Genius is an accident of birth, and true genius can be as crippling as any mental health disorder you can think of. It means flunking out of school easily or being tested for things like ADD only to discover that you were merely bored. It can make a job that isn't challenging a living hell as your mind simply can't cope with the monotony.
Genius level intelligence means a life of being shunned by school mates and later co-workers if you aren't careful to mask your intelligence. It creates a lot of social problems and can really hurt dating until you get really good at masking it. Genius is over-rated by those who lack it and rarely appreciated by those who have it. The most important skill a genius has to learn is how to mask their intelligence, so that those around them don't consider them to a 'genius'. Kind of sad when you think about it.
If you have a genius level child, the most important thing you can do for them is help them to develop their social skills, it will be their greatest challenge.
Correct, you can't join an RT device to a domain. This leaves developer certificates which are issued on a per machine basis and can't be used to distribute software. Microsoft makes a lot of noise out of the fact that they will catch you if try to use your developer certificate for another machine. Effectively, there is no official supported way to side load software to an RT device. This means that RT devices are effectively restricted to getting software only from the Microsoft store, which I have no doubt is quite by design.
Read my response to another user for more detail. I am responsible for hundreds of Ipad's at work in a/very/ pro Mac environment. I assure you that the only content the typical Ipad creates is the occasional email or note taking in meetings. The fact that there are a few content creation apps does not mean that you have typical professionals using an Ipad as a creation platform.
I assure you that if you read through my post history you will find plenty of comments that are critical to Microsoft as well. I hate to break it to you, but I'm an atheist when it comes to technology. I have no religion (mac, windows, android, linux etc) and routinely work with everything but Linux.
Interesting read, it looks like if you sign up for a developers license you can install Metro apps without being on a domain. I had recently started tackling how to distribute software to Windows 8 tablet and found the following:
The following quotes from Microsoft article give a flavor of the burden that is required to distribute applications to Windows 8:
"To enable sideloading on a Windows 8 Enterprise computer that is not domain-joined or on any Windows® 8 Pro computer, you must use a sideloading product activation key. To enable sideloading on a Windows® RT device, you must use a sideolading product activation key."
It would appear that I stand corrected, you can install on a tablet that is not joined to a domain. However you have to volume license key and or a developer license (not sure if you need both yet) to do so. Typically volume license keys aren't going to be available to anyone that wouldn't already have a domain to begin with. These quotes below from the link I supplied explain some of the burden that is required to 'sideload' Metro applications onto a Window 8 computer.
Certainly for home users, small business users and a fair chunk of mid size environments these requirements will simply be to burdensome to meet. Yes you/can/ do it, but in the real world it just isn't practical for all but the larger organizations to tackle.
"Typically, Windows Store apps are available only through the Windows® Store. You can submit LOB Windows Store apps to the Windows Store and make them available outside of your enterprise. However, you can also develop Windows Store apps for use only within your enterprise and add them to Windows devices you manage through a process we call sideloading."
"LOB Windows Store apps can be sideloaded onto a PC in the enterprise through scripts at runtime on a per-user basis. They can also be provisioned in an image by the enterprise so that the app is registered to each new user profile that's created on the PC. The requirements to sideload the app per-user or in the image are the same, but the Windows PowerShell cmdlets you use to add, get, and remove the apps are different."
App Signing Requirements
"You can install LOB Windows Store apps that are not signed by the Windows Store. The apps must be cryptographically signed and can only be installed on a computer that trusts the signing certificate."
Newsweek ceased being relevant when they became decidedly politically slanted decades ago. They became the liberal version of Fox news, reliable only for a guaranteed political slant. Nice that they are getting rid of the dead tree edition, but the reality is that their subscription base has been plummeting for years.
Changing the distribution form isn't going to change the reason people stopped reading them. Until they fix their blatant political bias this is nothing more than a stop gap between them and the dust bin of history. I predict they become little more than another blogger site within 3 years or so. This is the same company that was sold for a $1 not to long ago.
Before you go off thinking I'm some kind of right wing Fox news fanatic, I'm not very fond of them for their political bias either.
