- active/inactive lets you know if someone is at the computer pushing the mouse around. A big step towards knowing what is going on in the company.
A big step towards nothing except petty micromanagement. Just because I'm in my office and moving my mouse doesn't mean that I want to talk to you or that I'm available.
IM replaces the "walk around" part of a lot of tasks, scheduling meetings, discussing lunch, etc. That saves a LOT of time.
In my world we have something that lets us schedule meetings for a whole bunch of people and a conference room all at the same time. Using IM for scheduling means IMing the whole group of people, and Murphy's law indicates that the last one will break the schedule the N previous agreed to. As for "walking around", gee, it's nice to get a little human contact now and again.
- Is much easier to use than "paste illegible postit on monitor" so people stop doing that.
Another killer business problem solved. I think Harvard Business School is calling, they'd like you to lecture on the business hazards of monitors and post-its.
- Many users have the same account at home, so people can be reached (mostly just IT) for various resons at home.
It's called a cell phone, and it even works when you're not at home.
- Allows employees to deal with their friends/family without spending money on long distance phone calls.
It's called "personal business." Usually a good idea to do it on your own time.
But we are a small shop and can tell when someone is not doing their job... not like they can hide in amongst 100 other workers doing the same thing.
If IM status is your idea of performance management, you've got to be kidding.
So for some workplaces, there are good uses for IM.
The Anti-virus business is not very pretty; its sloshing through crap and selling people subscriptions. If you spend more on basic research or better tools, where is the return?
But it's trivial to argue that better AV analysis systems (VMs, hardware systems, whatever) can result in lower costs through fewer labor costs, less overhead (ie, one decent VM box that can virtualize an entire network vs. several labs worth of boxes and their infrastructure and support people).
You ultimately will run into diminshing returns, but if the AV companies figure that there's nothing worth innovating in the AV process, they're mistaken. And it's also not unusual for innovations attempted for one purpose provide payoffs in others.
I guess I was thinking of a "better" computer system that could more completely virtualize an x86 environment, and have a set of images running close to full speed.
There are some things that won't work without a full blown, isolated lab environment. I'm kinda supprised that the virus companies aren't using THAT setup already. Have everything install from images, and have 5 or so computers, and call it a day.
That was probably their first step.
I'd think the ultimate setup would be a high end machine with 8-16 CPUs capable of x86 virtualization that could be run a half-dozen or so images that would be virtually networked with each other.
That way you could simulate a real network on real machines, including a server, clients, etc and see what happened. Even setting up and imaging a lab of 8 machines and a server would be time consuming.
Doesn't anyone sell x86 virtualization on Sparc or IBM mainframe hardware?
I'm kind of surprised that AV companies don't use custom VMware-type environments that can be debugged at a level above what the virus or any other processor could detect, or use special hardware/simulators that also can't be detected.
I'd think this would give them greater granularity and more control over the entire environment than trying to just run in it in a standard debugger.
The apocryphal story is that caddied media was a part of the original CD standard, but they went with uncaddied media due to the high cost of CDs when they were first introduced and the added cost associated with them.
I don't understand why DVDs weren't caddied though -- by then the manufacturing processes and costs of the caddies would have been much cheaper, plus DVDs are higher data density and thus more easily damaged.
DVD-RAM is, and I use a few with my Panasonic DVD recorder. It's nice to just chuck 'em in a drawer and not worry about them.
Totally agree on the SMP thing. I work with some seriously "into it" techies (including myself) who live and breathe Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD/Solaris/HP-UX/IRIX at both work and home. Not a single one of them has a personal box with more than one CPU. Maybe that's a European, or maybe even specifically UK trend for developer's own kit at home. Weird. Maybe others would like to chip in here.
I'm actually replacing a dual CPU system (PIII-667) with a single CPU system. I think you can get longer life out of a dual CPU system, especially in a server environment, and for a workstation it's nice to have the extra response when running piggish single-CPU tasks.
