Unfortunately, Symantec seems to have a bit of the reverse Midas touch going on: they aquire a formerly promising company, it turns to shit, much less any attempts at internal development.
Imagine a merger of Symantec and CA. (shudder)
Just think of it as being like hazmat cleanup: anything too dangerous to neutralize, you concentrate for easier sequestration...
If you want to assign bonus points for low-effort existence, how about viruses? It's a matter of some ambiguity whether they even bother to be alive; but that hardly stops them from being mind bogglingly numerous and found basically wherever there are hosts available.
I'm not surprised. trees and plants were here before we were.
Genome sizes can drift in either direction over time(or just sort of wander), though, so finding a radically pruned minimum-functional-genome would also be a possible consequence of a long evolutionary history. Redundancy is nice; but DNA synthesis isn't metabolically free.
I don't know whether or not it will actually save Windows Phone whatever version, markets have traditionally been rather cruel to everyone except the first one or two vendors, and the OEM cloneshops who scrape by on margins that wouldn't even keep the lights on at some fancy corporate campus; but MS' takeover of Nokia looks far better executed than their takeover of Danger.
With Danger, they shelled out substantial money for a formerly fairly vigorous company and turned it into... 'Project Pink', while simultaneously pissing off Verizon, probably the single most powerful carrier in the US, and wasting substantial amounts of time reinventing the wheel because Sidekicks didn't run WinCE and that was ideologically unacceptable. They then went on to one of the fastest launch-to-cancellation cycles in contemporary history. Then, just to add injury to insult, they lost all their existing sidekick customers' data in a high-profile fiasco that highlighted the downsides of the cloud-centric model they were hoping to promote(and probably didn't endear them any further to carriers who had been selling Danger handsets by the boatload in the past). Good job on that one, guys.
With Nokia, by contrast, they picked up a respected hardware OEM to serve as their lead design vassal for phones shipping with their OS, killed off Nokia's remaining attempts to build or modernize their own OS, and all for a relative pittance. Made Google's Motorola buy look like amateur improv comedy hour.
At least Ballmer has the decency to sometimes attempt things in-house, Symantec is more like watching the MS acquisition of Danger/Sidekick all the time, at a slightly smaller scale.
You do really have to wonder about the fact that an antivirus company(which would theoretically know something about using 'signatures' to detect things), has a difficult time using the theoretically-unique serial number of your product to route you to the correct unhelpful script-reader...
You also were...less than totally impressed... by Altiris 7?
I think that our internal review of that piece of work is the only time my jaw has ever literally dropped when dealing with a vendor. I've never seen an acquisition squandered that hard, ever, much less subsequently offered as an 'upgrade' with a straight face.
I can only assume that the blowback must have been pretty severe; because they certainly didn't want to release 6.9SP5 (and oh fuck does it show; but still better than 7).
On the plus side, they eliminated the downright immoral practice of being able to 'easily contact the developers of the software you purchased if you need support' in favor of Symantec's Labyrinthine Phone Tree of Utter Suffering, which encourages self-sufficiency by making the alternative far, far, worse.
Unfortunately, Symantec seems to have a bit of the reverse Midas touch going on: they aquire a formerly promising company, it turns to shit, much less any attempts at internal development.
PGP: is it cool? Definitely, noble lineage, strong encryption for the masses, etc. Has Symantec done anything worth mentioning, aside from (perhaps, this is Symantec here) compatibility updates since they bought it? Crickets. (And, as for the hardware token, fully integrated USB ones are nice; but smartcards are pretty much 100% commodified, and designed to securely store private keys, so even a hardware token would bring little more than convenience to the table). Backup Exec is fiddly, undistinguished, and nontrivially expensive, and just isn't looking any better with age. The Altiris acquisition, while minor in the grand scheme of their operations, they utterly fucked up(take a formerly relatively niche product; but a niche product with a niche, and turn it into a shitty attempt at being a competitor to MS SMS? What could go wrong?).
Honestly, the only surprising thing about Symantec's 'strategy' is that it isn't hurting them more. They haven't developed anything worth buying out of the bargain bin in god-knows-how-long, and they manage to impart nontrivial negative value to anybody they buy almost immediately. Take them out back, shoot them, and give the money back to the shareholders...
Justice is not an eye for an eye. Justice is not torture. Justice is not becoming what you seek to destroy.
Precisely! That's why we need to use Science to enhance our criminals so that justice can be 10, maybe even 100, eyes for an eye without running into pesky human limits!
This seems to be the very definition of "cruel and unusual".