I probably have a few hundred Ipad's at work that fall under my responsibility. I can assure you that other than staff memo's or taking notes in meetings they are almost never used to produce content. People use the Ipad to consume content, not produce it, and a simple trawl through the app store makes that very apparent.
I also have a fairly large number of mac computers that I am responsible for, and those are are routinely used to produce content. For that matter most Android tablets are also only used to consume content. The fact of the matter is that without a keyboard at a minimum people simply don't have the interface needed to produce production levels of content. The places that do use them for production work tend to be very low interaction along the lines of taking orders at a store where only a few fields are filled out.
The comment wasn't an anti-apple troll, it was an observation based on a few years of seeing them used in a place that absolutely loves apple products. By way of point we recover content from a failed mac a few times a week. We have never once been asked to recover data on an Ipad at my work place. To put things in perspective, my employer has it's own private apple store and dedicated authorized warranty repair facility on site.
The bottom line is that the keyboard to allow for the production of content and not just the consumption of content is the most important thing Microsoft did in developing the Surface.
One thing I don't see getting a lot of play is that there are two different versions of the Surface. On the face of it they both pretty decent and with the keyboard people should actually be able to use on to produce content. The resolution is disappointing, but as has been pointed out elsewhere Microsoft has figured out three different ways to address that issue.
The RT model is the one that just went on sale. That is your toy that is really just a windows version of an Ipad except that it can produce content. However this model has serious drawbacks if you want to use one in a professional setting. You can't load or distribute apps for the Metro interface without using a process called side loading. Side loading can't be used unless your on a domain. The RT model can't join a domain, effectively making this a burden at best to try manage (third party agents etc). You also can't use any traditional application on it as it uses the ARM processor and Microsoft has been very adamant about not allowing any backwards compatibility with x86 or x64 apps.
The Pro version can join a domain and use all the apps that a normal Windows 8 computer can use. This is the model that is meant for use on networks and for use in a professional setting. The best way to keep them straight in your head is to think back to the day when XP came in two versions. The Pro version was the one that was meant to be used for production work, the regular version was the one meant for home users. For all intents and purposes you have two very different products with the almost identical name and size.
If you have to work with them professionally you should seriously considering putting out a memo to only allow purchase of the Pro model. This of course is why the pro model is built this way, because that is where the money is.
The current failure mode, lawfare by all kinds of pressure and interest groups
"Lawfare", never heard that before, I think I like it and Googling it I find it's definitely in use. Seems to be a very appropriate made up word that I think we'll see more of in the future.
The strategy is brilliant as a way to lock people into your service for the long run. Especially when you consider that with de-dupe they are really only putting pointers to a given file in a database with your account. Like or not, this is the cloud doing what the cloud does best and is the way of the future.
This is actually good area to research for everyday organizations that are not about to be on the receiving end of a police raid. The reason is simple, the most common disaster (not failure) that strikes most servers is the legal subpoena. Can your business survive a legal subpoena that would take a large portion of your data?
This is not an idle consideration, it's actually a very common consideration. Places like OnTrack do far more business recovering data for legal services like subpoenas than they do with disk failures. You usually get a certain amount of time (couple weeks or so) to respond to a subpoena with the requested data. If you don't get the request filled in time, or if the other side convinces the judge you might mess with the data they will simply seize your servers / data by court order?
Can you survive this? If you can survive this scenario, than chances are you can recover from just about any other reasonable disaster you might encounter. The pirate bay scenario is one that should be studied from a disaster recovery standpoint, regardless of your stance on piracy.
He was not the first to parachute faster than the speed of sound. He was the first to do so voluntarily. Of the first two people to do this, one of them died in the air. Not an easy feat.
You perfectly made my point with your reply, and I don't think you were even trying. Without attacking a single merit of what I said, all you did was reflect 'anti-US sentiment' and failed to site a single economic reason to spend the billions of dollars Galileo will cost.
My point stands, this is nothing more than a redundant multi-billion dollar pissing contest with no real economic benefit.
