The problem with secure Linuces is they are pretty boring for most people. With Red Hat, you get so many bells and whistles with the basic install. In case you haven't noticed, features sell software, not security.
In fact, the best, most secure OS's have hardly any features at all other than basic command line programs.
While you are no doubt correct about 'the most secure OS's', the point is, why does RedHat insist on running services that no one even uses anymore (finger, the r-services), unless they're on a closed unconnected network??
There's a middle ground between fort knox and the most insecure default installation around. Sorry, I've been around these computer things for a long long time, and I'd have to say that most Linux distros start off by being the most insecure OS's on the market. Yes, a default RedHat Linux installation is less secure than Windoze.
Granted, the power and flexibility is there to change that quickly (which Windoze often lacks), but the default should be a compromise between not boring and completely open to attack.
Windows XP also doesn't have support for RealVideo (Windows never has) so that involved me downloading a 5 minute download from Real.
Windows 95 (OSR2) actually had a realplay.exe file included in the base install (in either the windows or system directory). I believe it was version 4 (or lower) though, and I don't know if it was associated with all of Real's content at the time (but it did allow a friend of mine who'd never heard of Real audio to listen to files in IE 3.x).
The JRE itself (JUST the JVM and associated libraries) comes in at 5,364,696 bytes for the Windows platform, on a 56K modem, an average user should be able to get about 3KB/s download speed. At that speed, it will take about a half-hour to download the runtime. (Specifically, 1746.32 seconds, or about 29 minutes, 6 seconds.)
While this is no doubt true, the JVM that you're talking about is not required to run Java Applets from IE. The VM that the browser needs is a tiny little download (don't know the size), and took but a few seconds on a T1 (so maybe 3 minutes at 56K? if that) last time I had to install it.
Thank you for actually reading the article... and not the horrible title (it is not attempting to imply any hoax at all as I read it).
This particular doctor is researching pain (and he doesn't give a damn about bush's policies, so quit implying that).
He is finding that many legitimate, real pains are caused by non-phisiological causes, if he's being poorly quoted to imply that he believes these to not be real pains, that is the fault of the sensationalist journalism, not what he is actually saying.
This is a very old idea, being pursued as scientifically as possible -- our brains can either help us heal fast or slowly, or even create disease. It doesn't mean that the pain is not real, it means that they haven't always been able to find a physical cause, and in some cases, the disease goes away mysteriously.
By all means, take care of your wrists, sit properly when typing, but realize that stress can cause the problem as much as physical injury (I only seem to suffer wrist pain around exam time or when deadlines are due personally).
I had an employee who had suffered from Carpal tunnel syndrome before he was an employee of mine. Sorta funny that he had to have surgery to get some relief??????
The article at no time ever indicated that Carpal Tunnel Syndrome was not an actual phsiological condition. What they are finding is that due to poorly researched media coverage, many people suffering from whatever (lack of fulfillment in their lives?) attribute pain with no phsiological basis will attribute it to RSI or carpal tunnel. Some of these people legitimately have CTS, most don't.
Your employee quite likely could have had a phsiological problem and the nervous damage that CTS is all about. That does not disprove in the slightest the fact that many people are convinced they have something they just don't have.
And besides, one example is a pretty poor basis for generalization. There are people who have surgery for no particular reason also. For example, I have a relative who was told she had cancer due to a poorly performed biopsy, she was suffering from nothing more than deep disatisfaction with her life, and I believe will eventually will herself sick (sad, but true).
(and yes, I'm being naughty and citing one example, but you don't have to live too long to encounter more).
Cookies are simply a way of adding state to a stateless protocol. So for the most common example you could automatically remember your username to slashdot the next time you return.
Actually (being a little ANAL this morning), it would be more accurate to say that cookies allow slashdot to remember that you are in fact logged in when you click on each and every link in slashdot. Without them (or some other means), you would never get past the login screen (as each request to the server is discrete), and you would be permanently 'not logged in'... but otherwise a pretty decent 'splanation (unless I'm not awake yet either;)
Airplane engineers don't make compromises when the deadline is due. Why is it considered okay to make compromises in code when the deadline is due?
I must say that this is something I can't completely understand either. I'm now working in 'QA -- quality assurance'. What this means in a practical sense is often anything but assuring quality. We instead rubber stamp hasty patches made to meet deadlines, with no consideration given by the developer or management on what this change will have on the overall operation of our product.
