Designing an OS? Are you serious? Have you ever looked at the documentation on Firefox beyond the user stuff? Mozilla's support for using Firefox on more than one computer at a time is so bad that the web is littered with abandoned effort after abandoned effort from end user to do it for them!
How on earth do they think they are going to support an operating system which/requires/ management when they can't even support a browser that requires management? You shouldn't have to go dozens of web sites to track down the settings and troll developer forums to get the settings needed to mass deploy an application.
Mozilla, you really, really need to spend some time talking to people in the enterprise and learning what their needs our for managing fleets of computers. I've been on more than one meeting where Firefox was axed from deployment - even though every single person in the room personally used it, preferred it, acknowledged it was more secure - strictly because it is completely unmanageable for an enterprise. Don't get me start on their administrative toolkit either. It isn't close to usable and doesn't begin to cover what is needed.
I'm sorry, until you can get your act up to speed for a single application support at least somewhere to the level of say, Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, your simply being absurd. It's not about the technical capabilities of your applications, it's about the ability to use and administer it on an enterprise scale.
I'm sorry, the enterprise experience with trying to manage Firefox is so bad that the idea of a Firefox Operating System is going to cost the poor person who suggests it their reputation at best.
Direct your outrage on this on to the people who let them get away with this. They settled for no fines or penalties. When the watchers let the scumbags get off with a slap on the wrist the message is clear.
1. Have you publicly acknowledged the exploit? 2. Have you given at least some idea of how it works? 3. Have you given any mitigation instructions or will people simply have to uninstall your product since your not saying how to mitigate this? 4. Have you given any type of public communication along the lines of "were working on it"? 5. Are you giving any type of eta for a hot fix? 6. Have you learned that saying, we'll fix a critical exploit on one billion machines at the regular quarterly update schedule is not acceptable?
Home sick today or I would have been neck deep in this all bloody day. Haven't had a chance to look and see if they learned from their last royal clusterfuck or not.
You took a perfectly good cause and ruined it in the name of profit!!!! You have just fed the tinfoil hat crown and ruined smart meters world wide for years to come.
Let's think about this? Hey spouse, want to get a new smart meter? Hell no, I do that and the government will spy on me, the debt collectors will use it against me, do I look like I was born yesterday?
No one is going to want one of these things attached to their house now knowing how they have actually been used. Why the hell couldn't you leave well enough alone and use it for what it was actually meant for?
Smart meter technology could have been one of the greatest real world technological green technologies we have seen in a long time. Instead some short sighted, can't see the next week because tomorrow is in the way greedy bastards ruined it to sell their customers out to debt collectors!
Words cannot begin to describe how short sided and idiotic these people were. I'm sorry they just can't.
I've spent a fair amount of time in Melbourne, I thought well of the people down there. What the hell happened?
Quantity of plant life does equal quality of plant life, much less diversity of plant life. Simply saying we have "X" isn't that terribly helpful without context.
So I'll provide some context and let's put a twist on this story which is being spun for political gain. In the year 1980 we had 4,453,831,714 people (the study starts in 1982 but close enough) In just 30 years the world's population grew 6,848,932,929.
Over the course of three decades, the observed plant growth on dry land has been about 53.6 petagrams of carbon each year
In other words, we have grown the population of the world by 50% in thirty years and we still kept just as much plant life. Job well done with planting things to compensate for a growing population! We don't need to change a thing, we doing everything right. Neither answer is right of course, they are both ways of spinning a set of meaningless facts.
Point of the matter is that any given set of statistics can be twisted for a given political agenda with ease. The only thing this study does is show how easily meaningless data can be slanted for gain political purposes when the data is without merit. All it does is measure quantity without context. Might as well say a ranchers supports incredible wildlife, there's 200 cows and a dozen field mice.
Beer = sealed unit that is covered to keep radioactive dust out. Water would have been exposed and open to radioactive dust. Radioactive dust is the biggest concern outside the immediate blast zone. I sincerely doubted the exploded a nuke just to test it's effect on beer. Probably a case of next nuke, throw a few cases downwind to see how they do.
The cost would be trivial and the knowledge would have been practical. Living in fear of a nuclear attack was quite real in those days. Remember this was back in the days of performing drills to duck and cover under desks in case of nuclear attack.