Galileo is nothing but a multi-billion dollar pissing contest with the US to say "look at me, I can make my own GPS". When the continent is neck deep in an economic crisis that is miring millions of people and putting nation states on the verge of collapse, their priorities are seriously misplaced.
Seriously, there is no real benefit to this other than vanity and snubbing their noses at the United States. This has seriously got to be one of the most foolish economic decisions they have made in decades. Might as well spend billions of dollars making your own version of the Internet for the same reasons and results.
What complete and utter nonsense. Congestion is the number source of poor fuel economy by far. It is such a big deal that every car sold in the US (and most other countries) comes with two different fuel economy numbers - Highway and City. For the overwhelming majority of cars in existence they get better fuel economy at highway speeds instead of city speeds. This holds equally true for tail pipe emissions / pollution / carbon output.
Congestion also is a leading contributor to poor health for a couple of really big reasons. First when cars are moving in congested roads they are polluting a lot more than highway roads. In aggregate this causes significantly more pollution (traffic circles which force people to slow down have to carefully select their flowers and fauna so that the additional pollution doesn't kill them).
The second problem is that when people are wasting time in traffic jams they are physically inactive and that is bad for your bottom line. When your spending 1-2 hours each direction getting to and from work, you simply feel too exhausted to go to the health club. Obesity is a public health epidemic and this is a significant contributing factor to it.
The problems continue at a very real level beyond simply pollution, fuel and public health problems. Stop and go traffic is very hard on cars with excess wear and tear and the figure (which I don't have time to track down right now) is very high in the billions of dollars per year. Maintenance issues cause cars to also receive poorer fuel economy earlier than they otherwise would.
When people are forced to live closer together you increase crime by increasing the surface area for criminals to exploit (more people = more opportunities). Higher population densities also decrease a lot of opportunities to participate in outdoors activities for kids which is reflected in healthier kids in the suburbs than inner cities.
The bottom line is that decreasing the funding for new roads has nothing to do with traffic congestion, pollution, or the public good. It has everything to do with trying to dictate the lifestyle that people live and this report is nothing more than pure social engineering.
Once you are a few years into your career you should be constantly learning as a matter of routine course.
I would argue about giving away a lot higher level training though. Beyond the basics a lot of training is expensive and requires going to a specialized training center to get. I recently designed a training class presently being taught to IT professionals where companies are paying a grand a day a day for each day in the course.
I'm big on training obviously, but if you think can simply get by with training every 5 years or so you are in serious trouble.
Your in technology, like it or not this is a field that requires more continuing education as a matter of course (if not law) than a lawyer or a doctor. You should never ever be retraining or training. Instead you should constantly be working on your next thing skill and never ever become complacent.
You can't afford to work in this field in a job where you know everything. You have to find a job where you have 80% of the qualifications so that you can learn the other 20% and expand your skill sets. If you don't you become the expert who is 100% qualified at something that was relevant five years ago. The expert who is 100% qualified is also known as tomorrows dinosaur.
Never, ever rest, never ever allow yourself to be in a position where you cannot be challenged. Whatever job you find, it has to be one where you are picking up new skills and learning new things - whatever those new things are.
I have also learned it can help to talk to your managers and explain that you want to start learning more about the business side or whatever else you have an interest in. It is called initiative and it will set you apart from all the other people that show and simply do their job.
To paraphrase a politician (who's name I don't know). "If it quakes like a duck, walks like a duck and looks like a duck, it is a duck."
Censorship is censorship, just because it is done by a corporation doesn't some how magically make it better. The fact that they manipulated Google into doing their censoring for them doesn't somehow make it clean just because the government wasn't the one doing it.
I don't buy that they aren't engaging in censorship just because they don't have the government doing it on their behalf. For the average person, they would be hard pressed to find an alternative that isn't censored.
What's next, refusing to sell printers to people because their for / against gay marriage? This is a tool and he was using it for legal purposes. What the manufacturer did was no different than any other kind of censorship. Deplorable.
Like all things, it will go better with bacon. And since we'll be creating instant fried bacon worldwide when this happens everything will be better. Nothing to worry about...