We recently ended up accepting a solution which protects the user from an underlying flaw in the database schema, but does not resolve the underlying limitation in the database. All done rather quickly, in order to meet a deadline, with no real consideration on the impact this has on the overall system. And I can't say I blame the developer, or my erstwhile colleague who accepted the original patch. The problem is a lack of design from higher up (management or project lead), and really their only fault is succumbing to customer demands.
And the ironic thing is, the new fix is to reverse the original one.. sigh.
Microsoft then integrates this code into their Windows products
Interesting idea, but last I heard, you had to actually work for the evil empire to 'take a look' at their source. Since M$, like most any tech company would have made you sign a non-disclosure agreement, I really doubt that you've seen any, or you wouldn't be going on about it in a public forum...
AOL has been using IE exclusively pretty much for a few versions now, and Microsoft has been bundling their software as part of ICW and ONline services since Win95.
IE has one major feature that Netscape still doesn't even come close to approaching -- an API that can be used to make a custom browser (which is just a shell over the HTML/Script parsing engine that offers most of the functions of a web browser).
Yes, Netscape runs on more than 3 platforms, but Java supports inheritance last I heard.
Still -- this makes one wonder, why did AOL buy Netscape unless simply to scuttle it completely??
You cannot call your clients and say "StarOffice crashes when I try to open the Word 2000 file you sent. Please save it off as Word 6.0 format file and resend it."
hmm... but what about if you're actually using office 6.0? Many small businesses are frequently a version or so out of date, and so actually do spend time getting files re-sent from business partners because the file needs to be converted to these other formats... makes me wonder who's business model costs the user more money and time for 'convenience' and new 'enhancements' sake.
No one out there has actually read the bloody constitution have they?
There is no 'right to bear arms' in the US. The constitution gives you a right to an armed peace time militia, not a right to have a gun 'cause you feel like it!!!
Possibly, although I have trouble believing that every Joe citizen has a right to store a firearm in such a manner that his 15 year old has free and easy access to it.
If these families want to sue anyone with any real responsibility for this incident (although I still blame the perpetrators), the parents who allowed them access to their weapons have a higher accountability than the video game industry by a long shot.
I don't know if the problems in the US are mostly related to the sheer number of guns (which most of us in other countries find shocking), or the fact that you are not required to store them properly. Many of my uncles are hunters, they all had 4 or 5+ rifles in their houses. But, there is no way in hell that any of our families could have easily gotten access to a weapon and ammunition at the same time, because they were locked in two different cabinets, with the keys always being on my uncles person.
I suppose that people who are complete novices would find it difficult to find sites if they had to search for well known sites like hotmail.
I would be surprised if this issue even exists when most of our parents (those that aren't techies) are no longer using the net.
Every kid these days knows to type in companyname.com to get to someone's site, so how would hotmail (for example) be hurt by a porn site paying to be listed as hotmail in a search engine???
Maybe I just need more coffee this AM, but I don't get it.
Sorry, but neither of these is the worlds tallest building. The Sears tower is 442m tall. The Petronas towers are 452m tall.
The 'skypod' of the CN Tower in Toronto is 447m, and the spire is at a total of 553.33m tall. In fact, the Suyong Bay Tower in Korea is 462m tall, making it the next runner up (and I suspect it may have an antenna or other structure which makes it taller than the CN tower).
This article omits the CN tower, but lists the others. The Sears tower is about 5th overall, unless we want to conveniently omit CN's accomplishments;)
Debian -- the Amish farmer of Linux -- carefully examining what should and should not be included in the software, probing the political, ethical, and social differences between Free Software and Open Source, asking the question "whether we should"
I'll have to admit, this does seem like what Debian is trying to do. But the one (and only, so I am partly to blame) time I installed Debian I was less than impressed. I guess I am used to the problems that are unique to RedHat (files moved to strange places, breaking other things (like apxs)).
But with this debian install (the latest at the time), I was astounded by the fact that the man utility was utterly broken by some bizarre attempt to secure it which didn't work in this particular case.
These little differences force me to gravitate to BSD, or stick with the Linux I know well. Since I have no interest in spending countless hours learning the quirks of the particular distro, I'd rather have a stable server/development environment up in a reasonable amount of time. A few days is ok, but 2 weeks or months to learn the quirks of a new distro -- no thanks.
