Actually, truth be told I work in Harrisburg, PA, and we did not have any problems with the viruses. The company I work with has all M$ products and they did not get one infection, or one sniff of the virus at all (mostly because I was smart and took the WSH off of everyone's computer the first time a WSH virus came out). Use of M$ != spreading viruses. It certainly makes it a whole lot easier....
Tom Ridge probably adopted this law because one HUGE part of his platform as the gov has been fighting crime and prosecuting criminals. He changed the juvenile criminal laws to allow them to be prosecuted as adults, etc.
Ridge most likely signed this because he is being considered for the VP spot with George W. and wants to back 'popular' pieces of legislation.
One thing that I have noticed is that the area that I live in, Central PA, is getting more and more high-tech contracts because it's pretty cheap to live here, and we're close to New York, Baltimore, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, etc.
I was job hunting recently and I heard the same story from everyone I interviewed with: 'Company X from (NYC || California || Japan || Korea) has hired us in a million dollar contract to do Project Foo and we need 10 new employees in this next month.' I get the benefit of really high pay and cheap living. Don't move to the opportunities, let them come to you.
The actual phone number for the Small Business Committee is (202) 225-5821 and you can leave a message for Jim Talent of Missouri. He is their chairman. Their email address is smbiz@mail.house.gov and their website is www.house.gov/smbiz/welcome.html. Everyone call and raise your voice!
I've also developed an ASP based Help Desk that tied into an Access Database that tracked requests and emailed the requests to myself and the head technician so they could be properly routed to whoever should handle the problem. The biggest problem was always that people did not give enough description: "My AS400 doesn't work" or "Can't read my emails" and so you still had to schlepp over to them to see what was wrong.
People really liked it though because they could then see the progress that was being taken on their problems.
That is not a bad idea. I have heard that discussed amongst other people, creating a 'microphage' virus that will distribute itself through the WSH and run in this order:
Propogate itself
Dissolve the relationship between script files and the WSH
Uninstall the Windows Scripting Host
Delete itself
I imagine that it can be done. If not totally through the WSH, then the beginning can be, and then the rest through a loaded C or VB module. Of course, you'd still get into a heap of trouble if you did that, though you would be protecting people...
I agree with the reviewer that the examples in Programming Perl can be terse, and don't always work like expected. More than once I have had to hack at their code examples and/or load more modules from CPAN to get them to work. But then, if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't really be learning anything at all about Perl, I'd just be cutting and pasting code....I'm glad for the terse and cryptic examples. They give me a reason to think.
I consider this to be poop rolling down hill, and Microsoft is looking for someone to shove around because they're having a bad month. Tough. The posters own their posts, they have freedom of speech, and they have exercised that freedom. Slashdot can be considered a news organization (News For Nerds), and we have freedom of Press built into the Bill of Rights, and Slashdot has exercised their right. Anyone who's upset about it needs to get a life.
I mean, frankly, we demand that food companies post their 'source' right on the label, and I have seen every year Andy Rooney comment on the scary or dumb contents listed on labels. That's an editorial. is Frito-Lay going to go after him for reading their contents on the air?
pfffttt, bunch of namby-pamby whiners in Redmond....
Yes it could be, and I know that a majority of my luck has been just that luck, but it would require more work and the proper.dll's to run, and that is more difficult to pull off than just running through the WSH.
Outlook is only part of the problem. We use Outlook and Outlook Express at work, and out of 50 users here, not a single one of us had a brush with the virus. Why? Because I had removed the Windows Scripting Host from everyone's computers 6 months ago when the first VBS bug came through, and my proxy and email servers scan every damn piece of traffic looking for potential viruses. It's smart configuration and use of the computer that protects you from viruses.
You can make any OS insecure if you want. Microsoft just ships their's insecure without the common sense installed.
If you look at the code for the virus, you will see that it uses the Windows Scripting Host. Any sysadmin who left Windows Scripting Host on their system is just asking for trouble. Ever since that came out a year ago, every security site and book has at least in brief mentioned it as a gaping security hole because Windows will automatically run scripts through it without checking for permissions, blah blah blah.
