What I mean is this: no one believes that you can get something for nothing any longer. Case in point, I just installed Firefox (and Spybot/AdAware/SpywareBlaster) for my next-door neighbor who had a slew of popup-generating malware on his PC. As I installed Firefox, he kept asking "And it's free? Why? What's their business model?" As a salesman, he just couldn't swallow that it could be a full-featured application AND available for free.
The good news is that he's happily using it now and he's starting to understand that IE was how the malware was getting onto his system. But I tell you, if I have to spend as long convincing/educating others as I did with him, it's going to become a full-time job pretty damned fast.
I consider myself pretty damned good at Google search terms, and I'm still amazed how often what I consider really useful is buried a couple of pages down. The top hitters often make sense, but they are simply not what I wanted.
I have no intention of actually running IE to test it out but I assume it's a feature that can be enabled/disabled by the user. If so, making the choice available isn't any big deal. Now, if you can't go back to the default behavior, that's a different story.
All in all, me likes Google. Me wishes me had some pre-IPO shares; would like Google even better then.
I've been reading about the XFree86 license issue from time to time, so I think I have that pretty well understood. But I haven't seen anything about what has happened or will happen to XFree86 now that fewer distros (perhaps none?) are shipping it. Did the project just die outright, or is it still chugging along somehow?
I dunno... I bet we Americans manage to interject a lot more "Ummm"s and "Uhhh"s into a given sentence than our neighbors to the north.
Come to think of it, does this make Bugs Bunny a Canadian-American? Think about it... "Ummm, eh; What's up doc?" Looks like a combination of both sides of the border, eh?
I'm like Glenn (the IT guy in the story) in that I get to work on family and friends' PCs. I do so happily (which I admit suggests some sort of mental illness on my part) as it's something that I know how to do well and I'm glad to be able to fix their computer problems without them spending a boatload of money. But the main thing I've dealt with lately is malware installed via Internet Explorer on PCs whose owners are not by any means naive.
The last one was a friend who had a broadband connection, was behind a firewall but still had countless malware programs including one of those nasty browser hijacking/popup creating beasties that creates new randomly-named programs if you try to kill it while in normal mode. Try searching for one of those filenames in Google to get more info! Anyway, it took me hours to clean it up, and she was *shocked* when I told her how un-patched IE was. She said, "But I just downloaded the IE6 security patch... it can't have any unplugged security holes! And my network admins didn't say anthing about this." So of course I had to calmly explain to her the details about IE's status and how integration of IE into the OS by Microsoft had been a Very Bad Idea (tm). She was incredulous, but I pointed her to enough articles to convince her. Goes to show how difficult it is for people with non-geek day jobs to be informed about fundamental problems like this. Had it not been for the malware, she'd still be in the dark about it.
She's on Firefox now, and knows to keep it up to date. I told her she needs to start thinking about her employees computers, as they are using IE to browse the web from work... and you can guess how sick that made her to think of what could be leaking out to the world from behind her firewall.
I wonder why the corporate take-up of AMD has been so slow?
Because the OEM uptake of AMD hadn't materialized to any significant level. For instance, my company (medium-sized) only buys computers from "tier-1" suppliers for both the desktop and the server room. Until Opterons became available from IBM, HP and Sun there was little chance to get them in-house, but they're being set up as I type for use in our chip design work.
But same issue as before on the desktop. If AMD could get Dell to sell their CPUs in Dell systems, it would be huge. But I don't expect that to happen; I'm willing to bet that Dell gets a very good deal from Intel for doing exclusive business with them.
I wonder why the corporate take-up of AMD has been so slow?
Because the OEM uptake of AMD hadn't materialized to any significant level. For instance, my company (medium-sized) only buys computers from "tier-1" suppliers for both the desktop and the server room. Until Opterons became available from IBM, HP and Sun there was little chance to get them in-house, but they're being set up as I type for use in our chip design work.
But same issue as before on the desktop. If AMD could get Dell to sell their CPUs in Dell systems, it would be huge. But I don't expect that to happen; I'm willing to bet that Dell gets a very good deal from Intel for doing exclusive business with them.
This akin to how WindowsUpdate works. You get a notification that critical updates are available and that you really should install them to protect the computer.
Who's at fault when the user ignores those messages?
That would be exactly right if there weren't so many unpatched security holes in Internet Explorer. Even if you patch up to the hilt, you go to a website and you get hit with malware. The choices made by Microsoft to integrate the browser and in addition to allow untrusted code to execute via that browser is *not* the users' fault.