I can think of more than one time I have taken advantage of a bug and turned it into a feature. Always a bit dangerous in the event that they 'fix' the bug. I would imagine this why so much software inexplicably breaks with service packs (especially back in the nt4 through early xp days).
I've played with a number of distros off an on over the years, but the one I distinctly recall the most clearly was Red Hat 5.2 around 98 or so. I installed it and got to playing with it and the first thing I did was to increase the refresh rate on my monitor. I of course set it as high as it could go and it worked just fine.
About 2 minutes later the magic smoke was let out. Cost me a $300 monitor and was quite the object lesson on a new operating system. Thankfully you can't do this any more, however I would imagine that I'm far from the only person to have this happen to them back in the day.
Yeah, I think I got that memo. Now, I want you to find a single source me on their website that explains all of those settings, what they do, their values, what file you put them in, their context and how to implement them for all users at an enterprise level.
For enterprise deployments, your need to be able to set your configuration for any number of settings with ease. You can't do that with Firefox in the enterprise, I'm sorry but you just can't. I might need to configure any number of well over a thousand some settings, of which auto update is only one of them.
This is what Firefox needs to be able to stand a chance in hell of making it in the enterprise. Understand that the enterprise/wants/ to use Firefox - badly. 1. Enterprises need a single file that they can easily manipulate to change as needed for all users. Mozilla.cfg sort of handles this, but only in a limited capacity. 2. Central sources for documentation. Why does about:config only have some entries defined? I shouldn't have to troll developer forums or bug reports to find out how to manipulate something. 3. Easier support. The fact that it's open source is meaningless when programmers are not the ones supporting and distributing Firefox into production. IT professionals who are/not/ programmers need to be able to readily research and configure Firefox the way they want it. 4. Don't make judgement calls for my organization. You feel wonderful about browser rights, that's nice. I'm not confusing 75,000 users with a prompt about their 'browser rights' and crap-flooding the helpdesk. I should be able to easily disable this kind of thing without spending a lot of time trying to find the right setting. 5. Whoever came up with a six week release schedule needs to be placed into a monastery where they measure time by the seasons to gain some perspective. This places a heavy burden on enterprises and is a support burden. No other software product has this kind of release schedule and it goes against industry best practice.
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Genius is an accident of birth, and true genius can be as crippling as any mental health disorder you can think of. It means flunking out of school easily or being tested for things like ADD only to discover that you were merely bored. It can make a job that isn't challenging a living hell as your mind simply can't cope with the monotony.
Genius level intelligence means a life of being shunned by school mates and later co-workers if you aren't careful to mask your intelligence. It creates a lot of social problems and can really hurt dating until you get really good at masking it. Genius is over-rated by those who lack it and rarely appreciated by those who have it. The most important skill a genius has to learn is how to mask their intelligence, so that those around them don't consider them to a 'genius'. Kind of sad when you think about it.
If you have a genius level child, the most important thing you can do for them is help them to develop their social skills, it will be their greatest challenge.
Correct, you can't join an RT device to a domain. This leaves developer certificates which are issued on a per machine basis and can't be used to distribute software. Microsoft makes a lot of noise out of the fact that they will catch you if try to use your developer certificate for another machine. Effectively, there is no official supported way to side load software to an RT device. This means that RT devices are effectively restricted to getting software only from the Microsoft store, which I have no doubt is quite by design.
Read my response to another user for more detail. I am responsible for hundreds of Ipad's at work in a /very/ pro Mac environment. I assure you that the only content the typical Ipad creates is the occasional email or note taking in meetings. The fact that there are a few content creation apps does not mean that you have typical professionals using an Ipad as a creation platform.
I assure you that if you read through my post history you will find plenty of comments that are critical to Microsoft as well. I hate to break it to you, but I'm an atheist when it comes to technology. I have no religion (mac, windows, android, linux etc) and routinely work with everything but Linux.
