Going with your numbers I would still be concerned and want to check things out as that would leave you with 2.5tb of bandwidth for a month which is a lot for a hardware store. You might be running a server for the Internet where you sell hardware, but even then it sounds excessive and I would be concerned. I would set up WireShark on another system and mirror your ports one at a time and have a look at your traffic.
Now I won't argue your point that you ought to be able to use your advertised bandwidth at all. Internet in this country is an abomination compared to what it should be. I'm not trying to criticize you, so please don't be offended.
I'm not so sure Tor was your problem. Tor is notoriously slow and the amount of bandwidth it would have used probably didn't come close to using 10TB of data. I'm more including to think your systems got owned and you were acting as a spam relay or other such service.
The amount of bandwidth you were using goes far beyond the using Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, downloading all the Linux ISO's and every episode of your favorite show and every game of your favorite sport the last 50 years. Even someone going crazy with downloading warez would have a hard time using that kind of bandwidth.
Obviously I don't know your setup, but if I worked at Verizon I would be having a look at your traffic to see if you had become a bot in someone's control.
Holy how, your trying to claim that Apple has a "level of integrity" and want them to "remain honest" in selling the iPhone? Are you on crack, willfully ignorant, a simple idiotic fanboy, or a paid shill?
The bottom line is that claiming piracy hurts sales of licensed media through endorsed channels. Did you know grey market imports are often called piracy? Since the excuse of diminished sales is used to justify taking away peoples rights it needs to be examined for validity.
It's very relevant when piracy is used to justify an assault on peoples rights online and off. The list of examples and problems from DRM, all in the name of fighting piracy could easily fill a book. However if I were to take said book as an ebook and loan it to someone I would be accused of piracy, meanwhile for centuries society has thrived in no small part because of a concept we call the library.
For example I like Top Gear, however for many years there was no authorized means why which I could watch it the US. When it was released for some strange reason the first 5 seasons weren't released on iTunes. I have no legal way to watch those episodes without a flight overseas. Even then the authorized episodes released to the US are not the same as the originals.
To simply imply that piracy is wrong is to be willfully ignorant of reality. I'm not talking about counterfeiters, the people that profit off of others work, those are a wholly different set of people.
Any article that heralds the creation of telemarketing jobs is so far out of touch with reality as be pure economics ivory tower hyperbole. This isn't a war, and quantity of jobs does not have a quality of it's own for defeating quality of jobs. When people have to hold multiple jobs to survive because the jobs we have are all part time and without benefits the public has lost. Simply saying we've created millions of new jobs is fraudulent misrepresentation when those jobs are all entry level jobs. People need middle class jobs and that point seems to have been lost.
Adobe must be the one company in the world to have a worse track record at security than Microsoft, Oracle or Mozilla. They have ignored industry best practices and been a thorn in the side of the rest of the industry for years while being oblivious to the damage their customers have suffered from their shoddy practices.
This is the same company that wants you to rely on their security as the only way to their products now that they only rent a cloud based versions of Acrobat Suite. Incidents like this are inevitable and people need to learn that their is nothing magical about the 'cloud'. Companies that have cloud dependencies for the use of their products necessarily expose all of their customers when they get cracked.
Do you trust Adobe with your security? Do you really think a company with their track record is going to get their act together?
Take the view of the Pentagon and assume that you are at all times compromised. You probably are. Any given entity can be broken into by a determined hacker. Talk to a pen tester sometime and ask them how many places they have failed to break into. The entire concept of trust is that you can send data privately over the Internet, you can't unless you encrypt your data offline ahead of time.
On the Internet trust is all about identity and encryption. For most people that translates into a certificate that is used to supply SSL. People then assume that because they are using SSL that they can now trust a given connection. There is no justification for trust and there never has been, the entire concept of trust is a misunderstanding of the concept of how a Certificate Authority works.
All a Certificate Authority does is say that their is an unbroken chain of identity from a given point to a given point. Even then a Certificate can be forged or stolen or issued improperly, and even if controls detect a bad certificate in use most people will click the button to use the bad certificate anyways.