I suppose the professional sysadmin may get off on constantly exploring the subtle differences, but if your focus is setting up some basic and reliable services...
I can't see these differences convincing most corporate IT departments decide to through out their 20 NT boxen, and replace them with 2 or three Linux servers.
If your replacement doesn't know the distro you've chosen to set up and you move on to bigger and better things, they could be in for some problems down the road and regret the desicion and switch back to NT or something.
This is really just poor software design. This is simply evidence of what many have indicated is a problem in the area of web design in general.
Just because Joe Schmo is a good graphics designer, or knows how to use front page, does not qualify him or her to start designing software... it should be obvious to any professional software designer to verify the data from the web form against what is in the database.
In fact, many good shopping cart packages do just this... I suspect that after being burned once, smart e-businesses will either redesign their software, or hopefully learn that even web based software should be designed by a professional programmer, not some hack who just happens to understand PERL's syntax...
sh is actually the original bourne shell, but this analogy is reasonably solid otherwise.
But regardless, I don't see anything wrong with credit where credit is due. If someone else started marketing a *nix clone which ran on Intel (and other) processors, and called in OpenLinux (or some derivitive), I am fairly sure we would all support Linus' efforts to have the name changed, n'est pas?
I just left a job where I was doing front line support for one of the big US national ISPs.
The problem for us was two fold:
1 - front line tech support is staffed by people who have to learn that if the problem can't be fixed by them, it may never get fixed. In our case Tier 2 support was staffed by a bunch of idiots. Whenever I'd get an issue that I believed was legitimately our problem, we would try to escalate to them. Sometimes they wouldn't even understand the nature of the problem (most of them don't have any formal training, and don't have a clue what TCP/IP is never mind have a vague idea what routing is all about).
2 - The bigger the organization, the more it becomes steeped in 'procedures' and 'processes' meant to isolate the user from network operations.
If you could convince them that it was an issue that had to be escalated further, it would seem to sit there and go no further. They tend to get lost in a mire of corporate policies, and rarely if ever do issues get routed to the network ops.
Needless to say, it was very frustrating when an admin from another smaller service wanted to contact our netops. I guess the bigger sysadmins would have established direct contacts, because we never got contacts from the larger ones.
Even better, (if those in the know can educate the masses somehow). Don't buy any of these clearly disfunctional drives.
I'm sorry, but if I purchase legally a drive from manufacturer X and it craps out in 3 months, as a consumer who is capable of doing so, I have the **RIGHT** to back any of my data that I can salvage on any spare disc space I happen to have lying around.
If no one purchases these defective units (and purchases only the non-copy protected equivalents) for a period of a year, then whoever came up with this insane scheme will realize that it's clearly wrong.
I'm not concerned with someone successfully stopping software crackers (although anyone will tell you this is a fruitless endeavor), but MY data is mine, dammit!
I don't want to start a flame war, but there's something missing in this thread.
You're talking about your own experience as a programmer, whereas the original discussion was centered around a call center employee.
Yes, a programmer with experience probably has to turn away offers. But as someone with only call center experience at this point, I'd love to even receive a call from more than 1 in 10 applications submitted. This makes the original post make some more sense (although I don't believe the 1 week for 10K bit much).
Although it seemed like fun at first, after a year and a half, it's sometimes too easy for me to get cynical about this type of job.
The worst are generally the "system administrators". These people seem to range from a person who knows how to use excel (and doesn't care what a NIC or TCP/IP stack is) to some fast talker who poured the techie jargon on the boss and got a promotion (and counts on learning at everyone else's expense).
BTW, obviously all sysadmins aren't clueless, but rarely do those with a clue call a 1800 support tech for help -- unless a piece of our gear is down, which means a 11 second call for both of us.
And yes, angry people tend to find themselves shuffled off to Microsoft or a hardware manufacturer post haste in our shop.
Your French friend should try visiting Manitoba. Quebecois (Quebec's french) has apparently diverged quite a bit from the French spoken in France, while there was less divergence in Manitoba's French communities (according to my French teachers anyway). Although considering that the language spoken in both areas have likely evolved, this may not be the case.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with secure Linuces is they are pretty boring for most people. With Red Hat, you get so many bells and whistles with the basic install. In case you haven't noticed, features sell software, not security.
In fact, the best, most secure OS's have hardly any features at all other than basic command line programs.