In addition, people are overloaded these days with what they need to become mini-experts in: finance, real estate, law, the public education "system", etc., ad nauseum... they are neither inclined nor do they have the time to become anything more than simple users of their computer and its operating system.
I just spent about five hours last weekend helping two friends wipe spyware/trojans/malware off of their computers (a task that I was not completely successful in doing due to one very creative browser hijacking malware program) and they were shocked when I told them they should not be using IE. "Why didn't any of our network admins tell me anything about this?" one of them asked me incredulously.
Laws like this are silly; they don't stop other parties from getting their hands on the export-controlled product. Period.
Kind of reminds me of the laws on bottles of inseciticide which state "It is unlawful to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labelling." or something to that effect. What does my "professional" landscaper tell me? "Oh, I mix these two together in double the concentration to really zap the weeds!" (And no, I didn't let him do that). The law is basically unenforceable. And let's not even talk about posted speed limits! (Guilty as hell on this one). Yes, much more enforceable, and still not all that effective at preventing the behavior (talking percentages here).
To think the law would do anything useful just goes to show how out of touch some of our elected officials are. Is there really nothing else they can think of doing with their time and position of authority?
Not that I know of. You have no idea how many times I've had a task run longer than anticipated, and I *must* be in front of the GUI to do something based upon the result (not automatable) and I can't afford to have the program sit idle overnight just 'cuz I wanted to go home. I wanted this capability real bad about that point, believe you me.
So for now it's VNC, and perhaps one of these other discussed protocols (NX, RDB) down the road.
Like anything else, it depends upon what you're trying to do and how much performance you need/want.
Me, I use TightVNC over a VPN tunnel (cable modem) and it has acceptable performance. I do pay a performance hit when I use a graphical program such as a place & route tool (I'm an ASIC engineer) but it's by no means unusable.
Of course, I have been forced to use that same place & route tool over a 128Kbit ISDN line (years ago) so I'm quite pleased with what VNC allows me to do, both in terms of speed but more importantly in terms of freedom. When you do ASIC layout work for a living, you sacrifice a lot of family time if you can't detach/reattach ala VNC. So I'm pretty damned thankful.
That's not to say I don't welcome new applications if they better meet my needs. I'll be delighted to learn more about what NX offers just as soon as I can actually visit the proferred links!
"Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a
physical terminal between several processes (typically
interactive shells)."
I use it all the time; start an interactive job while I'm at work on a particular machine using screen, disconnect using "CTRL-A d" then go home, log into the same machine, issue the command "screen -r" and I'm right back into that shell session.
These days, I mostly use TightVNC over a VPN pipe instead, which gives me the graphical equivalent of this.
Hey, in Sleeper Woody Allen was able to fire up that VW bug that had been stored for like 200 years... and if a V-Dub can start after that, surely these rovers can manage one little winter!
For me it was Tribes 1, my first serious foray into online multi-player gaming. Evenings and weekends, and the wife got tired of it. The solution was to stop playing as much, and that's just the way it goes. Like the other poster said, adulthood beckons... can't have it all, gotta decide what matters.
I made the right choice, and it wasn't that hard in all honesty.
Washington, DC (FantasyNews) May 17th, 2004 - The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute reported today that Linus Torvalds, the public relations spokesman for the Linux operating system that was invented by Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, misled the public when he revealed the actual provenance of Linux.
"He can't be believed or trusted," said Ken Brown, head of the institute. "He says he has good teeth, yet the truth of the matter is that he has a mouth full of cavities. This is entirely consistent with the lies and fabrications this man has put forth since claiming he wrote Linux."
I have a SoundBlaster Audigy2 ZS, and Mandrake always installs drivers that don't work. I do as the author of this article says he did; I poke and prod until I get it to work (usually loading up harddrake2 and asking it to use different drivers). I was *just* messing with this yet again on Sunday as I installed Mandrake Official 10.0 PowerPack, and I spent longer trying to get the sound to work than I did on the install.
So yeah, I understand that newer hardware may not work out of the box; Linux will need to get more mainstream so hardware vendors will start releasing drivers earlier (or at all) so there's a chance for it to be on equal footing with Windows in that regard. But my point is simply that the author is not incorrect about the state of drivers under Linux; it's actually pretty obvious, and he didn't need to beat the subject to death.