We can be pretty creative about what fits through the 8th Amendment here in the Land Of The Free...
Now, this commie-pinko entitlement liberal nonsense about providing free life extension medicine to a bunch of undeserving criminals... That might be a harder sell.
That's what I've seen, that 4 out of 5 youngins can't be bothered to look anything up that they can't show off.
Are you, by any chance, also a witness to the mind-boggling spectacle of 'two or more people holding internet-connected devices and arguing furiously about the state of some matter of fact that could be looked up in moments'? That one drives me to a state of (admittedly irrational) rage.
Oh, very much so, which is why I would have no expectation that a programmer would necessarily know anything about configuring a common corporate mail client, or think worse of them for not knowing; but the procedures for 'google around to see if somebody knows why Library X has this weird quirk' and 'google around to see if somebody knows where Outlook 2007 puts the advanced settings for an exchange connection' are pretty much identical, and for any remotely common question about Outlook will certainly work.
Really, I'd expect the same procedure even if I asked a Flash developer a question related to veterinary medicine, load-sizing industrial chillers for injection molding processes, or saltwater aquarium care.
The modest overlap between IT stuff and 'stuff you would pick up getting a common contemporary dev environment set up(especially for something like Flash, if they were C gurus or something maybe they did do all their work camped out on the one SPARC installation their university forgot to dismantle, just because that's how they roll; but Flash doesn't really give you that option)' makes it more surprising that a contemporary Flash dev wouldn't know, offhand, about common desktop software; but it's the failure to 'just ask the internet instead of bothering somebody you probably don't want to look stupid in front of' that is nearly unimaginable.
I guess you don't believe you've fallen into the trap of "naive reality"?
No, not really. My assertion is merely that at least some aspects of 'reality' are not correlated with belief state. Not necessarily that they are 'knowable' in some terribly useful way, or otherwise epidemiologically tractable.
I think pediatric donors are covered by parental consent or lack thereof (which you could presumably gather ahead of time, exactly as you gather the parents' own consent ahead of time) and it wouldn't be terribly difficult to exclude last minute converts: the mechanisms are already in place for people to opt in, and all you'd need is opt-in date to know how recently they filed, which would allow you to either establish blanket minimums or category minimums based on how far ahead a given organ usually gives warnings of impending failure.
Based on the fairly favorable reviews of the 41 million pixel Nokias, there are apparently some clever tricks to turn lots of fairly lousy pixels into a smaller number of better ones.
Given that the state of sensor tech is basically the same at all (reasonable) sensor sizes, you are still going to get better results with a bigger chip than you will with the pitiful little sliver in your average cellphone; but apparently having more pixels is, at least potentially, a useful thing.
There are good glass / alternative options out there that will hold up to some abuse a little better. i.e. it won't look frosted over time from minute scratches.
Aside from cost(polycarbonate compares quite favorably to cheap glass, and exotic optical glass isn't cheap), I suspect that they like the failure mode of plastics better. Scratch resistance, even with hard-coat, isn't so hot, so they will 'fog' slightly over time if exposed to abrasion; but that's a relatively slow process and may remain tolerable even once it starts. Glass, especially the surface-toughened stuff that all the smartphone kids are using these days, has lovely scratch resistance; but poke it just a bit too hard and it's massive dramatic cracking time. If you are stacking 6 teeny pieces in the (constrained) space of a modern cellphone, you'd probably be talking about some touchy slivers of glass.
"Among them are 4 (four) Flash developers. As a test, when we moved to another building and they all got new computers last year, I made them configure their mail reader (MS Outlook) by themselves. Just gave them each a piece of paper with everything they needed, set them loose, and observed.
One immediately came back asking for help, and two of the others wouldn't have got it working without assistance from the fourth."
What surprises me most about that is not so much that they aren't familiar with Outlook configuration (webmail has butchered general knowledge that 'email' is even something that you don't just get from a website, and Outlook's heaviest presence is in corporate/institutional where IT tends to automagic as much of that as they can, lest they have to walk you through it.); but that someone of their demographic (junior, recent graduates, presumably comparatively young) wouldn't Just Fucking Google It before asking a potentially embarrassing question. Especially given that googling around a bit is more or less the standard response to a situation where documentation is lacking or unclear on some programming matter.
The fact that they lacked specific knowledge of a given mail client isn't too surprising(though Outlook isn't rocket surgery, so failure to figure it out is a little weirder); but how does somebody make it through programmer school without picking up on the fact that the internet is a repository of many secrets and asking it can save you a lot of time and trouble?
I guess no one's ever heard of auto correlation. If enough people say something is what everyone else believes then it becomes the truth.