However, when building my new box I found that the prices for SMP were just too high, unless I was willing to seriously sacrifice single CPU performance. Either I got a fast single CPU system or a much slower dual CPU system for slightly more money. I could get an equivilent performance dual system, but it was more expensive by at least a factor of 2. It's too bad AMD and Intel don't let you go 2-way with a standard CPU.
The other thing I found after several years of owning a SMP system was that there were very few apps that I ran that made good use of the SMP setup. I got good desktop performance and could do some CPU intensive stuff on one CPU while doing something on another CPU, but overall my second CPU was largely idle.
Isn't Perl supposed to be dropped from FreeBSD's base real soon now? AFAIK it wasn't supposed to be a permenant part of 5, and wasn't going to be necessary to build world.
For a project that wanted to get away from FreeBSD, the final diary entry shows at least two imports from FreeBSD.
I can't be critical of a group of people that release their own BSD in their spare time, but I guess I'm not seeing SMP as being important enough to fork an entire BSD system.
I'm actually to the point where I don't even like to manage my home LAN anymore. My current BSD firewall/inet server box has a disk that's slowly crapping out and I can hardly make myself do the work of syncing a new box up with it. I'm tempted to move my domains to my ISP and be done with it.
Granted if ALL browsers made it equally difficult, you'd be spot on, I think...
That was the idea...if browsers had been built to display and allow navigation of web sites, not as a framework for arbitrary client-server code, which is what they've become.
Isn't the problem MS has with XP Sp2 not that it is technologically unsound per se, but that it makes it so much more difficult to run site-based code, and MS is seeing a bunch of resistance from large customers who have extensive systems built around easy-to-run code on the desktop via the browser which now break.
It's probably too late, historically speaking, to do this, but not only should plug-ins be complicated to install (requiring a seperate download-unpack-install-from-shell and not within browser), but getting site-provided code to run locally should be hard as well, *always* requiring an active acknowledgement generated by the browser (perhaps with an increasingly severe security warning depending on what functions the code contains) to begin execution of the code, along with a failsafe stop/start switch unscriptable by a site that the user could hit if they didn't like the results.
If there were numerous obstacles to running site-provided code locally, then the end-user uptake would be very low, and if it was low, sites wouldn't be built that required it, and if sites didn't require it, people wouldn't have it installed in the first place -- creating a "good" catch-22 situation where browser exploits just wouldn't exist.
But it's probably too late. People have assumed that the browser is a generic container for client-server applications and everyone expects to be able to run code locally, and the code they expect to run is the worst kind -- ActiveX controls with tentacles buried deep in the OS.
We used to have a few trees in the neighborhood that produced shitloads of crab apples (that's what WE called them; they could have been any kind of apple). About mid-August there were enough apples to fill 2-3 Radio Flyer wagons full.
We filled 'em up, made teams and some ad-hoc defenses and had at it throwing apples at each other. A strong 13 year old can throw an apple hard enough that it hurts at close distance (across a residential street), and invariably at least one kid (usually the one who cried the most) got one right in the mouth, and usually one that had gotten kinda mashed and full of sand or something.
Ideally the apples could be picked up and used for several fights, although advent of the yellow jacket season usually put a limit on handling of half-rotten apples.
There is no way the P90 felt slower than a DX4/100
It did, but we still ran Win3.1 and DOS6.22 back then, so all of the apps were optimized, at best, for 386 systems.
My primary exposure to them was running our new system setup routine, which largely consisted of PKZIP and that definitely was faster than the Pentium.
Perhaps the P90 was much faster on stuff optimized for it?
There's a chance that I'm confusing the P90 systems with the P75s; it's been a long time and many job descriptions ago that I dealt with new equipment setups on those platforms.
SP5 would be worth it simply for rolling up all the critical updates and Sp4 into a single executable. This would allow machines to be setup and patched offline and not worry about as many network-level vulnerabilities, as well as taking a lot of the patching burden off of needing a relatively high speed internet connection.
I've always wondered why MS didn't produce minor-version service packs (eg, 4.24) that included the last major service pack plus critical updates released since then as a single EXE. Since SPs essentially unpack and run an executable, you'd think it wouldn't be too hard to mod that system to produce SP+hotfix rollups.