Whoa... in that case, please accept apologies for the "parting shot" and "jab" comments. I am appalled that your article was adulterated in that way; it stood just fine on its own merits, and obviously you didn't need any "help". That last bit is worthy of discussion, even if it does look like flamebait; it just didn't fit with the rest of your piece.
The article/essay really does cut to the heart of the matter, IMO. It's not undone by the addition, by any means; it just had such a nice cadence that I noticed when my brain, previously trotting along quite happily, tripped over that rock.;-)
Rick Ross made this parting shot in the close of his article:
I hope you will join me in watching how things progress before we draw conclusions about this settlement (or was it a purchase?)
The body of the article was well-written and I agree completely with his fundamental question -- where is Java in this settlement? I was shocked to hear pretty much squat about Java in the wake of the settlement, and I think his point that we must just wait and see is unfortunately correct.
But this little jab right at the end wasn't in keeping with the rest of the article. I wish he had instead expanded upon the idea of "What sorts of things might there be in the settlement, both good and bad for Java and/or Sun?". It almost feels as though it was inserted by someone else, it trips up the reader (well, me anyway) so badly.
You are correct in one respect, we all pretty much have stereos. But they are NOT necessarily less power-hungry than an older PC; for example, my Yamaha receiver could double as a toaster.
For convenience' sake, many would opt not to build a Mp3 server out of older equipment. Some would. I think the main point is that this suggestion made by the linked article to do this is being blown a bit out of proportion. The bottom line is, a second system doing useful things on your home network may make sense for some folks. It does for me, maybe not for you; both of these are just fine results IMO.
If you can provide your or your charity's contact information, I'll pay to ship you a couple of systems with Linux pre-installed. Just tell me what flavor, give any config details, and I'll do the rest. Happy to see working hardware go to a worthy cause.
Slashdot Mirror
What I mean is this: no one believes that you can get something for nothing any longer. Case in point, I just installed Firefox (and Spybot/AdAware/SpywareBlaster) for my next-door neighbor who had a slew of popup-generating malware on his PC. As I installed Firefox, he kept asking "And it's free? Why? What's their business model?" As a salesman, he just couldn't swallow that it could be a full-featured application AND available for free.
The good news is that he's happily using it now and he's starting to understand that IE was how the malware was getting onto his system. But I tell you, if I have to spend as long convincing/educating others as I did with him, it's going to become a full-time job pretty damned fast.
- Leo
I consider myself pretty damned good at Google search terms, and I'm still amazed how often what I consider really useful is buried a couple of pages down. The top hitters often make sense, but they are simply not what I wanted.
I have no intention of actually running IE to test it out but I assume it's a feature that can be enabled/disabled by the user. If so, making the choice available isn't any big deal. Now, if you can't go back to the default behavior, that's a different story.
All in all, me likes Google. Me wishes me had some pre-IPO shares; would like Google even better then.
- Leo
I thought as much.
Thanks for the reply!
- Leo
I've been reading about the XFree86 license issue from time to time, so I think I have that pretty well understood. But I haven't seen anything about what has happened or will happen to XFree86 now that fewer distros (perhaps none?) are shipping it. Did the project just die outright, or is it still chugging along somehow?
Just curious...
- Leo
I dunno... I bet we Americans manage to interject a lot more "Ummm"s and "Uhhh"s into a given sentence than our neighbors to the north.
Come to think of it, does this make Bugs Bunny a Canadian-American? Think about it... "Ummm, eh; What's up doc?" Looks like a combination of both sides of the border, eh?
- Leo
Cray CTO Says Cray Computers Are Great
Actually, I think he said that "Cray computers rock, eh?" or perhaps it was "Cray computers kick ass, eh?" or something like that.
- Leo
I'm like Glenn (the IT guy in the story) in that I get to work on family and friends' PCs. I do so happily (which I admit suggests some sort of mental illness on my part) as it's something that I know how to do well and I'm glad to be able to fix their computer problems without them spending a boatload of money. But the main thing I've dealt with lately is malware installed via Internet Explorer on PCs whose owners are not by any means naive.
The last one was a friend who had a broadband connection, was behind a firewall but still had countless malware programs including one of those nasty browser hijacking/popup creating beasties that creates new randomly-named programs if you try to kill it while in normal mode. Try searching for one of those filenames in Google to get more info! Anyway, it took me hours to clean it up, and she was *shocked* when I told her how un-patched IE was. She said, "But I just downloaded the IE6 security patch... it can't have any unplugged security holes! And my network admins didn't say anthing about this." So of course I had to calmly explain to her the details about IE's status and how integration of IE into the OS by Microsoft had been a Very Bad Idea (tm). She was incredulous, but I pointed her to enough articles to convince her. Goes to show how difficult it is for people with non-geek day jobs to be informed about fundamental problems like this. Had it not been for the malware, she'd still be in the dark about it.