Using beer when water wasn't safe to drink is a tradition going back centuries. If you really want to get down to it, the founding of Plymouth was because the Pilgrims ran out of beer and needed to make more. The pilgrims were notable puritans of course. It actually makes a lot of sense to test it. I would imagine they also probably tested bottles of soda for the same reasons.
/besides, you know somebody enjoyed the opportunity to get drunk on the governments dime
As memory serves McAfee did this about 8-10 years ago with an update. It's a sign of poor release management and a failure to follow best practices. If they fail to follow best practices for something like this that is high visibility and customer facing, imagine what they look inside the company.
These services are called "perception management" and they operate under public relations and other marketing labels. This kind of thing has been going on for Centuries, hell the original name of Greenland was a "perception management" name given to attract settlers (Greenland has far more Ice than Iceland). Why is this portrayed as a new kind of thing?
Name any public website you can think of, Amazon, Twitter, Slashdot, Wikipedia or any other. There are companies that monitor those websites and respond to with accounts that are saved just for those purposes. These accounts can be rented out by thousands or tens of thousands. It's dishonest and it is something that websites have had to battle for years.
Articles about exposing professional shills have appeared and been covered extensively on the Atlantic, Wired, Slashdot, and a number of other sites I can think of in recent memory.
I think the more interesting technology piece on this would be to cover how websites go about detecting and burying shill accounts. It's really just a form of spam, and the war on shill accounts will likely mirror the war on spam in every regard. It's just something you have to watch out for.
Let's give the users some birthday presents. How about bringing about some features that people have been asking for?
Mobile Application - how does a technology based website/not/ have a mobile application? Mobile Support - actually trying to use slashdot on a mobile platform is painful. Simple Status Change - a simple delta of how people have modded you or commented on your comments? A disagree button - it's 15 years on and their is still no simple 'disagree', instead fanbois simply -1 any comment against their pet/whatever/ Comment activity - if you've got a comment that's being heavily modified you can't get the stats for it anymore, as memory serves you used to. Your user stats - once upon a time these were available, now your limited to your number of +5 comments Better shill detection - I wouldn't think this would be that hard to program, but I'm not a programmer Editor - enough said!
Okay, as a guy whose consulting career has included things like training consultants how to architect operating system migrations I'll offer some enlightenment. Pundit article is clueless and has no basis in reality.
Let's start with 43% of web traffic. What does that figure mean? In a nutshell right now 43% of all web traffic is Windows XP. Microsoft hasn't sold Windows XP in six years to the mass market. That means your typical average home user (not slashdot - think your clueless Aunt Martha) probably doesn't have her XP computer any more. Remember that 43% accounts for all traffic, regardless of source.
If Microsoft hasn't been selling XP to home users in six years than how on earth is 43% of all web traffic still Windows XP? It is of course coming from business, government and similar users that are running XP. What that means if your crunch the numbers to make them balance out is that the/overwhelming/ majority of business uses Windows XP. I would imagine your figures are probably well in the 80% range.
Microsoft is desparate to change this, however they bombed things royally with Vista and Windows XP was good enough. Migrations are expensive, embedded applications, package testing, development, image testing, hardware independent image development, personality capture and the like all take a lot of time. A migration of 75,000 users can easily take 1-2 years, and that is without any embedded dependencies that/require/ Windows XP.
You also need to package all of your applications which is very time and labor intensive (although it will return the investment in spades and can be used in lifecycle). There are also license costs for new software, labor costs for staff, labor costs for consultants who know what their doing, hardware costs, staff interruption.
Think about the testing that you have to release a package to production for a single piece of software that you releasing. Now imagine that are doing that for all of your major applications, at once, on a new operating system. Your testing requirements are mind boggling and dwarf the requirements of any typical application by an order of magnitude if you do it correctly. Include things like capturing user data, disparate environments, defining standards, infrastructure and everything else and you can see why a migration is usually the largest project an IT department will tackle every few years.
All of this requires people that really, really know things like operating systems, packages, servers, databases, cmdb's, web servers, drivers, security, software distribution and a host of other skills. You need consultants to perform something like that and there's a limited number of consultants that are qualified to do that kind of work. You could probably take all the qualified consultants that can do this work in the United States and put them in a single conference room with ease.