There is this curious phenomenon, known as 'reality', that is known to exhibit behavior wholly uncorrelated with human belief states. Often painful; but occasionally hilarious.
It doesn't necessarily come down to humans (who can't necessarily save you if very fast responses are required or very subtle deviations need to be detected), though they can certainly help; but cost is much of the problem on the software side as well. More than a few important things run at the 'incompetent and overworked IT staff usually apply patches within a few months of release, assuming it isn't one of the systems that the vendor says you shouldn't touch' level and people are unwilling enough to shell out what it would take to bring them up to 'commercial best practice' levels, much less the (stratospheric, if we even have enough suitably qualified humans available) cost of 'all formally proven and whatnot'...
I think I have a call from 1985 on line one, from some guy called 'Therac-25' who seems very excited about the importance of hardware safeguards and not trusting your software overmuch...
On the plus side, while the upper bound for complexity(sometimes necessary, sometimes self-imposed) shows no signs of slowing down, the supply of problems that are tractable with historical methods shows no sign of exhaustion.
If the slashdot-asker is asking because his boss wants a problem that isn't a member of that category solved, or the cheap offshore labor has gotten adequate at solving that class of problems for peanuts, he is undeniably in serious trouble; but the mere existence of greater complexity does not appear to have actually solved all the lower complexity problems.
If you think fifteen years in the profession makes you an 'old programmer'.
Depending on how old you are when you start, the amount of time required to become 'an old programmer' can be identical to the amount of time required to become 'a programmer'...
ACPI WMI specs from the HW makers would be nice. It's frustrating how many laptops have broken hotkeys under Linux.
If we are currently at the point where you can't even get the details of what the Windows Management Instrumentation blobs embedded in the motherboard firmware mean, that might be another reason why somebody running a Linux company might dislike ACPI...
As long as (through some mixture of overt standard-setting to that effect, and basic 'you actually think that we are going to keep testing our BIOS once it boots Windows? That means that it's ready to ship!' OEM engineering) proprietary firmware is basically the lowest level of Windows drivers, writing other OSes on top of it just isn't going to be a pleasant experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, Symantec seems to have a bit of the reverse Midas touch going on: they aquire a formerly promising company, it turns to shit, much less any attempts at internal development.
Imagine a merger of Symantec and CA. (shudder)
Just think of it as being like hazmat cleanup: anything too dangerous to neutralize, you concentrate for easier sequestration...
If you want to assign bonus points for low-effort existence, how about viruses? It's a matter of some ambiguity whether they even bother to be alive; but that hardly stops them from being mind bogglingly numerous and found basically wherever there are hosts available.
I'm not surprised. trees and plants were here before we were.
Genome sizes can drift in either direction over time(or just sort of wander), though, so finding a radically pruned minimum-functional-genome would also be a possible consequence of a long evolutionary history. Redundancy is nice; but DNA synthesis isn't metabolically free.
Most human genes are backed up in numerous copies; but they are spread between sites for continuity of operations purposes.
Unfortunately for you, you are just a site, not the operation, so your continuity is a distinctly secondary objective.
I don't know whether or not it will actually save Windows Phone whatever version, markets have traditionally been rather cruel to everyone except the first one or two vendors, and the OEM cloneshops who scrape by on margins that wouldn't even keep the lights on at some fancy corporate campus; but MS' takeover of Nokia looks far better executed than their takeover of Danger.
With Danger, they shelled out substantial money for a formerly fairly vigorous company and turned it into... 'Project Pink', while simultaneously pissing off Verizon, probably the single most powerful carrier in the US, and wasting substantial amounts of time reinventing the wheel because Sidekicks didn't run WinCE and that was ideologically unacceptable. They then went on to one of the fastest launch-to-cancellation cycles in contemporary history. Then, just to add injury to insult, they lost all their existing sidekick customers' data in a high-profile fiasco that highlighted the downsides of the cloud-centric model they were hoping to promote(and probably didn't endear them any further to carriers who had been selling Danger handsets by the boatload in the past). Good job on that one, guys.
With Nokia, by contrast, they picked up a respected hardware OEM to serve as their lead design vassal for phones shipping with their OS, killed off Nokia's remaining attempts to build or modernize their own OS, and all for a relative pittance. Made Google's Motorola buy look like amateur improv comedy hour.
At least Ballmer has the decency to sometimes attempt things in-house, Symantec is more like watching the MS acquisition of Danger/Sidekick all the time, at a slightly smaller scale.