All of this assumes that a given government entity hasn't used a court order to force a Certificate Authority to replicate a Certificate so that your data can be seized. Certificate Authorities cooperate with things like court orders, they don't self destruct like Lavabit. That whole backstory with Lavabit self destructing - it was a fight over getting the key that was used because he wouldn't hand over his private key.
People also forget that SSL is wholly dependent on Certificate Authorities. SSL is used to encrypt data with a key when data is in transit. The problem is that data anyone that owns the network can conduct an MITM attack against your key. SSL is fundamentally broken because it presents a perception of trust when it is incapable of providing that level of trust.
I can't think of anyone I know who would ever claim their environment was secure, whether I've worked Wall Street, health insurance, defense contractors or any other type of organization that might be typically portrayed as secure. All of these environments have professionals, and all of them are painfully aware of the holes in the system and would fix them if they had the resources. The hard reality is that security costs money and good security costs even more money. Security also has a habit of impeding functionality and in today's environment, this is considered a big deal.
Security is really all about risk management and balancing any given risk against it's likelihood, cost of cleanup and cost of prevention. You can white-list every website your staff are allowed to visit on the Internet and dramatically reduce the number of infected machines, but the cost in terms of staffing, employee morale and retention would be quite high. You can put man traps at every door in your facility, however it would be a foolish waste of money and irritation in 99% of use cases.
Like it or not security is often tied directly to regulatory and compliance requirements. Those environments that have some sort of regulatory and compliance requirement are typically far more secure than those that don't. If you want improved security for the country (wherever your country is) you have to start with regulations and compliance requirements that force companies to institute it to begin with. It's claimed that cybercrime costs $100 billion in the US and $400 billion per year.
Want better security? Get companies to realize that have poor security costs more money than good security.
Thanks for the link and bit on the DEC Alpha. I had always understood Microsoft's standpoint on diversity as one meant to prevent a single supplier from being able to do them as they did to others.
We're in agreement that many Slashdotters are going to like Popular Science and that science in general. My point was that the article was nothing but blatant trolling and served no useful purpose.
You come to a site that cover news stories, including science stories and does so through user comments. You then question the value of user comments with regards to having any form of value. How the hell did this troll ever get posted?
I think it can be argued that Silk Road practiced the use of stupidity as well as anyone could have. The fact that they used TOR as a front door when they were completely sloppy with the rest of their practices does not mean they were somehow brilliant.
What they did was the rough equivalent of buying a Medeco lock for the front door of the house while leaving the patio door open with only a screen door blocking the entry and the windows all cracked open an inch. They then handed out Medeco keys to anyone that wanted one.
They then threw a two year long kegger with all the drugs you could afford where everyone recorded everything, deleted nothing and pretended nothing could ever come back to haunt them since they used a tumbler to hide their bitcoin trail. Your going to see a lot more warrants issued in any number of jurisdictions as a result of this case.
Read the warrant, it's a case study in sloppy security and I've got to imagine a number of white papers will be written about the sheer idiocy of the Dread Pirate Roberts. The/only/ reason it survived as long as it did was to allow law enforcement to catch more and more drug dealers.
Just remember whoever fills in the vacuum left by this raging idiot (and I am being kind in calling him a raging idiot) is just as likely to be FBI, Interpol or another like kind government agency. You see the problem with having black markets is they don't attract the most ethical of people, you know the ones that practice their due diligence?
The server that is set up correctly is the one that is likely the one made to withstand attacks from competitors from the Russian mafia on down. That site has to last long enough to gather evidence that can be used to take down an entire series of drug dealers all over the world. That means the site needs to be secure enough and well built enough to withstand competitors. That site is going to require professionals that won't make sloppy mistakes and a team of professionals isn't cheap.
What's your appetite for risk? Do you want the well built site that's professionally run and might be a front for the FBI or the half ass site that is probably run by a raging idiot or the mafia? Pick your poison.
He popularized technology and did a damn sight to try to get it right in the media. Remember watching the Matrix and seeing the use of Nmap and being excited because they got a single piece of tech right? This guy worked hard to get as many of those pieces right as he could.