What was the deal with the 486-DX4 100 then? Was that not an Intel CPU? I can remember a batch of Digital PCs we had circa '94-95 that came with that CPU, and it seemed a lot faster than the P90s we also had.
Someone I know claims to know someone at Intel who had a 486 clocked far above 100Mhz in the early 90s; suppsedly was much faster than equivilent Penitums.
Apparently was an internal-only proof of concept CPU that wasn't ever sold, but got used on some in-house boxes.
It may take hours at T1 speeds, but who's to say it has to be an interactive process?
What if it worked kind of like the old Audiogalaxy, where you went to a web site and picked what movies you wanted to download and a client on your machine downloaded them, with various bandwidth management options (use all, auto throttle, min/max, constant, etc).
I'd guess that within a month's time of asynchronous downloads, you'd never be able to catch up to the amount of movies you'd have on hand. Even at 128kbps we're talking 6 movies per month, and I'd assume that the average throughput would be 2-4 times that amount. Think of it as an electronic version of Netflix with a much shorter waiting list.
What's annoying is that they could do this *now* but for the paranoia of the MPAA.
Telling people to unplug their telephone to avoid telemarketers, unplug the web to avoid herbal part enlargement popups, or turn off their television to avoid violence is sidestepping the fact that these devices should be useful for purposes other than crime and marketeering.
That's about as inane as saying:
Telling people to cancel their magazine subscriptions, newspaper subscriptions and libraries to avoid advertising and immorality is sidestepping the fact these devices should be useful for purposes other than crime and markeeting.
The "mass medium" is easily controlled. My library has more than a child's lifetime worth of documentary and literature videos (to restrict it to simply videos), not counting the fact that they have the better and more intellectually sound alternative, the book.
I'll agree with your content analysis of the mass media -- it's full of crap, and even the stuff oriented at children is half advertising, and not good for young minds. But that doesn't mean we can't turn it off.
Consumers should have the right to not see Howard Stern or listen to World Harvest radio. They should have the right to not expose their children.
You already have those rights. Turn the fucking TV or radio off, or, change the channel.
Please, don't encourage the government to "protect the children".
Re:Measures to address the problem = more interest
on
419 Scam Blow-by-Blow
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· Score: 1
it was also the largest "industry" in the GNP (right term i think)
I thought they did a brisk trade in heroin, too. Perhaps not enough to top out their GNP.
Re:Measures to address the problem = more interest
on
419 Scam Blow-by-Blow
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· Score: 1
The problem with so many of these kleptocratic African countries is that "cleaning up the criminals" is usually just shorthand for "increasing our protection fee" or "getting rid of the competition."
The corruption is so endemic, it's hard to see them actually doing anything about it. Maybe an unlucky few independent operators without protection will wind up face-down in a Lagos ditch with a Kalishnikov slug in the back of the head, but does anyone expect the government to actually *do* anything constructive?
Over the years I've read several books and opinion pieces on Microsoft and their success. "Microsoft as the underdog" was a theme in many of them. I guess it's their strategy for motivating their workforce.
You could argue that there's some truth to this -- Microsoft *was* behind the curve on browsers for a long time -- it wasn't until Netscape stagnated and IE5 came out that they began to be more than underdogs. Admittedly they were 800 lb underdogs, but they were behind the curve.
I've also read that a lot of the whole underdog mentality is framed by Gates' perception of what happened to IBM and how he sees the same thing could happen to Microsoft. IBM was the king and then wasn't, almost overnight. Keeping an underdog/they're-out-to-get-me strategy prevents complacency.
AFAIK baloon flights dated back to 18th century Europe; flying per se "had been done" before. The Wright's were trying to use technology in new and novel ways to accomplish something. Rutan's craft doesn't deserve all the same credit, but at least SOME of it.
Rememeber also that Rutan's trying to win the X prize. He's not trying to replicate the shuttle or the Apollo missions, so deriding his craft for what it wasn't designed to do in the first place seems overly antagonistic.