Interesting read, it looks like if you sign up for a developers license you can install Metro apps without being on a domain. I had recently started tackling how to distribute software to Windows 8 tablet and found the following:
The following quotes from Microsoft article give a flavor of the burden that is required to distribute applications to Windows 8:
It would appear that I stand corrected, you can install on a tablet that is not joined to a domain. However you have to volume license key and or a developer license (not sure if you need both yet) to do so. Typically volume license keys aren't going to be available to anyone that wouldn't already have a domain to begin with. These quotes below from the link I supplied explain some of the burden that is required to 'sideload' Metro applications onto a Window 8 computer.
Certainly for home users, small business users and a fair chunk of mid size environments these requirements will simply be to burdensome to meet. Yes you /can/ do it, but in the real world it just isn't practical for all but the larger organizations to tackle.
App Signing Requirements
Newsweek ceased being relevant when they became decidedly politically slanted decades ago. They became the liberal version of Fox news, reliable only for a guaranteed political slant. Nice that they are getting rid of the dead tree edition, but the reality is that their subscription base has been plummeting for years.
Changing the distribution form isn't going to change the reason people stopped reading them. Until they fix their blatant political bias this is nothing more than a stop gap between them and the dust bin of history. I predict they become little more than another blogger site within 3 years or so. This is the same company that was sold for a $1 not to long ago.
Before you go off thinking I'm some kind of right wing Fox news fanatic, I'm not very fond of them for their political bias either.
I probably have a few hundred Ipad's at work that fall under my responsibility. I can assure you that other than staff memo's or taking notes in meetings they are almost never used to produce content. People use the Ipad to consume content, not produce it, and a simple trawl through the app store makes that very apparent.
I also have a fairly large number of mac computers that I am responsible for, and those are are routinely used to produce content. For that matter most Android tablets are also only used to consume content. The fact of the matter is that without a keyboard at a minimum people simply don't have the interface needed to produce production levels of content. The places that do use them for production work tend to be very low interaction along the lines of taking orders at a store where only a few fields are filled out.
The comment wasn't an anti-apple troll, it was an observation based on a few years of seeing them used in a place that absolutely loves apple products. By way of point we recover content from a failed mac a few times a week. We have never once been asked to recover data on an Ipad at my work place. To put things in perspective, my employer has it's own private apple store and dedicated authorized warranty repair facility on site.
The bottom line is that the keyboard to allow for the production of content and not just the consumption of content is the most important thing Microsoft did in developing the Surface.
One thing I don't see getting a lot of play is that there are two different versions of the Surface. On the face of it they both pretty decent and with the keyboard people should actually be able to use on to produce content. The resolution is disappointing, but as has been pointed out elsewhere Microsoft has figured out three different ways to address that issue.
The RT model is the one that just went on sale. That is your toy that is really just a windows version of an Ipad except that it can produce content. However this model has serious drawbacks if you want to use one in a professional setting. You can't load or distribute apps for the Metro interface without using a process called side loading. Side loading can't be used unless your on a domain. The RT model can't join a domain, effectively making this a burden at best to try manage (third party agents etc). You also can't use any traditional application on it as it uses the ARM processor and Microsoft has been very adamant about not allowing any backwards compatibility with x86 or x64 apps.
The Pro version can join a domain and use all the apps that a normal Windows 8 computer can use. This is the model that is meant for use on networks and for use in a professional setting. The best way to keep them straight in your head is to think back to the day when XP came in two versions. The Pro version was the one that was meant to be used for production work, the regular version was the one meant for home users. For all intents and purposes you have two very different products with the almost identical name and size.
If you have to work with them professionally you should seriously considering putting out a memo to only allow purchase of the Pro model. This of course is why the pro model is built this way, because that is where the money is.
"Lawfare", never heard that before, I think I like it and Googling it I find it's definitely in use. Seems to be a very appropriate made up word that I think we'll see more of in the future.
The strategy is brilliant as a way to lock people into your service for the long run. Especially when you consider that with de-dupe they are really only putting pointers to a given file in a database with your account. Like or not, this is the cloud doing what the cloud does best and is the way of the future.
This is actually good area to research for everyday organizations that are not about to be on the receiving end of a police raid. The reason is simple, the most common disaster (not failure) that strikes most servers is the legal subpoena. Can your business survive a legal subpoena that would take a large portion of your data?