Most authors don't get visits from the FBI or CIA because they managed to get the tech that spot on. Clancy worked to incorporate tech day in and out for decades and did it books, movies and games, arguably to a greater extent than any other person in the media.
While I certainly think the pioneers in the tech field deserve to recognized, they don't popularize the technology or try to get it right in the media. Tom Clancy did exactly that for decades. Think of Norman Borlaug, he saved more lives than anyone in history but he didn't popularize his technology with the public or focus on the media. How many people heard of him when he passed away or can say who he is without looking him up?
Interesting, I had understood the caterpillar drive to be something that he had made up. It makes me wonder if he had talked with people working with their development at the time.
He was very tech oriented and worked extensively with people in the field to try to make his novels sound as accurate on the details as he could. He was good enough at taking non-classified data and extrapolating where things could go from there that he received visits from the FBI and CIA to find out how he knew what he knew.
He certainly made things up (caterpillar drive for the sub etc), but the point is he worked tirelessly to get technical details right in as many cases as he could, and to try get them as plausible as he could get away with in those cases where he needed to make the up. He put a lot more effort into getting the details right than most authors and far more than Hollywood ever did and for that his passing is very relevant for Slashdot. He took creative license, but he took it far less than a lot of other authors (Bourne Ultimatum series etc) and used it far more selectively.
He wrote 17 number one selling books and had three of his books turned into blockbuster movies. He was active in having games made about his books even back in the 80's and made sure a series of games was made ever since then. He came up with ideas for terrorism like flying a civilian airliner into a government building before 9/11.
Want to have at least some idea of parity in IT? It could be done, but you have to tackle the negative social stigma that women face when dating someone that is in IT.
There is a backlash in the US against women that date someone that can be perceived as a geek / nerd. Since women are typically more socially oriented then men this is a really big deal for them. I have known and been friends with a number of women in IT over the years and invariably almost all of them were geeks / nerds or immigrants to begin with. If you want more women in IT you have to expand the pool of candidates beyond the current pool.
Can you imagine the social stigma that a woman would face if she actually went into IT herself? While certain types of IT jobs may not appeal as much to women they can do quite well with other types of IT jobs. The social stigma of IT being geek / nerd work is the elephant in the room.
I think this is largely a US cultural problem as I have talked with a number of people in Asia and Europe about this over the years and they have very different attitudes.
I don't think it's so much of a case that they enable a turbo mode as much as they are able to optimize the hardware and drivers for a given application. If you know a given application requires a certain set of parameters in order to tune it than you might as well save that batch of optimizations and let your customers use them. I don't think there's anything inherently dishonest in doing this as anyone using that given application will benefit. How if your going into overdrive for a benchmark without disclosure that is inherently dishonest.
That's what OCZ did with their card for use with MS SQL server. In this case they explicitly state the card as being optimized for MS SQL Server so their isn't anything dishonest going on. The problem comes from situations like yours where a customer is highly unlikely to ever come optimized fresh from the factory. How do you judge a neutral benchmark when your use case isn't one of the common ones and all of the review sites use the same sets of benchmarks?
The IBM hardware it came out on the time if you bought your system directly from IBM (instead of off the shelf) included a SCSI drive and motherboard with MCA architecture (first 32bit bus on a PC). I can't recall it requiring more expensive hardware if you bought the MS version though that would run on non-IBM hardware. Regardless the differences in hardware costs for SCSI was enough to help make OS2 too expensive for many.
It's been a lot of years since I've played with it, however I fuzzy memories about having to edit config files on it. I don't recall if the text editor I used was stock or not, I'm sure someone here would know. I can say for certain that at the time the Lotus notes suite from IBM was quite the serious competitor to Microsoft Office. IBM very distinctly did not include their office suite with OS/2.
Actually, that was about the time of OS/2, and having watched that unfold you really have to say that was more IBM doing it to themselves than Microsoft doing it to them (it was expensive, pain in the ass to use, device drivers were rare and it was intuitive as an ancient foreign language - even if it was technically superior in just about every way).