While you are no doubt correct about 'the most secure OS's', the point is, why does RedHat insist on running services that no one even uses anymore (finger, the r-services), unless they're on a closed unconnected network??
There's a middle ground between fort knox and the most insecure default installation around. Sorry, I've been around these computer things for a long long time, and I'd have to say that most Linux distros start off by being the most insecure OS's on the market. Yes, a default RedHat Linux installation is less secure than Windoze.
Granted, the power and flexibility is there to change that quickly (which Windoze often lacks), but the default should be a compromise between not boring and completely open to attack.
Windows XP also doesn't have support for RealVideo (Windows never has) so that involved me downloading a 5 minute download from Real.
Windows 95 (OSR2) actually had a realplay.exe file included in the base install (in either the windows or system directory). I believe it was version 4 (or lower) though, and I don't know if it was associated with all of Real's content at the time (but it did allow a friend of mine who'd never heard of Real audio to listen to files in IE 3.x).
Look at it this way: we finally are freed from those annoying pop-up windows!
Dude, we're not even talking about JavaScript. Go read something besides slashdot, and get an education.
The JRE itself (JUST the JVM and associated libraries) comes in at 5,364,696 bytes for the Windows platform, on a 56K modem, an average user should be able to get about 3KB/s download speed. At that speed, it will take about a half-hour to download the runtime. (Specifically, 1746.32 seconds, or about 29 minutes, 6 seconds.) While this is no doubt true, the JVM that you're talking about is not required to run Java Applets from IE. The VM that the browser needs is a tiny little download (don't know the size), and took but a few seconds on a T1 (so maybe 3 minutes at 56K? if that) last time I had to install it.
Thank you for actually reading the article... and not the horrible title (it is not attempting to imply any hoax at all as I read it).
This particular doctor is researching pain (and he doesn't give a damn about bush's policies, so quit implying that).
He is finding that many legitimate, real pains are caused by non-phisiological causes, if he's being poorly quoted to imply that he believes these to not be real pains, that is the fault of the sensationalist journalism, not what he is actually saying.
This is a very old idea, being pursued as scientifically as possible -- our brains can either help us heal fast or slowly, or even create disease. It doesn't mean that the pain is not real, it means that they haven't always been able to find a physical cause, and in some cases, the disease goes away mysteriously.
By all means, take care of your wrists, sit properly when typing, but realize that stress can cause the problem as much as physical injury (I only seem to suffer wrist pain around exam time or when deadlines are due personally).
I had an employee who had suffered from Carpal tunnel syndrome before he was an employee of mine. Sorta funny that he had to have surgery to get some relief??????
The article at no time ever indicated that Carpal Tunnel Syndrome was not an actual phsiological condition. What they are finding is that due to poorly researched media coverage, many people suffering from whatever (lack of fulfillment in their lives?) attribute pain with no phsiological basis will attribute it to RSI or carpal tunnel. Some of these people legitimately have CTS, most don't.
Your employee quite likely could have had a phsiological problem and the nervous damage that CTS is all about. That does not disprove in the slightest the fact that many people are convinced they have something they just don't have.
And besides, one example is a pretty poor basis for generalization. There are people who have surgery for no particular reason also. For example, I have a relative who was told she had cancer due to a poorly performed biopsy, she was suffering from nothing more than deep disatisfaction with her life, and I believe will eventually will herself sick (sad, but true).
(and yes, I'm being naughty and citing one example, but you don't have to live too long to encounter more).
Cookies are simply a way of adding state to a stateless protocol. So for the most common example you could automatically remember your username to slashdot the next time you return.
;)
Actually (being a little ANAL this morning), it would be more accurate to say that cookies allow slashdot to remember that you are in fact logged in when you click on each and every link in slashdot. Without them (or some other means), you would never get past the login screen (as each request to the server is discrete), and you would be permanently 'not logged in'... but otherwise a pretty decent 'splanation (unless I'm not awake yet either
How did OS X win that category? OS X doesn't support IPX/SPX, DecNet, NetBEUI...
Not necessarily agreeing with the article, but the Internet could care less about any of these protocols.
It is nice to see native TCP/IP support, it only took Microshaft 15 years to build it in...
Airplane engineers don't make compromises when the deadline is due. Why is it considered okay to make compromises in code when the deadline is due?