I and the two techs here at work removed it a while ago. We've received two of the emails from other companies, but they have fallen dead in the water.
Remove Windows Scripting Host from your computer, and you should be fine! So far, the best tool to use to remove WSH is fdisk. WSH comes as default on Win98 and W2k. NT can get it, but it is not installed as default.
Matthew Rothenberg, also from ZDNet has a co lumn basically highlighting the same key points of the argument against Taschek's article except from posters to the article.
I don't think the problem is the format that the data comes in as much as it is the viewer used to get at that data. Star Office and Word Perfect have shown us that it is possible to open foreign binaries without much difficulty. The trick comes in deciding how it's displayed. Netscape and Microsoft can't agree on how HTML is to be displayed, and HTML was supposed to be the great equalizing formatting language way back when. Netscape and IE render XML differently now, and it doesn't look like they will agree on it either.
The biggest problem is getting everyone to agree what the finished output will look like.
I posted this two weeks ago!
on
Laptop Lojack?
·
· Score: 2
pft! I posted this same story two weeks ago. Oh well.
It's probably just Bill Gates. The State Department didn't have a license for their copy of Win95 (someone probably brought it in from home, and they all shared the disc) and so Microsoft took it.
I'll second your article...further down the page FascDot Killed My Pr on talks about how we shouldn't care about what someone's grandmother needs because we don't want a simple-minded Linux, but I don't think that attitude is going to carry us very far.
Our goal should be to make several different levels of use into a UI. If you want things simple, then choose the simple user level and the UI will do most everything for you, and prevent you from breaking stuff. More of a power user? Bump up the skill level.
I know it's a simple analogy, but video games let you choose what skill level you're going to play at so you don't get fragged at the start. Why not let the GUI's and UI's act the same way?
That way, my grandmother can use Linux too, and I can share files back and forth with her, or even sign on her computer at my skill level and use it without going crazy, and without making it impossible for her to use, etc.
Other than that, scripting, extensible, and lots of options. Make it so there is more than one way to do anything...hmmm, like Perl... (DUCKS FLAMING ARROW) whew that was close, lucky I wore my asbestos slacks today.
Stefik is right in the fact that there is always a terrible, and sometimes bloody, response to new technology and the ideas that follow.
Witness the Protestant reformation of Europe, where Guttenburg's Press was used by the Protestants to make Martin Luther's translation of the bible into German, which allowed more people to read (information wants to be free?) the Bible. The bloodshed that the Catholic church committed to stop the Reformation was astounding.
Many people say that the Reformation could not have occured without the printing press, which ended the church's monopoly on learning....now, the bonds on learning have slipped more...this makes for some interesting years ahead.
It is not entirely true that the French do not care about government influence in economic affairs. The French government installed shorter work weeks, I believe 35 hours a week instead of 40, and many companies protested saying it would only make it harder for them to make a profit when they have to send people home an hour early.
Personally I would take offense at the government telling me when I had to go home, deep in hack, hitting a Zen state of programming, oh damn it's 2pm, time to go home...pfft!
The use of Perl is not just restricted to the *nix world either. I work in an NT, AS400 shop, and I have used Perl to perform feats that blow the socks off my VB and VC programming coworkers. We even found a Perl port for the AS400, though I cannot convince the sysadmin to let me install it....:)
Perl has a place permanently in my toolkit for just about any job that I have. It's fast, it's easy, and if I don't know how to do something, I can find the answer pretty fast: perlmonks, perl.com, comp.lang.perl.misc...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, truth be told I work in Harrisburg, PA, and we did not have any problems with the viruses. The company I work with has all M$ products and they did not get one infection, or one sniff of the virus at all (mostly because I was smart and took the WSH off of everyone's computer the first time a WSH virus came out). Use of M$ != spreading viruses.
It certainly makes it a whole lot easier....