Microsoft would in the following years perform many things that well justified their being sued for being a monopoly and of being a modern robber baron, but OS/2 wasn't one of them. Your probably thinking of of CP/M.
Benchmarks are problematic by their very nature in that they are typically predictable and a manufacturer can simply say they have tuned their product for a given application. Let me give a good example of this from a product that isn't made for consumer use just to make my point:
This is a PCIE SSD product designed to boot server performance explicitly for Microsoft MS SQL Server. This product has been explicitly designed to make a given product that is quite expensive work faster.
Is this product cheating because it has been tuned just to give better results in one application? What if OCZ released a version of the product that was tuned to detect if it was working on MySQL, MS SQL Server and Oracle and optimize performance accordingly? What happens when someone tries to use it on another SQL database and get's less than stellar performance?
For the typical Slashdot car analogy think of Ferrari, they have been accused of cheating on car tests for many years by setting up their cars for the exact track they were about to be tested on. What would happen if Ferrari (or another manufacturer) tied their systems into the car's GPS?
Think of the Top Gear episode where the Nissan GTR knew it had just been driven onto a racetrack and turned off it's speed limiter. You could just as easily program the car to have optimal settings for that exact track and then populate in as many race tracks as you could. Is that cheating or is the manufacturer anticipating the potential needs of their customers and tuning their product accordingly?
If everyone playing the latest Call of Duty get's the same benefit when they buy their card, than can you really say it's cheating? Through the use of patches you can continuously upgrade the card to be optimized with the latest games.
Comparing Microsoft then and now and you've got to make a number of comparisons on why they grew back then compared to being stagnant as week old molasses now.
No stack ranking. Employees could focus on their job instead of everyone else's job. More risk taking. They were willing to try new products without worrying nearly as much about eating into their own sales for another product. Diversity. This was when Windows NT 3.1 was about to be released and it supported DEC Alpha as well as MIPS CPU's. Mind-share. They realized mind share was more important than an iron fisted DRM approach and didn't get absurd with DRM. Cheaper. At that time Unix workstations were a fair bit more expensive than Windows based computers and Microsoft was actually the cheaper option for the masses. Options. You could run just about anything you wanted with their common platform.
I've got to imagine that I'm far from the only person that misses Microsoft from the days of old, before they became soul crushing monopoly that destroyed innovation at every opportunity. Would you believe people actually camped out overnight for Windows 95 and stores opened up at midnight just to sell it?
Microsoft has since declared war on their employees, vendors, professionals, OEM's and just about everyone else in the industry. Nowadays they pull stunts like the Windows RT walled garden and call that diversity. Microsoft used to be a great company, but today that's as much history as the DEC Alpha.
Microsoft would have offered a very sweetheart deal pricewise for this.
From Delta's standpoint it would also have the advantage in that almost nothing runs on it, meaning that people aren't going to muck with it install crap software and malware on the Surface RT is all but unheard of. They also almost certainly would have offered some type of enterprise management tools for the tablets from MS.
Enterprise support for the Ipad is a royal pain at best and tools are quite limited. The app store is oblivious to the concept that a computer could be owned my a company instead of a person. Support issues go far beyond these and their IT department doubtless didn't want to deal with it.
I'm not endorsing the Surface RT and I've certainly gone on the record here about how it's a terrible tablet. I'm just explaining the logic behind the order. They certainly could have made a much better choice than the Surface RT.
You'll note that I said that benefit for start ups on this was incidental. I'm not endorsing the position of the story that this will make start ups much more successful. Your taking me out of context on this, I'm merely talking about the laws of supply and demand. I am not endorsing for or against the new health insurance law.
Slashdot Mirror
Going with your numbers I would still be concerned and want to check things out as that would leave you with 2.5tb of bandwidth for a month which is a lot for a hardware store. You might be running a server for the Internet where you sell hardware, but even then it sounds excessive and I would be concerned. I would set up WireShark on another system and mirror your ports one at a time and have a look at your traffic.