All of the above applies even if you didn't have a single Windows XP dependency. This excludes things like the fact that you have a lot of applications that have dependencies on Internet Explorer 6 (which is a very large quantity). These require programmers to bring their given application up the new standard (which you have to define and that takes time).
Sorry to burst your bubble, but their is only one reason for companies to migrate to Windows 7 (almost always 64bit), and that is because Microsoft is ending support for Windows XP.
Let's keep some perspective here. They only sell one model at a time. All of the other vendors sell multiple models at the same time. The implication is that this is somehow the leading phone ecosystem or some such thing. In reality Apple doesn't even sell as many smart phones as Samsung alone, never mind all of the other vendors.
Android has 68% of the worldwide market compared to 17% for apple, which slipped from 19% a year before. Look I'm all for personal choice, I think apple has some pretty neat things that they do, but can we check the hype machine in Realityville please?
Get your feet wet and start working with things. You need experience in order to prove that you can do things. Frankly experience is often more valuable than a degree or certification. For what it's worth, a funny thing happens with the right experience. You do funny things like holding a senior IT position at a very large University without claiming a degree or being a former student.
That being said I believe certifications and degrees are both useful and have value.
Degrees show that you can commit to something that takes years to get. However they don't necessarily mean you know jack squat about the subject you have a degree in. I have cleaned up after many a person with higher level degrees who royally fucked things up. I have also trained a lot of people with masters or PhD's over the years that were absolutely amazed to learn that I never did end up earning my degree.
Certifications are useful as a guiding path to help you get started in learning a given subject well. You can take a certification to pass the test or you can take it to learn the subject. Most people do the former and not the later. Done correctly a certification can be very valuable in laying foundational knowledge or providing a/framework/ for you to learn by.
I've gotten certifications over the years from generic ITIL ones to rare certifications that are only held by a few hundred people world wide. However when I look back over the years the most useful certification I ever earned was the old Networking Essentials cert from an early version of the MCSE test. It acted as a foundational knowledge that my dives into Novell, Microsoft, Cisco, Mac and Linux were all able to leverage.
However certifications have their limits. A few years after I earned my MCSE braindump sites started appearing on the Internet and that certification went from being quite valuable to an Internet punchline. The net result is that people got burned by paper MCSE's / (insert_cert_here) and don't place a lot of value on them (or other certs) any more. The net result now is that if people feel your relying on a certification to get an interview they are going to grill the daylights out of you to make sure you know your subject cold and aren't limited to book knowledge.
The only way to get past book knowledge and paper certification stigmas is to have experience. In other words you need to get out there and start producing. Keep an open mind on ways to do this that don't involve getting paid, especially when you don't have experience. Whether that means tackling an open source project (look at sourceforge sometime and it is quite obvious a number of projects were resume builders), working as an intern of whatever means you want.
Once you have done this you will a portfolio. You need think of your portfolio as your resume 2.0 and treat it accordingly. Make it professional, interesting, make sure it doesn't offend anyone, keep it clean that kind of thing. The point of the portfolio is to show and prove what you can do.
When you present your portfolio, something you will want to keep in mind is your design tradeoffs. Be prepared to answer why you did things one way and not another. You should also be prepared to then offer an example of when you would do things the other way. This is more important this it sounds. Good luck.
Okay, replying to myself after reading the summaries from the stories that came out and I hit the nail on the head. The only thing I missed was the you can plug the proprietary cable in either direction. There really wasn't anything new or noteworthy on this phone other than what I said. (slight bump in the IOS, but that is almost trivial and all iphones get that).
Pretty sad when you labelled flamebait for refusing to kiss Apples ass or refusing to comply with group think. Can we get a 'disagree' button for the fanbois please?
Slashdot Mirror
Designing an OS? Are you serious? Have you ever looked at the documentation on Firefox beyond the user stuff? Mozilla's support for using Firefox on more than one computer at a time is so bad that the web is littered with abandoned effort after abandoned effort from end user to do it for them!
How on earth do they think they are going to support an operating system which /requires/ management when they can't even support a browser that requires management? You shouldn't have to go dozens of web sites to track down the settings and troll developer forums to get the settings needed to mass deploy an application.