So why is Burt Rutan suddenly the go-to guy for all things space-related
It's kind of like the Wrights and Curtis becoming "go to" guys for travel, even though they could move maybe two people 50 miles and everyone knew that Cunard Lines and Leland Stanford's railroads could actually accomplish real transportation.
An alliance between pioneers in a field only makes sense; who's to say Rutan won't have an orbital vehicle in 10 years? Be kind of useless without a destination.
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- active/inactive lets you know if someone is at the computer pushing the mouse around. A big step towards knowing what is going on in the company.
A big step towards nothing except petty micromanagement. Just because I'm in my office and moving my mouse doesn't mean that I want to talk to you or that I'm available.
IM replaces the "walk around" part of a lot of tasks, scheduling meetings, discussing lunch, etc. That saves a LOT of time.
In my world we have something that lets us schedule meetings for a whole bunch of people and a conference room all at the same time. Using IM for scheduling means IMing the whole group of people, and Murphy's law indicates that the last one will break the schedule the N previous agreed to. As for "walking around", gee, it's nice to get a little human contact now and again.
- Is much easier to use than "paste illegible postit on monitor" so people stop doing that.
Another killer business problem solved. I think Harvard Business School is calling, they'd like you to lecture on the business hazards of monitors and post-its.
- Many users have the same account at home, so people can be reached (mostly just IT) for various resons at home.
It's called a cell phone, and it even works when you're not at home.
- Allows employees to deal with their friends/family without spending money on long distance phone calls.
It's called "personal business." Usually a good idea to do it on your own time. But we are a small shop and can tell when someone is not doing their job... not like they can hide in amongst 100 other workers doing the same thing.
If IM status is your idea of performance management, you've got to be kidding.
So for some workplaces, there are good uses for IM.
I'm still waiting for the first one.
The Anti-virus business is not very pretty; its sloshing through crap and selling people subscriptions. If you spend more on basic research or better tools, where is the return?
But it's trivial to argue that better AV analysis systems (VMs, hardware systems, whatever) can result in lower costs through fewer labor costs, less overhead (ie, one decent VM box that can virtualize an entire network vs. several labs worth of boxes and their infrastructure and support people).
You ultimately will run into diminshing returns, but if the AV companies figure that there's nothing worth innovating in the AV process, they're mistaken. And it's also not unusual for innovations attempted for one purpose provide payoffs in others.
I guess I was thinking of a "better" computer system that could more completely virtualize an x86 environment, and have a set of images running close to full speed.
There are some things that won't work without a full blown, isolated lab environment. I'm kinda supprised that the virus companies aren't using THAT setup already. Have everything install from images, and have 5 or so computers, and call it a day.
That was probably their first step.
I'd think the ultimate setup would be a high end machine with 8-16 CPUs capable of x86 virtualization that could be run a half-dozen or so images that would be virtually networked with each other.
That way you could simulate a real network on real machines, including a server, clients, etc and see what happened. Even setting up and imaging a lab of 8 machines and a server would be time consuming.
Doesn't anyone sell x86 virtualization on Sparc or IBM mainframe hardware?
I'm kind of surprised that AV companies don't use custom VMware-type environments that can be debugged at a level above what the virus or any other processor could detect, or use special hardware/simulators that also can't be detected.
I'd think this would give them greater granularity and more control over the entire environment than trying to just run in it in a standard debugger.
The apocryphal story is that caddied media was a part of the original CD standard, but they went with uncaddied media due to the high cost of CDs when they were first introduced and the added cost associated with them.
I don't understand why DVDs weren't caddied though -- by then the manufacturing processes and costs of the caddies would have been much cheaper, plus DVDs are higher data density and thus more easily damaged.
DVD-RAM is, and I use a few with my Panasonic DVD recorder. It's nice to just chuck 'em in a drawer and not worry about them.
Totally agree on the SMP thing. I work with some seriously "into it" techies (including myself) who live and breathe Linux/OpenBSD/FreeBSD/Solaris/HP-UX/IRIX at both work and home. Not a single one of them has a personal box with more than one CPU. Maybe that's a European, or maybe even specifically UK trend for developer's own kit at home. Weird. Maybe others would like to chip in here.
