crap about Blackberry / the protections it offers, what are the chances this will succeed?
The key is to be confident, and just say stuff whether you know its true or not.
Its worked for slashdot submitters and editors for years now!
Realizing that success lies in doing what you're good at, instead of what you enjoy, is the first of many sacrifices needed for earned success. If you happen to love what you happen to be good at, hey, nice for you: people should feel good about that sort of thing.
Being someone who is both good at technical stuff and loves it, ive never really understood this. A lot of the reason I am good at what I do is because I love doing it; I would not know how to decipher a wireshark dump if I hadnt been curious so many years ago as to "what does a packet look like?"
I see a lot of people in the IT field who do not care about IT, and they are invariably bad at IT. Why should you ever strive to learn things not directly related to your job if you dont care about the field? And how can you ever be good in a field that demands a very wide base of knowledge if you dont learn those things? So those people tend to always say "I dont know, Ive never done it before,ask someone else" when tasked many things, and wonder why their enthusiastic colleagues tend to be moving so far ahead.
It sounds somewhat arrogant of me to say this, and I apologize: but it is the truth. All of the things I have been complimented / praised for in terms of my expertise came from random side experiments where I spent a weekend learning something. I guess I just dont see how one could be more than mediocre if they were in a field they didnt enjoy.
The "What If" scenarios arent so that you specifically in a specific mugging can pull out a particular gun and shoot someone; theyre so that your would-be mugger has to think carefully if he wants to try mugging a citizen. If the populace is disarmed, its not a problem. If a quarter of the population is carrying a concealed weapon, hes probably going to think twice.
But thats not even remotely the most important part, in my eyes (and I'd hazard, the eyes of the folks who drafted it). The idea that I as a person can defend myself and my house is a pretty fundamental thing; it was famously enshrined as the castle doctrine, and its somewhat meaningless if youre not permitted the means to defend yourself and your house with lethal force. Theres also the whole idea that we as citizens should not be wholly reliant on "the government" to defend our land from invaders; this gets made light of, but guerrilla forces have historically been notoriously effective against invading armies.
Do you think the "militia" has the power to take on the police and military?
I dunno, ask the vietnamese how their attempts went vs the most powerful military in the world.
Tell that to the people of Cambodia, the USSR, China, Spain, Vietnam, and North Korea. Oh, and those in western europe (Poland and France in particular). Im sure theyd totally agree with you.
Handguns in the US, about 8000 / year. Pol Pot, ~3,000,000-- and he was one of the gentler ones. So that'd be about 400 years.
I'm just tired of hearing about how sure people are that I'm wrong and they're right based on "faith".
Everyone does this with every ideology. I have democrat friends who are convinced Im off my rocker in some of the political beliefs I have, while my conservative friends would say the same regarding the democrats.
The key is not to get all bent out of shape that each group is convinced that the other is deeply and fundamentally wrong; its to recognize that fact and accept, and if it must be discussed, to do so in a way that doesnt assume that the other person is a caricature of what they believe.
Best quote I've ever read, "Religion is like a penis. It's fine to have one and it's fine to be proud of it, but please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around... and PLEASE don't try to shove it down my child's throat."
Quotes like that sound witty and clever, but Id remark that it would be an odd religion indeed where you on the one hand professed that your eternal fate was on the line, but on the other that its much too controversial to bother your friends with.
Penn famously remarked on how glad he as a fairly committed atheist was that a christian cared enough to try to proselytize him: how much would that person have had to either hate or be apathetic towards Penn, in order NOT to tell him of the eternal danger they perceived?
Im no expert, and cant really debate it beyond this point-- but that attack appears to be somewhat similar to attacks on AES: get a huge number of ciphertexts from a given plaintext and different keys, and you can start to recover some of the plaintext.
Its an attack, but Im not sure that thats considered "broken". The issue is that most of the current encryption schemes used in SSL have problems; I wasnt aware of this one in RC4, but Im not sure of how serious it is.
Yes, and that protocol has NOTHING to do with chrome. That is used by websites, if you read their usage examples.
In fact, the SafeBrowsing2 protocol-- which I described-- specifically mentions that it is used by firefox and chrome.
You can rightfully mention that the lookup protocol has privacy issues; in fact they specifically go over the privacy implications of that. But to criticize them for merely offering that service is a bit crazy, and its offtopic in a discussion on chrome because it is not used in chrome.
Theyre not comparing anything. Safebrowsing protocol has your computer download their database, and you do the comparison locally. The server never knows anything except that youre using safebrowsing.
That sort of makes most of your post irrelevant.
RC4 was chosen because it was the recommended choice for quite some time recently due to attacks on AES-CBC. In fact, Google hopped onto RC4 before anyone else when BEAST hit.
For the record, RC4 is not broken, it still works, and its still immune to BEAST. IIRC criticisms of it stem from its age, simplicity and speed.
You're right to be skeptical; the headline is nonsense.
Article indicates that the NSA has used "some quantity" of these radio devices, and has in addition planted 100,000 software bugs on computers across the world. Run it through the slashdot submission process, and that becomes "NSA plants 100,000 radio spy kits in your kitchen computer"
Im at the point where I assume any article about the NSA was written by someone who doesnt understand or care about the actual issues, and is just looking to fan the flames as much as possible.
but just because regular religious people take their marching orders from a central pillar,
Sorry to burst YOUR bubble but many (most?) religious people do not take their marching orders from a central pillar either. In theory, Catholics do, but as I recall that was one of the primary issues of the reformation (hence "sola scriptura"). In fact, as a southern baptist, I dont really take marching orders from anyone except the bible.
And frankly, in practical terms Catholics do not either; compare the official stance on abortion / contraception to the 70+% of catholics who express approval of those things.
It seems like youre objecting to me lumping all atheists in with Pol Pot, which is great because I likewise object to lumping all protestants in with the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusaders.
Ooops.
The only way I would be willing to even entertain the question of
killing gun rights would be if the other party were concerned enough to advocate an amendment. Gun control I would be willing to discuss if it were extremely limited in scope, and I view it as terribly dangerous in either case due to the precedent for ignoring the bill of rights it would enforce.
Look at which has historically been more of a threat: Fellow citizens shooting you dead, or invasions and governments going authoritarian.
The only way I would be willing to even entertain the question of
Perhaps I misread your post, but you appeared to be mocking people who defend gun rights on the ground of personal freedoms. Were you being sincere?
but obviously things have gone badly off the rails in the US
I dont think thats the case at all, at least not regarding gun deaths. Gun deaths are not terribly high in the scheme of things, and they actually tend to be worse in the places with the tightest gun laws (or vice versa; the point remains).
In a free society, one of the risks that you have is that you will be killed in the streets. Reducing the chance that that will happen invariably means cutting down on personal freedoms. Im certainly not going to stand behind any attempt to circumvent the constitution to satisfy some reckless fear that youll be one of the fraction of a percent who get killed in gang violence; I fear government overreach and the descent into authoritarianism far more than I fear gun violence. Look historically at which has been a greater threat, and perhaps youd agree with me.
IIRC, they already had multiple reference objects.