Mozilla, you really, really need to spend some time talking to people in the enterprise and learning what their needs our for managing fleets of computers. I've been on more than one meeting where Firefox was axed from deployment - even though every single person in the room personally used it, preferred it, acknowledged it was more secure - strictly because it is completely unmanageable for an enterprise. Don't get me start on their administrative toolkit either. It isn't close to usable and doesn't begin to cover what is needed.
I'm sorry, until you can get your act up to speed for a single application support at least somewhere to the level of say, Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, your simply being absurd. It's not about the technical capabilities of your applications, it's about the ability to use and administer it on an enterprise scale.
I'm sorry, the enterprise experience with trying to manage Firefox is so bad that the idea of a Firefox Operating System is going to cost the poor person who suggests it their reputation at best.
You have a point, I'm not sure you could even call this a slap on the wrist. My point was to direct outrage appropriately.
Direct your outrage on this on to the people who let them get away with this. They settled for no fines or penalties. When the watchers let the scumbags get off with a slap on the wrist the message is clear.
Oracle, did you learn from last time?
1. Have you publicly acknowledged the exploit?
2. Have you given at least some idea of how it works?
3. Have you given any mitigation instructions or will people simply have to uninstall your product since your not saying how to mitigate this?
4. Have you given any type of public communication along the lines of "were working on it"?
5. Are you giving any type of eta for a hot fix?
6. Have you learned that saying, we'll fix a critical exploit on one billion machines at the regular quarterly update schedule is not acceptable?
Home sick today or I would have been neck deep in this all bloody day. Haven't had a chance to look and see if they learned from their last royal clusterfuck or not.
You took a perfectly good cause and ruined it in the name of profit!!!! You have just fed the tinfoil hat crown and ruined smart meters world wide for years to come.
Let's think about this? Hey spouse, want to get a new smart meter? Hell no, I do that and the government will spy on me, the debt collectors will use it against me, do I look like I was born yesterday?
No one is going to want one of these things attached to their house now knowing how they have actually been used. Why the hell couldn't you leave well enough alone and use it for what it was actually meant for?
Smart meter technology could have been one of the greatest real world technological green technologies we have seen in a long time. Instead some short sighted, can't see the next week because tomorrow is in the way greedy bastards ruined it to sell their customers out to debt collectors!
Words cannot begin to describe how short sided and idiotic these people were. I'm sorry they just can't.
I've spent a fair amount of time in Melbourne, I thought well of the people down there. What the hell happened?
Quantity of plant life does equal quality of plant life, much less diversity of plant life. Simply saying we have "X" isn't that terribly helpful without context.
So I'll provide some context and let's put a twist on this story which is being spun for political gain. In the year 1980 we had 4,453,831,714 people (the study starts in 1982 but close enough) In just 30 years the world's population grew 6,848,932,929.
In other words, we have grown the population of the world by 50% in thirty years and we still kept just as much plant life. Job well done with planting things to compensate for a growing population! We don't need to change a thing, we doing everything right. Neither answer is right of course, they are both ways of spinning a set of meaningless facts.
Point of the matter is that any given set of statistics can be twisted for a given political agenda with ease. The only thing this study does is show how easily meaningless data can be slanted for gain political purposes when the data is without merit. All it does is measure quantity without context. Might as well say a ranchers supports incredible wildlife, there's 200 cows and a dozen field mice.
I didn't think it had happened, I have been enlightened. My day has now been made more cheery knowing that. What would you call that, a double Nobel?
I'm waiting for the day some wins an Ig Nobel and then goes on to win the Nobel prize as well. Such an accomplishment for humanity....
Beer = sealed unit that is covered to keep radioactive dust out. Water would have been exposed and open to radioactive dust. Radioactive dust is the biggest concern outside the immediate blast zone. I sincerely doubted the exploded a nuke just to test it's effect on beer. Probably a case of next nuke, throw a few cases downwind to see how they do.
The cost would be trivial and the knowledge would have been practical. Living in fear of a nuclear attack was quite real in those days. Remember this was back in the days of performing drills to duck and cover under desks in case of nuclear attack.