Tom Ridge probably adopted this law because one HUGE part of his platform as the gov has been fighting crime and prosecuting criminals. He changed the juvenile criminal laws to allow them to be prosecuted as adults, etc.
Ridge most likely signed this because he is being considered for the VP spot with George W. and wants to back 'popular' pieces of legislation.
I was job hunting recently and I heard the same story from everyone I interviewed with:
'Company X from (NYC || California || Japan || Korea) has hired us in a million dollar contract to do Project Foo and we need 10 new employees in this next month.'
I get the benefit of really high pay and cheap living. Don't move to the opportunities, let them come to you.
You forgot to mention Yahoo. Their Mapping and Address pages are also run in Python. One of the coolest uses I have seen, and powerful too!
The actual phone number for the Small Business Committee is (202) 225-5821 and you can leave a message for Jim Talent of Missouri. He is their chairman. Their email address is smbiz@mail.house.gov and their website is www.house.gov/smbiz/welcome.html . Everyone call and raise your voice!
I've also developed an ASP based Help Desk that tied into an Access Database that tracked requests and emailed the requests to myself and the head technician so they could be properly routed to whoever should handle the problem. The biggest problem was always that people did not give enough description :
"My AS400 doesn't work" or "Can't read my emails" and so you still had to schlepp over to them to see what was wrong.
People really liked it though because they could then see the progress that was being taken on their problems.
- Propogate itself
- Dissolve the relationship between script files and the WSH
- Uninstall the Windows Scripting Host
- Delete itself
I imagine that it can be done. If not totally through the WSH, then the beginning can be, and then the rest through a loaded C or VB module. Of course, you'd still get into a heap of trouble if you did that, though you would be protecting people...I agree with the reviewer that the examples in Programming Perl can be terse, and don't always work like expected. More than once I have had to hack at their code examples and/or load more modules from CPAN to get them to work. But then, if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't really be learning anything at all about Perl, I'd just be cutting and pasting code....I'm glad for the terse and cryptic examples. They give me a reason to think.
I consider this to be poop rolling down hill, and Microsoft is looking for someone to shove around because they're having a bad month. Tough. The posters own their posts, they have freedom of speech, and they have exercised that freedom. Slashdot can be considered a news organization (News For Nerds), and we have freedom of Press built into the Bill of Rights, and Slashdot has exercised their right. Anyone who's upset about it needs to get a life.
I mean, frankly, we demand that food companies post their 'source' right on the label, and I have seen every year Andy Rooney comment on the scary or dumb contents listed on labels. That's an editorial. is Frito-Lay going to go after him for reading their contents on the air?
pfffttt, bunch of namby-pamby whiners in Redmond....
Why we use Napster or Gnutella to get our music...
Yes it could be, and I know that a majority of my luck has been just that luck, but it would require more work and the proper .dll's to run, and that is more difficult to pull off than just running through the WSH.
Outlook is only part of the problem. We use Outlook and Outlook Express at work, and out of 50 users here, not a single one of us had a brush with the virus. Why? Because I had removed the Windows Scripting Host from everyone's computers 6 months ago when the first VBS bug came through, and my proxy and email servers scan every damn piece of traffic looking for potential viruses. It's smart configuration and use of the computer that protects you from viruses.
You can make any OS insecure if you want. Microsoft just ships their's insecure without the common sense installed.
I'll just be waiting for my Sonic Screwdriver and Dr Who's Tardis. The ultimate kick ass mobile home.
Of course, Buckaroo Banzai's car travelling through solid mass was pretty damn cool too..hmmm, so many goodies and so little time.
Unless of course they're reading HG Wells......
If you look at the code for the virus, you will see that it uses the Windows Scripting Host. Any sysadmin who left Windows Scripting Host on their system is just asking for trouble. Ever since that came out a year ago, every security site and book has at least in brief mentioned it as a gaping security hole because Windows will automatically run scripts through it without checking for permissions, blah blah blah.
I and the two techs here at work removed it a while ago. We've received two of the emails from other companies, but they have fallen dead in the water.