She's on Firefox now, and knows to keep it up to date. I told her she needs to start thinking about her employees computers, as they are using IE to browse the web from work... and you can guess how sick that made her to think of what could be leaking out to the world from behind her firewall.
- Leo
True, but WDC is incorporated in Delaware (as are just about every high-tech company). Does this change the legal situation?
- Leo
I wonder why the corporate take-up of AMD has been so slow?
Because the OEM uptake of AMD hadn't materialized to any significant level. For instance, my company (medium-sized) only buys computers from "tier-1" suppliers for both the desktop and the server room. Until Opterons became available from IBM, HP and Sun there was little chance to get them in-house, but they're being set up as I type for use in our chip design work.
But same issue as before on the desktop. If AMD could get Dell to sell their CPUs in Dell systems, it would be huge. But I don't expect that to happen; I'm willing to bet that Dell gets a very good deal from Intel for doing exclusive business with them.
- Leo
I wonder why the corporate take-up of AMD has been so slow?
Because the OEM uptake of AMD hadn't materialized to any significant level. For instance, my company (medium-sized) only buys computers from "tier-1" suppliers for both the desktop and the server room. Until Opterons became available from IBM, HP and Sun there was little chance to get them in-house, but they're being set up as I type for use in our chip design work.
But same issue as before on the desktop. If AMD could get Dell to sell their CPUs in Dell systems, it would be huge. But I don't expect that to happen; I'm willing to bet that Dell gets a very good deal from Intel for doing exclusive business with them.
- Leo
This akin to how WindowsUpdate works. You get a notification that critical updates are available and that you really should install them to protect the computer.
Who's at fault when the user ignores those messages?
That would be exactly right if there weren't so many unpatched security holes in Internet Explorer. Even if you patch up to the hilt, you go to a website and you get hit with malware. The choices made by Microsoft to integrate the browser and in addition to allow untrusted code to execute via that browser is *not* the users' fault.
In addition, people are overloaded these days with what they need to become mini-experts in: finance, real estate, law, the public education "system", etc., ad nauseum... they are neither inclined nor do they have the time to become anything more than simple users of their computer and its operating system.
I just spent about five hours last weekend helping two friends wipe spyware/trojans/malware off of their computers (a task that I was not completely successful in doing due to one very creative browser hijacking malware program) and they were shocked when I told them they should not be using IE. "Why didn't any of our network admins tell me anything about this?" one of them asked me incredulously.
Why indeed...
- Leo
Laws like this are silly; they don't stop other parties from getting their hands on the export-controlled product. Period.
Kind of reminds me of the laws on bottles of inseciticide which state "It is unlawful to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labelling." or something to that effect. What does my "professional" landscaper tell me? "Oh, I mix these two together in double the concentration to really zap the weeds!" (And no, I didn't let him do that). The law is basically unenforceable. And let's not even talk about posted speed limits! (Guilty as hell on this one). Yes, much more enforceable, and still not all that effective at preventing the behavior (talking percentages here).
To think the law would do anything useful just goes to show how out of touch some of our elected officials are. Is there really nothing else they can think of doing with their time and position of authority?
Sheesh.
- Leo
Not that I know of. You have no idea how many times I've had a task run longer than anticipated, and I *must* be in front of the GUI to do something based upon the result (not automatable) and I can't afford to have the program sit idle overnight just 'cuz I wanted to go home. I wanted this capability real bad about that point, believe you me.
So for now it's VNC, and perhaps one of these other discussed protocols (NX, RDB) down the road.
Cheers,
- Leo
Like anything else, it depends upon what you're trying to do and how much performance you need/want.
Me, I use TightVNC over a VPN tunnel (cable modem) and it has acceptable performance. I do pay a performance hit when I use a graphical program such as a place & route tool (I'm an ASIC engineer) but it's by no means unusable.
Of course, I have been forced to use that same place & route tool over a 128Kbit ISDN line (years ago) so I'm quite pleased with what VNC allows me to do, both in terms of speed but more importantly in terms of freedom. When you do ASIC layout work for a living, you sacrifice a lot of family time if you can't detach/reattach ala VNC. So I'm pretty damned thankful.