Using beer when water wasn't safe to drink is a tradition going back centuries. If you really want to get down to it, the founding of Plymouth was because the Pilgrims ran out of beer and needed to make more. The pilgrims were notable puritans of course. It actually makes a lot of sense to test it. I would imagine they also probably tested bottles of soda for the same reasons.
As memory serves McAfee did this about 8-10 years ago with an update. It's a sign of poor release management and a failure to follow best practices. If they fail to follow best practices for something like this that is high visibility and customer facing, imagine what they look inside the company.
Time to start bringing your business elsewhere.
These services are called "perception management" and they operate under public relations and other marketing labels. This kind of thing has been going on for Centuries, hell the original name of Greenland was a "perception management" name given to attract settlers (Greenland has far more Ice than Iceland). Why is this portrayed as a new kind of thing?
Name any public website you can think of, Amazon, Twitter, Slashdot, Wikipedia or any other. There are companies that monitor those websites and respond to with accounts that are saved just for those purposes. These accounts can be rented out by thousands or tens of thousands. It's dishonest and it is something that websites have had to battle for years.
Articles about exposing professional shills have appeared and been covered extensively on the Atlantic, Wired, Slashdot, and a number of other sites I can think of in recent memory.
I think the more interesting technology piece on this would be to cover how websites go about detecting and burying shill accounts. It's really just a form of spam, and the war on shill accounts will likely mirror the war on spam in every regard. It's just something you have to watch out for.
Would you like your thermonuclear war with a side of apple pie Ala mode?
Awesome, look forward to seeing them.
Let's give the users some birthday presents. How about bringing about some features that people have been asking for?
Mobile Application - how does a technology based website /not/ have a mobile application? /whatever/
Mobile Support - actually trying to use slashdot on a mobile platform is painful.
Simple Status Change - a simple delta of how people have modded you or commented on your comments?
A disagree button - it's 15 years on and their is still no simple 'disagree', instead fanbois simply -1 any comment against their pet
Comment activity - if you've got a comment that's being heavily modified you can't get the stats for it anymore, as memory serves you used to.
Your user stats - once upon a time these were available, now your limited to your number of +5 comments
Better shill detection - I wouldn't think this would be that hard to program, but I'm not a programmer
Editor - enough said!
This isn't a loss of features, this is a purification of your experience.
Okay, as a guy whose consulting career has included things like training consultants how to architect operating system migrations I'll offer some enlightenment. Pundit article is clueless and has no basis in reality.
Let's start with 43% of web traffic. What does that figure mean? In a nutshell right now 43% of all web traffic is Windows XP. Microsoft hasn't sold Windows XP in six years to the mass market. That means your typical average home user (not slashdot - think your clueless Aunt Martha) probably doesn't have her XP computer any more. Remember that 43% accounts for all traffic, regardless of source.
If Microsoft hasn't been selling XP to home users in six years than how on earth is 43% of all web traffic still Windows XP? It is of course coming from business, government and similar users that are running XP. What that means if your crunch the numbers to make them balance out is that the /overwhelming/ majority of business uses Windows XP. I would imagine your figures are probably well in the 80% range.
Microsoft is desparate to change this, however they bombed things royally with Vista and Windows XP was good enough. Migrations are expensive, embedded applications, package testing, development, image testing, hardware independent image development, personality capture and the like all take a lot of time. A migration of 75,000 users can easily take 1-2 years, and that is without any embedded dependencies that /require/ Windows XP.
You also need to package all of your applications which is very time and labor intensive (although it will return the investment in spades and can be used in lifecycle). There are also license costs for new software, labor costs for staff, labor costs for consultants who know what their doing, hardware costs, staff interruption.
Think about the testing that you have to release a package to production for a single piece of software that you releasing. Now imagine that are doing that for all of your major applications, at once, on a new operating system. Your testing requirements are mind boggling and dwarf the requirements of any typical application by an order of magnitude if you do it correctly. Include things like capturing user data, disparate environments, defining standards, infrastructure and everything else and you can see why a migration is usually the largest project an IT department will tackle every few years.
All of this requires people that really, really know things like operating systems, packages, servers, databases, cmdb's, web servers, drivers, security, software distribution and a host of other skills. You need consultants to perform something like that and there's a limited number of consultants that are qualified to do that kind of work. You could probably take all the qualified consultants that can do this work in the United States and put them in a single conference room with ease.