This is not an idle consideration, it's actually a very common consideration. Places like OnTrack do far more business recovering data for legal services like subpoenas than they do with disk failures. You usually get a certain amount of time (couple weeks or so) to respond to a subpoena with the requested data. If you don't get the request filled in time, or if the other side convinces the judge you might mess with the data they will simply seize your servers / data by court order?
Can you survive this? If you can survive this scenario, than chances are you can recover from just about any other reasonable disaster you might encounter. The pirate bay scenario is one that should be studied from a disaster recovery standpoint, regardless of your stance on piracy.
He was not the first to parachute faster than the speed of sound. He was the first to do so voluntarily. Of the first two people to do this, one of them died in the air. Not an easy feat.
You perfectly made my point with your reply, and I don't think you were even trying. Without attacking a single merit of what I said, all you did was reflect 'anti-US sentiment' and failed to site a single economic reason to spend the billions of dollars Galileo will cost.
My point stands, this is nothing more than a redundant multi-billion dollar pissing contest with no real economic benefit.
Galileo is nothing but a multi-billion dollar pissing contest with the US to say "look at me, I can make my own GPS". When the continent is neck deep in an economic crisis that is miring millions of people and putting nation states on the verge of collapse, their priorities are seriously misplaced.
Seriously, there is no real benefit to this other than vanity and snubbing their noses at the United States. This has seriously got to be one of the most foolish economic decisions they have made in decades. Might as well spend billions of dollars making your own version of the Internet for the same reasons and results.
What complete and utter nonsense. Congestion is the number source of poor fuel economy by far. It is such a big deal that every car sold in the US (and most other countries) comes with two different fuel economy numbers - Highway and City. For the overwhelming majority of cars in existence they get better fuel economy at highway speeds instead of city speeds. This holds equally true for tail pipe emissions / pollution / carbon output.
Congestion also is a leading contributor to poor health for a couple of really big reasons. First when cars are moving in congested roads they are polluting a lot more than highway roads. In aggregate this causes significantly more pollution (traffic circles which force people to slow down have to carefully select their flowers and fauna so that the additional pollution doesn't kill them).
The second problem is that when people are wasting time in traffic jams they are physically inactive and that is bad for your bottom line. When your spending 1-2 hours each direction getting to and from work, you simply feel too exhausted to go to the health club. Obesity is a public health epidemic and this is a significant contributing factor to it.
The problems continue at a very real level beyond simply pollution, fuel and public health problems. Stop and go traffic is very hard on cars with excess wear and tear and the figure (which I don't have time to track down right now) is very high in the billions of dollars per year. Maintenance issues cause cars to also receive poorer fuel economy earlier than they otherwise would.
When people are forced to live closer together you increase crime by increasing the surface area for criminals to exploit (more people = more opportunities). Higher population densities also decrease a lot of opportunities to participate in outdoors activities for kids which is reflected in healthier kids in the suburbs than inner cities.
The bottom line is that decreasing the funding for new roads has nothing to do with traffic congestion, pollution, or the public good. It has everything to do with trying to dictate the lifestyle that people live and this report is nothing more than pure social engineering.
Once you are a few years into your career you should be constantly learning as a matter of routine course.
I would argue about giving away a lot higher level training though. Beyond the basics a lot of training is expensive and requires going to a specialized training center to get. I recently designed a training class presently being taught to IT professionals where companies are paying a grand a day a day for each day in the course.
I'm big on training obviously, but if you think can simply get by with training every 5 years or so you are in serious trouble.
Your in technology, like it or not this is a field that requires more continuing education as a matter of course (if not law) than a lawyer or a doctor. You should never ever be retraining or training. Instead you should constantly be working on your next thing skill and never ever become complacent.
You can't afford to work in this field in a job where you know everything. You have to find a job where you have 80% of the qualifications so that you can learn the other 20% and expand your skill sets. If you don't you become the expert who is 100% qualified at something that was relevant five years ago. The expert who is 100% qualified is also known as tomorrows dinosaur.