Remove Windows Scripting Host from your computer, and you should be fine! So far, the best tool to use to remove WSH is fdisk. WSH comes as default on Win98 and W2k. NT can get it, but it is not installed as default.
Matthew Rothenberg, also from ZDNet has a co lumn basically highlighting the same key points of the argument against Taschek's article except from posters to the article.
I don't think the problem is the format that the data comes in as much as it is the viewer used to get at that data. Star Office and Word Perfect have shown us that it is possible to open foreign binaries without much difficulty. The trick comes in deciding how it's displayed. Netscape and Microsoft can't agree on how HTML is to be displayed, and HTML was supposed to be the great equalizing formatting language way back when. Netscape and IE render XML differently now, and it doesn't look like they will agree on it either.
The biggest problem is getting everyone to agree what the finished output will look like.
pft! I posted this same story two weeks ago. Oh well.
It's probably just Bill Gates. The State Department didn't have a license for their copy of Win95 (someone probably brought it in from home, and they all shared the disc) and so Microsoft took it.
Do you think David Hasslehoff had one of these in Knight Rider? I bet Air Wolf had one...Blue Thunder probably just had an AM deck.
True! :) But you get that tingle of thrill too... hehehehehe, let's break something.
Perhaps it would be better to send the PHBs into 'the field' with WinCE and let the sysadmins run the company for a while. :)
I'll second your article...further down the page FascDot Killed My Pr on talks about how we shouldn't care about what someone's grandmother needs because we don't want a simple-minded Linux, but I don't think that attitude is going to carry us very far.
Our goal should be to make several different levels of use into a UI. If you want things simple, then choose the simple user level and the UI will do most everything for you, and prevent you from breaking stuff. More of a power user? Bump up the skill level.
I know it's a simple analogy, but video games let you choose what skill level you're going to play at so you don't get fragged at the start. Why not let the GUI's and UI's act the same way?
That way, my grandmother can use Linux too, and I can share files back and forth with her, or even sign on her computer at my skill level and use it without going crazy, and without making it impossible for her to use, etc.
Other than that, scripting, extensible, and lots of options. Make it so there is more than one way to do anything...hmmm, like Perl...
(DUCKS FLAMING ARROW)
whew that was close, lucky I wore my asbestos slacks today.
Stefik is right in the fact that there is always a terrible, and sometimes bloody, response to new technology and the ideas that follow.
Witness the Protestant reformation of Europe, where Guttenburg's Press was used by the Protestants to make Martin Luther's translation of the bible into German, which allowed more people to read (information wants to be free?) the Bible. The bloodshed that the Catholic church committed to stop the Reformation was astounding.
Many people say that the Reformation could not have occured without the printing press, which ended the church's monopoly on learning....now, the bonds on learning have slipped more...this makes for some interesting years ahead.
It is not entirely true that the French do not care about government influence in economic affairs. The French government installed shorter work weeks, I believe 35 hours a week instead of 40, and many companies protested saying it would only make it harder for them to make a profit when they have to send people home an hour early.
Personally I would take offense at the government telling me when I had to go home, deep in hack, hitting a Zen state of programming, oh damn it's 2pm, time to go home...pfft!
Wake me when they deliver some really exciting news about signifigantly faster bus speeds and RAM...or greatly improved cache.
The use of Perl is not just restricted to the *nix world either. I work in an NT, AS400 shop, and I have used Perl to perform feats that blow the socks off my VB and VC programming coworkers. We even found a Perl port for the AS400, though I cannot convince the sysadmin to let me install it.... :)
Perl has a place permanently in my toolkit for just about any job that I have. It's fast, it's easy, and if I don't know how to do something, I can find the answer pretty fast: perlmonks, perl.com, comp.lang.perl.misc...
It seems like the Slashdot Effect has swallowed the OS Link....
Does anyone know if it plans to use the Perl from the Topaz Project, or if the OS will be easily updatable each time a new distribution is released?