I must say that this is something I can't completely understand either. I'm now working in 'QA -- quality assurance'. What this means in a practical sense is often anything but assuring quality. We instead rubber stamp hasty patches made to meet deadlines, with no consideration given by the developer or management on what this change will have on the overall operation of our product.
We recently ended up accepting a solution which protects the user from an underlying flaw in the database schema, but does not resolve the underlying limitation in the database. All done rather quickly, in order to meet a deadline, with no real consideration on the impact this has on the overall system. And I can't say I blame the developer, or my erstwhile colleague who accepted the original patch. The problem is a lack of design from higher up (management or project lead), and really their only fault is succumbing to customer demands.
And the ironic thing is, the new fix is to reverse the original one.. sigh.
Microsoft then integrates this code into their Windows products
Interesting idea, but last I heard, you had to actually work for the evil empire to 'take a look' at their source. Since M$, like most any tech company would have made you sign a non-disclosure agreement, I really doubt that you've seen any, or you wouldn't be going on about it in a public forum...
AOL has been using IE exclusively pretty much for a few versions now, and Microsoft has been bundling their software as part of ICW and ONline services since Win95.
IE has one major feature that Netscape still doesn't even come close to approaching -- an API that can be used to make a custom browser (which is just a shell over the HTML/Script parsing engine that offers most of the functions of a web browser).
Yes, Netscape runs on more than 3 platforms, but Java supports inheritance last I heard.
Still -- this makes one wonder, why did AOL buy Netscape unless simply to scuttle it completely??
You cannot call your clients and say "StarOffice crashes when I try to open the Word 2000 file you sent. Please save it off as Word 6.0 format file and resend it."
hmm... but what about if you're actually using office 6.0? Many small businesses are frequently a version or so out of date, and so actually do spend time getting files re-sent from business partners because the file needs to be converted to these other formats... makes me wonder who's business model costs the user more money and time for 'convenience' and new 'enhancements' sake.
No one out there has actually read the bloody constitution have they?
There is no 'right to bear arms' in the US. The constitution gives you a right to an armed peace time militia, not a right to have a gun 'cause you feel like it!!!
Possibly, although I have trouble believing that every Joe citizen has a right to store a firearm in such a manner that his 15 year old has free and easy access to it.
If these families want to sue anyone with any real responsibility for this incident (although I still blame the perpetrators), the parents who allowed them access to their weapons have a higher accountability than the video game industry by a long shot.
I don't know if the problems in the US are mostly related to the sheer number of guns (which most of us in other countries find shocking), or the fact that you are not required to store them properly. Many of my uncles are hunters, they all had 4 or 5+ rifles in their houses. But, there is no way in hell that any of our families could have easily gotten access to a weapon and ammunition at the same time, because they were locked in two different cabinets, with the keys always being on my uncles person.
I suppose that people who are complete novices would find it difficult to find sites if they had to search for well known sites like hotmail.
I would be surprised if this issue even exists when most of our parents (those that aren't techies) are no longer using the net.
Every kid these days knows to type in companyname.com to get to someone's site, so how would hotmail (for example) be hurt by a porn site paying to be listed as hotmail in a search engine???
Maybe I just need more coffee this AM, but I don't get it.
Sorry, but neither of these is the worlds tallest building. The Sears tower is 442m tall. The Petronas towers are 452m tall.
;)
The 'skypod' of the CN Tower in Toronto is 447m, and the spire is at a total of 553.33m tall. In fact, the Suyong Bay Tower in Korea is 462m tall, making it the next runner up (and I suspect it may have an antenna or other structure which makes it taller than the CN tower).
This article omits the CN tower, but lists the others. The Sears tower is about 5th overall, unless we want to conveniently omit CN's accomplishments
Debian -- the Amish farmer of Linux -- carefully examining what should and should not be included in the software, probing the political, ethical, and social differences between Free Software and Open Source, asking the question "whether we should"
I'll have to admit, this does seem like what Debian is trying to do. But the one (and only, so I am partly to blame) time I installed Debian I was less than impressed. I guess I am used to the problems that are unique to RedHat (files moved to strange places, breaking other things (like apxs)).
But with this debian install (the latest at the time), I was astounded by the fact that the man utility was utterly broken by some bizarre attempt to secure it which didn't work in this particular case.
These little differences force me to gravitate to BSD, or stick with the Linux I know well. Since I have no interest in spending countless hours learning the quirks of the particular distro, I'd rather have a stable server/development environment up in a reasonable amount of time. A few days is ok, but 2 weeks or months to learn the quirks of a new distro -- no thanks.