Now I won't argue your point that you ought to be able to use your advertised bandwidth at all. Internet in this country is an abomination compared to what it should be. I'm not trying to criticize you, so please don't be offended.
Utter bollocks, gay men are not 26% of the population and even then most of them have more sense than that...
I'm not so sure Tor was your problem. Tor is notoriously slow and the amount of bandwidth it would have used probably didn't come close to using 10TB of data. I'm more including to think your systems got owned and you were acting as a spam relay or other such service.
The amount of bandwidth you were using goes far beyond the using Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, downloading all the Linux ISO's and every episode of your favorite show and every game of your favorite sport the last 50 years. Even someone going crazy with downloading warez would have a hard time using that kind of bandwidth.
Obviously I don't know your setup, but if I worked at Verizon I would be having a look at your traffic to see if you had become a bot in someone's control.
Holy how, your trying to claim that Apple has a "level of integrity" and want them to "remain honest" in selling the iPhone? Are you on crack, willfully ignorant, a simple idiotic fanboy, or a paid shill?
http://betanews.com/2008/11/26/apple-claiming-iphone-3g-is-really-fast-deemed-false-by-uk-regulators/
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/apple-iphone-3g,news-2422.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/apples-iphone-4-retina-display-claims-are-false-marketing-2010-6
http://forum.sdx-developers.com/index.php?topic=19901.0;wap
http://gawker.com/5042380/misleading-iphone-ad-banned-in-the-uk
The bottom line is that claiming piracy hurts sales of licensed media through endorsed channels. Did you know grey market imports are often called piracy? Since the excuse of diminished sales is used to justify taking away peoples rights it needs to be examined for validity.
It's very relevant when piracy is used to justify an assault on peoples rights online and off. The list of examples and problems from DRM, all in the name of fighting piracy could easily fill a book. However if I were to take said book as an ebook and loan it to someone I would be accused of piracy, meanwhile for centuries society has thrived in no small part because of a concept we call the library.
For example I like Top Gear, however for many years there was no authorized means why which I could watch it the US. When it was released for some strange reason the first 5 seasons weren't released on iTunes. I have no legal way to watch those episodes without a flight overseas. Even then the authorized episodes released to the US are not the same as the originals.
To simply imply that piracy is wrong is to be willfully ignorant of reality. I'm not talking about counterfeiters, the people that profit off of others work, those are a wholly different set of people.
Any article that heralds the creation of telemarketing jobs is so far out of touch with reality as be pure economics ivory tower hyperbole. This isn't a war, and quantity of jobs does not have a quality of it's own for defeating quality of jobs. When people have to hold multiple jobs to survive because the jobs we have are all part time and without benefits the public has lost. Simply saying we've created millions of new jobs is fraudulent misrepresentation when those jobs are all entry level jobs. People need middle class jobs and that point seems to have been lost.
Adobe must be the one company in the world to have a worse track record at security than Microsoft, Oracle or Mozilla. They have ignored industry best practices and been a thorn in the side of the rest of the industry for years while being oblivious to the damage their customers have suffered from their shoddy practices.
This is the same company that wants you to rely on their security as the only way to their products now that they only rent a cloud based versions of Acrobat Suite. Incidents like this are inevitable and people need to learn that their is nothing magical about the 'cloud'. Companies that have cloud dependencies for the use of their products necessarily expose all of their customers when they get cracked.
Do you trust Adobe with your security? Do you really think a company with their track record is going to get their act together?
Take the view of the Pentagon and assume that you are at all times compromised. You probably are. Any given entity can be broken into by a determined hacker. Talk to a pen tester sometime and ask them how many places they have failed to break into. The entire concept of trust is that you can send data privately over the Internet, you can't unless you encrypt your data offline ahead of time.
On the Internet trust is all about identity and encryption. For most people that translates into a certificate that is used to supply SSL. People then assume that because they are using SSL that they can now trust a given connection. There is no justification for trust and there never has been, the entire concept of trust is a misunderstanding of the concept of how a Certificate Authority works.