All of the above applies even if you didn't have a single Windows XP dependency. This excludes things like the fact that you have a lot of applications that have dependencies on Internet Explorer 6 (which is a very large quantity). These require programmers to bring their given application up the new standard (which you have to define and that takes time).
Sorry to burst your bubble, but their is only one reason for companies to migrate to Windows 7 (almost always 64bit), and that is because Microsoft is ending support for Windows XP.
Point well made.
Anonymous Coward is right. Dice did buy them out for $20 million.
One supercomputer to outsource them all
I assure you that I have been anti-hype and anti-marketing for decades. Sorry to burst your bubble.
You hit the nail on the head. This is a repeat of the PC wars all over again. A smart phone is just a small PC that happens to make phone calls.
Let's keep some perspective here. They only sell one model at a time. All of the other vendors sell multiple models at the same time. The implication is that this is somehow the leading phone ecosystem or some such thing. In reality Apple doesn't even sell as many smart phones as Samsung alone, never mind all of the other vendors.
Android has 68% of the worldwide market compared to 17% for apple, which slipped from 19% a year before. Look I'm all for personal choice, I think apple has some pretty neat things that they do, but can we check the hype machine in Realityville please?
Get your feet wet and start working with things. You need experience in order to prove that you can do things. Frankly experience is often more valuable than a degree or certification. For what it's worth, a funny thing happens with the right experience. You do funny things like holding a senior IT position at a very large University without claiming a degree or being a former student.
That being said I believe certifications and degrees are both useful and have value.
Degrees show that you can commit to something that takes years to get. However they don't necessarily mean you know jack squat about the subject you have a degree in. I have cleaned up after many a person with higher level degrees who royally fucked things up. I have also trained a lot of people with masters or PhD's over the years that were absolutely amazed to learn that I never did end up earning my degree.
Certifications are useful as a guiding path to help you get started in learning a given subject well. You can take a certification to pass the test or you can take it to learn the subject. Most people do the former and not the later. Done correctly a certification can be very valuable in laying foundational knowledge or providing a /framework/ for you to learn by.
I've gotten certifications over the years from generic ITIL ones to rare certifications that are only held by a few hundred people world wide. However when I look back over the years the most useful certification I ever earned was the old Networking Essentials cert from an early version of the MCSE test. It acted as a foundational knowledge that my dives into Novell, Microsoft, Cisco, Mac and Linux were all able to leverage.
However certifications have their limits. A few years after I earned my MCSE braindump sites started appearing on the Internet and that certification went from being quite valuable to an Internet punchline. The net result is that people got burned by paper MCSE's / (insert_cert_here) and don't place a lot of value on them (or other certs) any more. The net result now is that if people feel your relying on a certification to get an interview they are going to grill the daylights out of you to make sure you know your subject cold and aren't limited to book knowledge.
The only way to get past book knowledge and paper certification stigmas is to have experience. In other words you need to get out there and start producing. Keep an open mind on ways to do this that don't involve getting paid, especially when you don't have experience. Whether that means tackling an open source project (look at sourceforge sometime and it is quite obvious a number of projects were resume builders), working as an intern of whatever means you want.
Once you have done this you will a portfolio. You need think of your portfolio as your resume 2.0 and treat it accordingly. Make it professional, interesting, make sure it doesn't offend anyone, keep it clean that kind of thing. The point of the portfolio is to show and prove what you can do.
When you present your portfolio, something you will want to keep in mind is your design tradeoffs. Be prepared to answer why you did things one way and not another. You should also be prepared to then offer an example of when you would do things the other way. This is more important this it sounds. Good luck.
Science will ask biological type questions. The rest of the world only cares about these questions though:
Is it cute?
Is it tasty?
Can it do tricks?
Beyond that the rest of the world just doesn't care. Kind of sad actually.
Okay, replying to myself after reading the summaries from the stories that came out and I hit the nail on the head. The only thing I missed was the you can plug the proprietary cable in either direction. There really wasn't anything new or noteworthy on this phone other than what I said. (slight bump in the IOS, but that is almost trivial and all iphones get that).
Pretty sad when you labelled flamebait for refusing to kiss Apples ass or refusing to comply with group think. Can we get a 'disagree' button for the fanbois please?