I suppose the professional sysadmin may get off on constantly exploring the subtle differences, but if your focus is setting up some basic and reliable services...
I can't see these differences convincing most corporate IT departments decide to through out their 20 NT boxen, and replace them with 2 or three Linux servers.
If your replacement doesn't know the distro you've chosen to set up and you move on to bigger and better things, they could be in for some problems down the road and regret the desicion and switch back to NT or something.
This is really just poor software design. This is simply evidence of what many have indicated is a problem in the area of web design in general.
Just because Joe Schmo is a good graphics designer, or knows how to use front page, does not qualify him or her to start designing software... it should be obvious to any professional software designer to verify the data from the web form against what is in the database.
In fact, many good shopping cart packages do just this... I suspect that after being burned once, smart e-businesses will either redesign their software, or hopefully learn that even web based software should be designed by a professional programmer, not some hack who just happens to understand PERL's syntax...
sh is actually the original bourne shell, but this analogy is reasonably solid otherwise.
But regardless, I don't see anything wrong with credit where credit is due. If someone else started marketing a *nix clone which ran on Intel (and other) processors, and called in OpenLinux (or some derivitive), I am fairly sure we would all support Linus' efforts to have the name changed, n'est pas?
I just left a job where I was doing front line support for one of the big US national ISPs.
The problem for us was two fold:
1 - front line tech support is staffed by people who have to learn that if the problem can't be fixed by them, it may never get fixed. In our case Tier 2 support was staffed by a bunch of idiots. Whenever I'd get an issue that I believed was legitimately our problem, we would try to escalate to them. Sometimes they wouldn't even understand the nature of the problem (most of them don't have any formal training, and don't have a clue what TCP/IP is never mind have a vague idea what routing is all about).
2 - The bigger the organization, the more it becomes steeped in 'procedures' and 'processes' meant to isolate the user from network operations. If you could convince them that it was an issue that had to be escalated further, it would seem to sit there and go no further. They tend to get lost in a mire of corporate policies, and rarely if ever do issues get routed to the network ops.
Needless to say, it was very frustrating when an admin from another smaller service wanted to contact our netops. I guess the bigger sysadmins would have established direct contacts, because we never got contacts from the larger ones.
Even better, (if those in the know can educate the masses somehow). Don't buy any of these clearly disfunctional drives.
I'm sorry, but if I purchase legally a drive from manufacturer X and it craps out in 3 months, as a consumer who is capable of doing so, I have the **RIGHT** to back any of my data that I can salvage on any spare disc space I happen to have lying around.
If no one purchases these defective units (and purchases only the non-copy protected equivalents) for a period of a year, then whoever came up with this insane scheme will realize that it's clearly wrong.
I'm not concerned with someone successfully stopping software crackers (although anyone will tell you this is a fruitless endeavor), but MY data is mine, dammit!
-- or maybe I'm over reacting (?!?)
I don't want to start a flame war, but there's something missing in this thread.
You're talking about your own experience as a programmer, whereas the original discussion was centered around a call center employee.
Yes, a programmer with experience probably has to turn away offers. But as someone with only call center experience at this point, I'd love to even receive a call from more than 1 in 10 applications submitted. This makes the original post make some more sense (although I don't believe the 1 week for 10K bit much).
because this would require that non-technical types (or even partially technical types) RTFM :P
Although it seemed like fun at first, after a year and a half, it's sometimes too easy for me to get cynical about this type of job.
The worst are generally the "system administrators". These people seem to range from a person who knows how to use excel (and doesn't care what a NIC or TCP/IP stack is) to some fast talker who poured the techie jargon on the boss and got a promotion (and counts on learning at everyone else's expense).
BTW, obviously all sysadmins aren't clueless, but rarely do those with a clue call a 1800 support tech for help -- unless a piece of our gear is down, which means a 11 second call for both of us. And yes, angry people tend to find themselves shuffled off to Microsoft or a hardware manufacturer post haste in our shop.
Your French friend should try visiting Manitoba. Quebecois (Quebec's french) has apparently diverged quite a bit from the French spoken in France, while there was less divergence in Manitoba's French communities (according to my French teachers anyway). Although considering that the language spoken in both areas have likely evolved, this may not be the case.