All a Certificate Authority does is say that their is an unbroken chain of identity from a given point to a given point. Even then a Certificate can be forged or stolen or issued improperly, and even if controls detect a bad certificate in use most people will click the button to use the bad certificate anyways.
All of this assumes that a given government entity hasn't used a court order to force a Certificate Authority to replicate a Certificate so that your data can be seized. Certificate Authorities cooperate with things like court orders, they don't self destruct like Lavabit. That whole backstory with Lavabit self destructing - it was a fight over getting the key that was used because he wouldn't hand over his private key.
People also forget that SSL is wholly dependent on Certificate Authorities. SSL is used to encrypt data with a key when data is in transit. The problem is that data anyone that owns the network can conduct an MITM attack against your key. SSL is fundamentally broken because it presents a perception of trust when it is incapable of providing that level of trust.
I can't think of anyone I know who would ever claim their environment was secure, whether I've worked Wall Street, health insurance, defense contractors or any other type of organization that might be typically portrayed as secure. All of these environments have professionals, and all of them are painfully aware of the holes in the system and would fix them if they had the resources. The hard reality is that security costs money and good security costs even more money. Security also has a habit of impeding functionality and in today's environment, this is considered a big deal.
Security is really all about risk management and balancing any given risk against it's likelihood, cost of cleanup and cost of prevention. You can white-list every website your staff are allowed to visit on the Internet and dramatically reduce the number of infected machines, but the cost in terms of staffing, employee morale and retention would be quite high. You can put man traps at every door in your facility, however it would be a foolish waste of money and irritation in 99% of use cases.
Like it or not security is often tied directly to regulatory and compliance requirements. Those environments that have some sort of regulatory and compliance requirement are typically far more secure than those that don't. If you want improved security for the country (wherever your country is) you have to start with regulations and compliance requirements that force companies to institute it to begin with. It's claimed that cybercrime costs $100 billion in the US and $400 billion per year.
Want better security? Get companies to realize that have poor security costs more money than good security.
Thanks for the link and bit on the DEC Alpha. I had always understood Microsoft's standpoint on diversity as one meant to prevent a single supplier from being able to do them as they did to others.
We're in agreement that many Slashdotters are going to like Popular Science and that science in general. My point was that the article was nothing but blatant trolling and served no useful purpose.
You come to a site that cover news stories, including science stories and does so through user comments. You then question the value of user comments with regards to having any form of value. How the hell did this troll ever get posted?
I think it can be argued that Silk Road practiced the use of stupidity as well as anyone could have. The fact that they used TOR as a front door when they were completely sloppy with the rest of their practices does not mean they were somehow brilliant.
What they did was the rough equivalent of buying a Medeco lock for the front door of the house while leaving the patio door open with only a screen door blocking the entry and the windows all cracked open an inch. They then handed out Medeco keys to anyone that wanted one.
They then threw a two year long kegger with all the drugs you could afford where everyone recorded everything, deleted nothing and pretended nothing could ever come back to haunt them since they used a tumbler to hide their bitcoin trail. Your going to see a lot more warrants issued in any number of jurisdictions as a result of this case.
Read the warrant, it's a case study in sloppy security and I've got to imagine a number of white papers will be written about the sheer idiocy of the Dread Pirate Roberts. The /only/ reason it survived as long as it did was to allow law enforcement to catch more and more drug dealers.
Just remember whoever fills in the vacuum left by this raging idiot (and I am being kind in calling him a raging idiot) is just as likely to be FBI, Interpol or another like kind government agency. You see the problem with having black markets is they don't attract the most ethical of people, you know the ones that practice their due diligence?
The server that is set up correctly is the one that is likely the one made to withstand attacks from competitors from the Russian mafia on down. That site has to last long enough to gather evidence that can be used to take down an entire series of drug dealers all over the world. That means the site needs to be secure enough and well built enough to withstand competitors. That site is going to require professionals that won't make sloppy mistakes and a team of professionals isn't cheap.