That's not to say I don't welcome new applications if they better meet my needs. I'll be delighted to learn more about what NX offers just as soon as I can actually visit the proferred links!
- Leo
From the manpage for screen:
"Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a
physical terminal between several processes (typically
interactive shells)."
I use it all the time; start an interactive job while I'm at work on a particular machine using screen, disconnect using "CTRL-A d" then go home, log into the same machine, issue the command "screen -r" and I'm right back into that shell session.
These days, I mostly use TightVNC over a VPN pipe instead, which gives me the graphical equivalent of this.
Hope this helps.
- Leo
Hey, in Sleeper Woody Allen was able to fire up that VW bug that had been stored for like 200 years... and if a V-Dub can start after that, surely these rovers can manage one little winter!
- Leo
For me it was Tribes 1, my first serious foray into online multi-player gaming. Evenings and weekends, and the wife got tired of it. The solution was to stop playing as much, and that's just the way it goes. Like the other poster said, adulthood beckons... can't have it all, gotta decide what matters.
I made the right choice, and it wasn't that hard in all honesty.
- Leo
Washington, DC (FantasyNews) May 17th, 2004 - The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute reported today that Linus Torvalds, the public relations spokesman for the Linux operating system that was invented by Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, misled the public when he revealed the actual provenance of Linux.
"He can't be believed or trusted," said Ken Brown, head of the institute. "He says he has good teeth, yet the truth of the matter is that he has a mouth full of cavities. This is entirely consistent with the lies and fabrications this man has put forth since claiming he wrote Linux."
Well, they'd better hope that BMW doesn't decide to sue 'em for using their numbering scheme...
;-)
Not for me, it doesn't.
I have a SoundBlaster Audigy2 ZS, and Mandrake always installs drivers that don't work. I do as the author of this article says he did; I poke and prod until I get it to work (usually loading up harddrake2 and asking it to use different drivers). I was *just* messing with this yet again on Sunday as I installed Mandrake Official 10.0 PowerPack, and I spent longer trying to get the sound to work than I did on the install.
So yeah, I understand that newer hardware may not work out of the box; Linux will need to get more mainstream so hardware vendors will start releasing drivers earlier (or at all) so there's a chance for it to be on equal footing with Windows in that regard. But my point is simply that the author is not incorrect about the state of drivers under Linux; it's actually pretty obvious, and he didn't need to beat the subject to death.
- Leo
Whoa... in that case, please accept apologies for the "parting shot" and "jab" comments. I am appalled that your article was adulterated in that way; it stood just fine on its own merits, and obviously you didn't need any "help". That last bit is worthy of discussion, even if it does look like flamebait; it just didn't fit with the rest of your piece.
;-)
The article/essay really does cut to the heart of the matter, IMO. It's not undone by the addition, by any means; it just had such a nice cadence that I noticed when my brain, previously trotting along quite happily, tripped over that rock.
Cheers,
- Leo
Rick Ross made this parting shot in the close of his article:
I hope you will join me in watching how things progress before we draw conclusions about this settlement (or was it a purchase?)
The body of the article was well-written and I agree completely with his fundamental question -- where is Java in this settlement? I was shocked to hear pretty much squat about Java in the wake of the settlement, and I think his point that we must just wait and see is unfortunately correct.
But this little jab right at the end wasn't in keeping with the rest of the article. I wish he had instead expanded upon the idea of "What sorts of things might there be in the settlement, both good and bad for Java and/or Sun?". It almost feels as though it was inserted by someone else, it trips up the reader (well, me anyway) so badly.
- Leo
You are correct in one respect, we all pretty much have stereos. But they are NOT necessarily less power-hungry than an older PC; for example, my Yamaha receiver could double as a toaster.
For convenience' sake, many would opt not to build a Mp3 server out of older equipment. Some would. I think the main point is that this suggestion made by the linked article to do this is being blown a bit out of proportion. The bottom line is, a second system doing useful things on your home network may make sense for some folks. It does for me, maybe not for you; both of these are just fine results IMO.
- Leo
For direct email, send it to leobutler phat yahooie blot bomb (please to un-obfuscate the mess first... :-)
If you can provide your or your charity's contact information, I'll pay to ship you a couple of systems with Linux pre-installed. Just tell me what flavor, give any config details, and I'll do the rest. Happy to see working hardware go to a worthy cause.
- Leo