Never, ever rest, never ever allow yourself to be in a position where you cannot be challenged. Whatever job you find, it has to be one where you are picking up new skills and learning new things - whatever those new things are.
I have also learned it can help to talk to your managers and explain that you want to start learning more about the business side or whatever else you have an interest in. It is called initiative and it will set you apart from all the other people that show and simply do their job.
How can I see this replacing "how would you move Mt Fuji" as a future interview question?
Not sure if your trolling or ignorant, but will give the benefit of the doubt. Bruce PerensBio.
To paraphrase a politician (who's name I don't know). "If it quakes like a duck, walks like a duck and looks like a duck, it is a duck."
Censorship is censorship, just because it is done by a corporation doesn't some how magically make it better. The fact that they manipulated Google into doing their censoring for them doesn't somehow make it clean just because the government wasn't the one doing it.
I don't buy that they aren't engaging in censorship just because they don't have the government doing it on their behalf. For the average person, they would be hard pressed to find an alternative that isn't censored.
What's next, refusing to sell printers to people because their for / against gay marriage? This is a tool and he was using it for legal purposes. What the manufacturer did was no different than any other kind of censorship. Deplorable.
Like all things, it will go better with bacon. And since we'll be creating instant fried bacon worldwide when this happens everything will be better. Nothing to worry about...
Because i am not a programmer, and you make things work how you can.
I can think of more than one time I have taken advantage of a bug and turned it into a feature. Always a bit dangerous in the event that they 'fix' the bug. I would imagine this why so much software inexplicably breaks with service packs (especially back in the nt4 through early xp days).
I've played with a number of distros off an on over the years, but the one I distinctly recall the most clearly was Red Hat 5.2 around 98 or so. I installed it and got to playing with it and the first thing I did was to increase the refresh rate on my monitor. I of course set it as high as it could go and it worked just fine.
About 2 minutes later the magic smoke was let out. Cost me a $300 monitor and was quite the object lesson on a new operating system. Thankfully you can't do this any more, however I would imagine that I'm far from the only person to have this happen to them back in the day.
lockPref("app.update.mode", 0);
lockPref("app.update.service.enabled", true);
lockPref("app.update.enabled", true);
lockPref("app.update.interval", 14400);
lockPref("app.update.auto", true);
lockPref("app.update.autoUpdateEnabled", true);
pref("toolkit.telemetry.prompted", 2);
pref("toolkit.telemetry.rejected", true);
pref("toolkit.telemetry.enabled", false);
Yeah, I think I got that memo. Now, I want you to find a single source me on their website that explains all of those settings, what they do, their values, what file you put them in, their context and how to implement them for all users at an enterprise level.
For enterprise deployments, your need to be able to set your configuration for any number of settings with ease. You can't do that with Firefox in the enterprise, I'm sorry but you just can't. I might need to configure any number of well over a thousand some settings, of which auto update is only one of them.
This is what Firefox needs to be able to stand a chance in hell of making it in the enterprise. Understand that the enterprise /wants/ to use Firefox - badly. /not/ programmers need to be able to readily research and configure Firefox the way they want it.
1. Enterprises need a single file that they can easily manipulate to change as needed for all users. Mozilla.cfg sort of handles this, but only in a limited capacity.
2. Central sources for documentation. Why does about:config only have some entries defined? I shouldn't have to troll developer forums or bug reports to find out how to manipulate something.
3. Easier support. The fact that it's open source is meaningless when programmers are not the ones supporting and distributing Firefox into production. IT professionals who are
4. Don't make judgement calls for my organization. You feel wonderful about browser rights, that's nice. I'm not confusing 75,000 users with a prompt about their 'browser rights' and crap-flooding the helpdesk. I should be able to easily disable this kind of thing without spending a lot of time trying to find the right setting.
5. Whoever came up with a six week release schedule needs to be placed into a monastery where they measure time by the seasons to gain some perspective. This places a heavy burden on enterprises and is a support burden. No other software product has this kind of release schedule and it goes against industry best practice.