What's your appetite for risk? Do you want the well built site that's professionally run and might be a front for the FBI or the half ass site that is probably run by a raging idiot or the mafia? Pick your poison.
He popularized technology and did a damn sight to try to get it right in the media. Remember watching the Matrix and seeing the use of Nmap and being excited because they got a single piece of tech right? This guy worked hard to get as many of those pieces right as he could.
Most authors don't get visits from the FBI or CIA because they managed to get the tech that spot on. Clancy worked to incorporate tech day in and out for decades and did it books, movies and games, arguably to a greater extent than any other person in the media.
While I certainly think the pioneers in the tech field deserve to recognized, they don't popularize the technology or try to get it right in the media. Tom Clancy did exactly that for decades. Think of Norman Borlaug, he saved more lives than anyone in history but he didn't popularize his technology with the public or focus on the media. How many people heard of him when he passed away or can say who he is without looking him up?
Interesting, I had understood the caterpillar drive to be something that he had made up. It makes me wonder if he had talked with people working with their development at the time.
He was very tech oriented and worked extensively with people in the field to try to make his novels sound as accurate on the details as he could. He was good enough at taking non-classified data and extrapolating where things could go from there that he received visits from the FBI and CIA to find out how he knew what he knew.
He certainly made things up (caterpillar drive for the sub etc), but the point is he worked tirelessly to get technical details right in as many cases as he could, and to try get them as plausible as he could get away with in those cases where he needed to make the up. He put a lot more effort into getting the details right than most authors and far more than Hollywood ever did and for that his passing is very relevant for Slashdot. He took creative license, but he took it far less than a lot of other authors (Bourne Ultimatum series etc) and used it far more selectively.
He wrote 17 number one selling books and had three of his books turned into blockbuster movies. He was active in having games made about his books even back in the 80's and made sure a series of games was made ever since then. He came up with ideas for terrorism like flying a civilian airliner into a government building before 9/11.
Want to have at least some idea of parity in IT? It could be done, but you have to tackle the negative social stigma that women face when dating someone that is in IT.
There is a backlash in the US against women that date someone that can be perceived as a geek / nerd. Since women are typically more socially oriented then men this is a really big deal for them. I have known and been friends with a number of women in IT over the years and invariably almost all of them were geeks / nerds or immigrants to begin with. If you want more women in IT you have to expand the pool of candidates beyond the current pool.
Can you imagine the social stigma that a woman would face if she actually went into IT herself? While certain types of IT jobs may not appeal as much to women they can do quite well with other types of IT jobs. The social stigma of IT being geek / nerd work is the elephant in the room.
I think this is largely a US cultural problem as I have talked with a number of people in Asia and Europe about this over the years and they have very different attitudes.
I don't think it's so much of a case that they enable a turbo mode as much as they are able to optimize the hardware and drivers for a given application. If you know a given application requires a certain set of parameters in order to tune it than you might as well save that batch of optimizations and let your customers use them. I don't think there's anything inherently dishonest in doing this as anyone using that given application will benefit. How if your going into overdrive for a benchmark without disclosure that is inherently dishonest.
That's what OCZ did with their card for use with MS SQL server. In this case they explicitly state the card as being optimized for MS SQL Server so their isn't anything dishonest going on. The problem comes from situations like yours where a customer is highly unlikely to ever come optimized fresh from the factory. How do you judge a neutral benchmark when your use case isn't one of the common ones and all of the review sites use the same sets of benchmarks?
The IBM hardware it came out on the time if you bought your system directly from IBM (instead of off the shelf) included a SCSI drive and motherboard with MCA architecture (first 32bit bus on a PC). I can't recall it requiring more expensive hardware if you bought the MS version though that would run on non-IBM hardware. Regardless the differences in hardware costs for SCSI was enough to help make OS2 too expensive for many.
It's been a lot of years since I've played with it, however I fuzzy memories about having to edit config files on it. I don't recall if the text editor I used was stock or not, I'm sure someone here would know. I can say for certain that at the time the Lotus notes suite from IBM was quite the serious competitor to Microsoft Office. IBM very distinctly did not include their office suite with OS/2.