I'm actually replacing a dual CPU system (PIII-667) with a single CPU system. I think you can get longer life out of a dual CPU system, especially in a server environment, and for a workstation it's nice to have the extra response when running piggish single-CPU tasks.
However, when building my new box I found that the prices for SMP were just too high, unless I was willing to seriously sacrifice single CPU performance. Either I got a fast single CPU system or a much slower dual CPU system for slightly more money. I could get an equivilent performance dual system, but it was more expensive by at least a factor of 2. It's too bad AMD and Intel don't let you go 2-way with a standard CPU.
The other thing I found after several years of owning a SMP system was that there were very few apps that I ran that made good use of the SMP setup. I got good desktop performance and could do some CPU intensive stuff on one CPU while doing something on another CPU, but overall my second CPU was largely idle.
Isn't Perl supposed to be dropped from FreeBSD's base real soon now? AFAIK it wasn't supposed to be a permenant part of 5, and wasn't going to be necessary to build world.
For a project that wanted to get away from FreeBSD, the final diary entry shows at least two imports from FreeBSD.
I can't be critical of a group of people that release their own BSD in their spare time, but I guess I'm not seeing SMP as being important enough to fork an entire BSD system.
...and moved everyone to Slough.
I'm actually to the point where I don't even like to manage my home LAN anymore. My current BSD firewall/inet server box has a disk that's slowly crapping out and I can hardly make myself do the work of syncing a new box up with it. I'm tempted to move my domains to my ISP and be done with it.
Stuff is a curse.
Granted if ALL browsers made it equally difficult, you'd be spot on, I think...
That was the idea...if browsers had been built to display and allow navigation of web sites, not as a framework for arbitrary client-server code, which is what they've become.
Isn't the problem MS has with XP Sp2 not that it is technologically unsound per se, but that it makes it so much more difficult to run site-based code, and MS is seeing a bunch of resistance from large customers who have extensive systems built around easy-to-run code on the desktop via the browser which now break.
It's probably too late, historically speaking, to do this, but not only should plug-ins be complicated to install (requiring a seperate download-unpack-install-from-shell and not within browser), but getting site-provided code to run locally should be hard as well, *always* requiring an active acknowledgement generated by the browser (perhaps with an increasingly severe security warning depending on what functions the code contains) to begin execution of the code, along with a failsafe stop/start switch unscriptable by a site that the user could hit if they didn't like the results.
If there were numerous obstacles to running site-provided code locally, then the end-user uptake would be very low, and if it was low, sites wouldn't be built that required it, and if sites didn't require it, people wouldn't have it installed in the first place -- creating a "good" catch-22 situation where browser exploits just wouldn't exist.
But it's probably too late. People have assumed that the browser is a generic container for client-server applications and everyone expects to be able to run code locally, and the code they expect to run is the worst kind -- ActiveX controls with tentacles buried deep in the OS.
We used to have a few trees in the neighborhood that produced shitloads of crab apples (that's what WE called them; they could have been any kind of apple). About mid-August there were enough apples to fill 2-3 Radio Flyer wagons full.
We filled 'em up, made teams and some ad-hoc defenses and had at it throwing apples at each other. A strong 13 year old can throw an apple hard enough that it hurts at close distance (across a residential street), and invariably at least one kid (usually the one who cried the most) got one right in the mouth, and usually one that had gotten kinda mashed and full of sand or something.
Ideally the apples could be picked up and used for several fights, although advent of the yellow jacket season usually put a limit on handling of half-rotten apples.
There is no way the P90 felt slower than a DX4/100
It did, but we still ran Win3.1 and DOS6.22 back then, so all of the apps were optimized, at best, for 386 systems.
My primary exposure to them was running our new system setup routine, which largely consisted of PKZIP and that definitely was faster than the Pentium.
Perhaps the P90 was much faster on stuff optimized for it?