You do really have to wonder about the fact that an antivirus company(which would theoretically know something about using 'signatures' to detect things), has a difficult time using the theoretically-unique serial number of your product to route you to the correct unhelpful script-reader...
You also were...less than totally impressed... by Altiris 7?
I think that our internal review of that piece of work is the only time my jaw has ever literally dropped when dealing with a vendor. I've never seen an acquisition squandered that hard, ever, much less subsequently offered as an 'upgrade' with a straight face.
I can only assume that the blowback must have been pretty severe; because they certainly didn't want to release 6.9SP5 (and oh fuck does it show; but still better than 7).
On the plus side, they eliminated the downright immoral practice of being able to 'easily contact the developers of the software you purchased if you need support' in favor of Symantec's Labyrinthine Phone Tree of Utter Suffering, which encourages self-sufficiency by making the alternative far, far, worse.
Unfortunately, Symantec seems to have a bit of the reverse Midas touch going on: they aquire a formerly promising company, it turns to shit, much less any attempts at internal development.
PGP: is it cool? Definitely, noble lineage, strong encryption for the masses, etc. Has Symantec done anything worth mentioning, aside from (perhaps, this is Symantec here) compatibility updates since they bought it? Crickets. (And, as for the hardware token, fully integrated USB ones are nice; but smartcards are pretty much 100% commodified, and designed to securely store private keys, so even a hardware token would bring little more than convenience to the table). Backup Exec is fiddly, undistinguished, and nontrivially expensive, and just isn't looking any better with age. The Altiris acquisition, while minor in the grand scheme of their operations, they utterly fucked up(take a formerly relatively niche product; but a niche product with a niche, and turn it into a shitty attempt at being a competitor to MS SMS? What could go wrong?).
Honestly, the only surprising thing about Symantec's 'strategy' is that it isn't hurting them more. They haven't developed anything worth buying out of the bargain bin in god-knows-how-long, and they manage to impart nontrivial negative value to anybody they buy almost immediately. Take them out back, shoot them, and give the money back to the shareholders...
Justice is not an eye for an eye. Justice is not torture. Justice is not becoming what you seek to destroy.
Precisely! That's why we need to use Science to enhance our criminals so that justice can be 10, maybe even 100, eyes for an eye without running into pesky human limits!
This seems to be the very definition of "cruel and unusual".
We can be pretty creative about what fits through the 8th Amendment here in the Land Of The Free...
Now, this commie-pinko entitlement liberal nonsense about providing free life extension medicine to a bunch of undeserving criminals... That might be a harder sell.
That's what I've seen, that 4 out of 5 youngins can't be bothered to look anything up that they can't show off.
Are you, by any chance, also a witness to the mind-boggling spectacle of 'two or more people holding internet-connected devices and arguing furiously about the state of some matter of fact that could be looked up in moments'? That one drives me to a state of (admittedly irrational) rage.
Oh, very much so, which is why I would have no expectation that a programmer would necessarily know anything about configuring a common corporate mail client, or think worse of them for not knowing; but the procedures for 'google around to see if somebody knows why Library X has this weird quirk' and 'google around to see if somebody knows where Outlook 2007 puts the advanced settings for an exchange connection' are pretty much identical, and for any remotely common question about Outlook will certainly work.
Really, I'd expect the same procedure even if I asked a Flash developer a question related to veterinary medicine, load-sizing industrial chillers for injection molding processes, or saltwater aquarium care.
The modest overlap between IT stuff and 'stuff you would pick up getting a common contemporary dev environment set up(especially for something like Flash, if they were C gurus or something maybe they did do all their work camped out on the one SPARC installation their university forgot to dismantle, just because that's how they roll; but Flash doesn't really give you that option)' makes it more surprising that a contemporary Flash dev wouldn't know, offhand, about common desktop software; but it's the failure to 'just ask the internet instead of bothering somebody you probably don't want to look stupid in front of' that is nearly unimaginable.
I guess you don't believe you've fallen into the trap of "naive reality"?
No, not really. My assertion is merely that at least some aspects of 'reality' are not correlated with belief state. Not necessarily that they are 'knowable' in some terribly useful way, or otherwise epidemiologically tractable.
I think pediatric donors are covered by parental consent or lack thereof (which you could presumably gather ahead of time, exactly as you gather the parents' own consent ahead of time) and it wouldn't be terribly difficult to exclude last minute converts: the mechanisms are already in place for people to opt in, and all you'd need is opt-in date to know how recently they filed, which would allow you to either establish blanket minimums or category minimums based on how far ahead a given organ usually gives warnings of impending failure.