Actually, that was about the time of OS/2, and having watched that unfold you really have to say that was more IBM doing it to themselves than Microsoft doing it to them (it was expensive, pain in the ass to use, device drivers were rare and it was intuitive as an ancient foreign language - even if it was technically superior in just about every way).
Microsoft would in the following years perform many things that well justified their being sued for being a monopoly and of being a modern robber baron, but OS/2 wasn't one of them. Your probably thinking of of CP/M.
Benchmarks are problematic by their very nature in that they are typically predictable and a manufacturer can simply say they have tuned their product for a given application. Let me give a good example of this from a product that isn't made for consumer use just to make my point:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7165/ocz-announces-zdxl-pcie-sql-accelerator-ssd-solution
This is a PCIE SSD product designed to boot server performance explicitly for Microsoft MS SQL Server. This product has been explicitly designed to make a given product that is quite expensive work faster.
Is this product cheating because it has been tuned just to give better results in one application? What if OCZ released a version of the product that was tuned to detect if it was working on MySQL, MS SQL Server and Oracle and optimize performance accordingly? What happens when someone tries to use it on another SQL database and get's less than stellar performance?
For the typical Slashdot car analogy think of Ferrari, they have been accused of cheating on car tests for many years by setting up their cars for the exact track they were about to be tested on. What would happen if Ferrari (or another manufacturer) tied their systems into the car's GPS?
Think of the Top Gear episode where the Nissan GTR knew it had just been driven onto a racetrack and turned off it's speed limiter. You could just as easily program the car to have optimal settings for that exact track and then populate in as many race tracks as you could. Is that cheating or is the manufacturer anticipating the potential needs of their customers and tuning their product accordingly?
If everyone playing the latest Call of Duty get's the same benefit when they buy their card, than can you really say it's cheating? Through the use of patches you can continuously upgrade the card to be optimized with the latest games.
Comparing Microsoft then and now and you've got to make a number of comparisons on why they grew back then compared to being stagnant as week old molasses now.
No stack ranking. Employees could focus on their job instead of everyone else's job.
More risk taking. They were willing to try new products without worrying nearly as much about eating into their own sales for another product.
Diversity. This was when Windows NT 3.1 was about to be released and it supported DEC Alpha as well as MIPS CPU's.
Mind-share. They realized mind share was more important than an iron fisted DRM approach and didn't get absurd with DRM.
Cheaper. At that time Unix workstations were a fair bit more expensive than Windows based computers and Microsoft was actually the cheaper option for the masses.
Options. You could run just about anything you wanted with their common platform.
I've got to imagine that I'm far from the only person that misses Microsoft from the days of old, before they became soul crushing monopoly that destroyed innovation at every opportunity. Would you believe people actually camped out overnight for Windows 95 and stores opened up at midnight just to sell it?
Microsoft has since declared war on their employees, vendors, professionals, OEM's and just about everyone else in the industry. Nowadays they pull stunts like the Windows RT walled garden and call that diversity. Microsoft used to be a great company, but today that's as much history as the DEC Alpha.
Microsoft would have offered a very sweetheart deal pricewise for this.
From Delta's standpoint it would also have the advantage in that almost nothing runs on it, meaning that people aren't going to muck with it install crap software and malware on the Surface RT is all but unheard of. They also almost certainly would have offered some type of enterprise management tools for the tablets from MS.
Enterprise support for the Ipad is a royal pain at best and tools are quite limited. The app store is oblivious to the concept that a computer could be owned my a company instead of a person. Support issues go far beyond these and their IT department doubtless didn't want to deal with it.
I'm not endorsing the Surface RT and I've certainly gone on the record here about how it's a terrible tablet. I'm just explaining the logic behind the order. They certainly could have made a much better choice than the Surface RT.
You'll note that I said that benefit for start ups on this was incidental. I'm not endorsing the position of the story that this will make start ups much more successful. Your taking me out of context on this, I'm merely talking about the laws of supply and demand. I am not endorsing for or against the new health insurance law.