There's a chance that I'm confusing the P90 systems with the P75s; it's been a long time and many job descriptions ago that I dealt with new equipment setups on those platforms.
SP5 would be worth it simply for rolling up all the critical updates and Sp4 into a single executable. This would allow machines to be setup and patched offline and not worry about as many network-level vulnerabilities, as well as taking a lot of the patching burden off of needing a relatively high speed internet connection.
I've always wondered why MS didn't produce minor-version service packs (eg, 4.24) that included the last major service pack plus critical updates released since then as a single EXE. Since SPs essentially unpack and run an executable, you'd think it wouldn't be too hard to mod that system to produce SP+hotfix rollups.
What was the deal with the 486-DX4 100 then? Was that not an Intel CPU? I can remember a batch of Digital PCs we had circa '94-95 that came with that CPU, and it seemed a lot faster than the P90s we also had.
Someone I know claims to know someone at Intel who had a 486 clocked far above 100Mhz in the early 90s; suppsedly was much faster than equivilent Penitums.
Apparently was an internal-only proof of concept CPU that wasn't ever sold, but got used on some in-house boxes.
It may take hours at T1 speeds, but who's to say it has to be an interactive process?
What if it worked kind of like the old Audiogalaxy, where you went to a web site and picked what movies you wanted to download and a client on your machine downloaded them, with various bandwidth management options (use all, auto throttle, min/max, constant, etc).
I'd guess that within a month's time of asynchronous downloads, you'd never be able to catch up to the amount of movies you'd have on hand. Even at 128kbps we're talking 6 movies per month, and I'd assume that the average throughput would be 2-4 times that amount. Think of it as an electronic version of Netflix with a much shorter waiting list.
What's annoying is that they could do this *now* but for the paranoia of the MPAA.
That's about as inane as saying:
Consumers should have the right to not see Howard Stern or listen to World Harvest radio. They should have the right to not expose their children.
You already have those rights. Turn the fucking TV or radio off, or, change the channel.
Please, don't encourage the government to "protect the children".
it was also the largest "industry" in the GNP (right term i think)
I thought they did a brisk trade in heroin, too. Perhaps not enough to top out their GNP.
The problem with so many of these kleptocratic African countries is that "cleaning up the criminals" is usually just shorthand for "increasing our protection fee" or "getting rid of the competition."
The corruption is so endemic, it's hard to see them actually doing anything about it. Maybe an unlucky few independent operators without protection will wind up face-down in a Lagos ditch with a Kalishnikov slug in the back of the head, but does anyone expect the government to actually *do* anything constructive?
Over the years I've read several books and opinion pieces on Microsoft and their success. "Microsoft as the underdog" was a theme in many of them. I guess it's their strategy for motivating their workforce.
You could argue that there's some truth to this -- Microsoft *was* behind the curve on browsers for a long time -- it wasn't until Netscape stagnated and IE5 came out that they began to be more than underdogs. Admittedly they were 800 lb underdogs, but they were behind the curve.
I've also read that a lot of the whole underdog mentality is framed by Gates' perception of what happened to IBM and how he sees the same thing could happen to Microsoft. IBM was the king and then wasn't, almost overnight. Keeping an underdog/they're-out-to-get-me strategy prevents complacency.
AFAIK baloon flights dated back to 18th century Europe; flying per se "had been done" before. The Wright's were trying to use technology in new and novel ways to accomplish something. Rutan's craft doesn't deserve all the same credit, but at least SOME of it.
Rememeber also that Rutan's trying to win the X prize. He's not trying to replicate the shuttle or the Apollo missions, so deriding his craft for what it wasn't designed to do in the first place seems overly antagonistic.
So why is Burt Rutan suddenly the go-to guy for all things space-related
It's kind of like the Wrights and Curtis becoming "go to" guys for travel, even though they could move maybe two people 50 miles and everyone knew that Cunard Lines and Leland Stanford's railroads could actually accomplish real transportation.
An alliance between pioneers in a field only makes sense; who's to say Rutan won't have an orbital vehicle in 10 years? Be kind of useless without a destination.