Based on the fairly favorable reviews of the 41 million pixel Nokias, there are apparently some clever tricks to turn lots of fairly lousy pixels into a smaller number of better ones.
Given that the state of sensor tech is basically the same at all (reasonable) sensor sizes, you are still going to get better results with a bigger chip than you will with the pitiful little sliver in your average cellphone; but apparently having more pixels is, at least potentially, a useful thing.
There are good glass / alternative options out there that will hold up to some abuse a little better. i.e. it won't look frosted over time from minute scratches.
Aside from cost(polycarbonate compares quite favorably to cheap glass, and exotic optical glass isn't cheap), I suspect that they like the failure mode of plastics better. Scratch resistance, even with hard-coat, isn't so hot, so they will 'fog' slightly over time if exposed to abrasion; but that's a relatively slow process and may remain tolerable even once it starts. Glass, especially the surface-toughened stuff that all the smartphone kids are using these days, has lovely scratch resistance; but poke it just a bit too hard and it's massive dramatic cracking time. If you are stacking 6 teeny pieces in the (constrained) space of a modern cellphone, you'd probably be talking about some touchy slivers of glass.
"Among them are 4 (four) Flash developers. As a test, when we moved to another building and they all got new computers last year, I made them configure their mail reader (MS Outlook) by themselves. Just gave them each a piece of paper with everything they needed, set them loose, and observed. One immediately came back asking for help, and two of the others wouldn't have got it working without assistance from the fourth."
What surprises me most about that is not so much that they aren't familiar with Outlook configuration (webmail has butchered general knowledge that 'email' is even something that you don't just get from a website, and Outlook's heaviest presence is in corporate/institutional where IT tends to automagic as much of that as they can, lest they have to walk you through it.); but that someone of their demographic (junior, recent graduates, presumably comparatively young) wouldn't Just Fucking Google It before asking a potentially embarrassing question. Especially given that googling around a bit is more or less the standard response to a situation where documentation is lacking or unclear on some programming matter.
The fact that they lacked specific knowledge of a given mail client isn't too surprising(though Outlook isn't rocket surgery, so failure to figure it out is a little weirder); but how does somebody make it through programmer school without picking up on the fact that the internet is a repository of many secrets and asking it can save you a lot of time and trouble?
Errr, it's just disappeared. What's the statistical chances of that happening after being highligted on /.?
Lower after beta than before beta, unfortunately.
I guess no one's ever heard of auto correlation. If enough people say something is what everyone else believes then it becomes the truth.
There is this curious phenomenon, known as 'reality', that is known to exhibit behavior wholly uncorrelated with human belief states. Often painful; but occasionally hilarious.
It doesn't necessarily come down to humans (who can't necessarily save you if very fast responses are required or very subtle deviations need to be detected), though they can certainly help; but cost is much of the problem on the software side as well. More than a few important things run at the 'incompetent and overworked IT staff usually apply patches within a few months of release, assuming it isn't one of the systems that the vendor says you shouldn't touch' level and people are unwilling enough to shell out what it would take to bring them up to 'commercial best practice' levels, much less the (stratospheric, if we even have enough suitably qualified humans available) cost of 'all formally proven and whatnot'...
I think I have a call from 1985 on line one, from some guy called 'Therac-25' who seems very excited about the importance of hardware safeguards and not trusting your software overmuch...
On the plus side, while the upper bound for complexity(sometimes necessary, sometimes self-imposed) shows no signs of slowing down, the supply of problems that are tractable with historical methods shows no sign of exhaustion.
If the slashdot-asker is asking because his boss wants a problem that isn't a member of that category solved, or the cheap offshore labor has gotten adequate at solving that class of problems for peanuts, he is undeniably in serious trouble; but the mere existence of greater complexity does not appear to have actually solved all the lower complexity problems.
If you think fifteen years in the profession makes you an 'old programmer'.
Depending on how old you are when you start, the amount of time required to become 'an old programmer' can be identical to the amount of time required to become 'a programmer'...
ACPI WMI specs from the HW makers would be nice. It's frustrating how many laptops have broken hotkeys under Linux.
If we are currently at the point where you can't even get the details of what the Windows Management Instrumentation blobs embedded in the motherboard firmware mean, that might be another reason why somebody running a Linux company might dislike ACPI...
As long as (through some mixture of overt standard-setting to that effect, and basic 'you actually think that we are going to keep testing our BIOS once it boots Windows? That means that it's ready to ship!' OEM engineering) proprietary firmware is basically the lowest level of Windows drivers, writing other OSes on top of it just isn't going to be a pleasant experience.