This is not security we're talking about here. This is IT lazyness.
IT people, for some reason, have this overwhelming urge to "lock down" environments so that they can limit the wide variety of things they have to support.
In the end, however, you need to look no further than the whole point and purpose of an IT department in the first place:
"To provide employees of a company with the tools they require to do their jobs".
When IT controls that definition "tools they require" - then without a doubt, the people who are trying to do their job become limited in how they work. Quite often, lattitude in how different people do a certain job differently will affect productivity in a HUGE way.
At the other end of the scale, when the end user controls the definition of "tools they require" - then pretty much anything goes, and when something breaks, an IT group can end up spending a lot of time, effort, and money trying to fix problems and keep things running smoothly.
So what we're seeing here is bean-counters running the show. Bean-counters who set up a corporation as a set of departments who have to compete with eachother for their budgets. This is the most counter-productive load of bullshit any person with an ounce of common sense could experience. The whole point of an IT department is to provide service. It's not to bill someone's department for "number of pages printed" or "number of helpdesk calls" - or "number of bits they transferred over the corporate network". When an IT person (or manger) gets the idea that they need to actually BILL people in their own company for services rendered, then they've lost the whole point of being in a company in the first place, and it looks like they'd really rather be running a separate company that basically is an outsourcing firm.
I think this whole notion is just a load of crap.
Give people machines, give them software, teach them how to use it, and leave them the fuck alone so they can do their job. If they want a different machine or platform - then you should, as a Computer Person - learn how to support that platform and fix problems. Otherwise, get the fuck out of the way, and let people who want to learn about different platforms help your company's employees to do their jobs.
IT used to be called MIS, Management Information SERVICES. Then they started calling it IS, or Information Services. Then, somewhere along the way, they scammed their way into dropping the word "Services". So exactly WHAT is the function of this department now? How do they contribute to the productivity of the company as a whole? It seems that nowadays, they only contribute as a barrier, rather than an enabler.
Another bunch of bean-counters trying to justify more headcount and bigger budgets so they can be little Napoleons in their corporate war to dominate their company. What does that have to do with doing business? Nothing. Get rid of the bums, I say.
really, I think that 99% of the support problems out there could be solved if companies were more open and not so paranoid about protecting their IP or "image".
At some point about 10 years ago - companies started to be afraid to list "known issues" of their products, or give users a database of problems to search.
Novell used to have a Support Encyclopedia. I don't know if they still do - but it used to be a great tool for finding problems. If you had a problem, it was usually documented in there, and a patch was usually available. The encyclopedia was updated quarterly, available on CD in a format that was searchable. Not just searchable, it had a totally great search engine that could find just about anything.
In comparison, online search engines in general today, from Microsoft to Apple - SUCK for finding information on problems.
Over the years - Novell started clamping down on the information more and more, and NSE became more of a big glob of marketing goo. And Microsoft's counterpart TechNet came out - and it was 99% marketing crap from the getgo, and remains as such today. Companies began to be afraid to even use the word "bug" because of it's negative connotations. So they used words like "problem" or "issue" - and guess what happened to those words? Now THEY have negative connotations. I've got news for you - it's a negative thing!
But being truthful and forthcoming to your customers is a POSITIVE thing. And the people who support these products, who are not PAID by the vendor to support them - appreciated this information.
I support products that run on Windows. A good 50-75% of my support issues are actually Windows problems. Either problems with the OS - or problems caused by something endemic to Windows - usually, a poorly-documented function where a programmer expected a certain behavior - and something unexpected happened in certain circumstances that wasn't documented, or was documented but not clearly explained.
Lately, I have noticed an iron curtain being erected with regard to product's internal information. So now, when you support a product that runs on a given platform, and something strange happens, it's anybody's guess what the fucking problem is. We're troubleshooting black boxes now. So all vendors support pretty much flies blind.
The latest example of this - where I'm deriving most of my current wrath from - is a DELL RAID driver. A customer has an older version - and Dell strongly recommends that customers upgrade. But do they have a list of specific changes from one version of this RAID driver to another? Hell no. So how do I know if this customer's problem might be related to behavior that they fixed in the later RAID driver? How do I justify to my customer that they should upgrade the driver, and do their own internal testing on a third-party product?
Our QA tests with the latest driver. The older driver isn't even immediately available. So in order to try to duplicate this customer's problem, I've got to get ahold of the hardware, back-rev the driver, set up the customer's environment, install our software and hope I can reproduce the problem so all this effort was worth my time.
All because the customer won't update their driver.
All because FUCKING DELL won't give out information on the problems they fixed, or why a customer should upgrade. They simply expect everyone to always run the latest driver.
Other examples of sucky support information - my DSL provider, PacBell - they'll waste HOURS of their own technician's time before they'll admit to a problem that they knew was happening up front.
Another Example - Apple's Support message boards. Used to be a great place to look for information from other peopl who were having problems. Now they've handed it over to the marketing people, and it's absolutely useless. Any problems people run into get censored off the board, so it's not really searchable - plus you have to jump through registration hoops, and their board's response time is 10 times slower than it used to be.
Personally - I find vendors who are open and forthcoming with information to be FAR more attractive than a vendor that claims to have a perfect product. Software and Hardware break in the real world, and the extent to which customers have to rely on their support people is determined by how much the vendor empowers it's customers to resolve issues on their own.
If a vendor clamps down on information - customers have to rely on the support services, which are typically for-pay, and in the fact that vendors will often have to waive support fees when it's apparent that it's their product that is broken, or in the event that the customer is a huge and valuable account - support is still not a money-making venture. And the end result is a frustrated customer who paid lots of money for a product that didn't work, and can't be made to work without paying more money, and there's no guarantee that paying more money will make the product work.
So why do you think people are afraid to spend money on software and computers? Why has the industry slowed down? Why don't people trust technology?
Because of the opacity of the products. Because of the influence of timid marketing and legal people in the major computer industry corporations.
If they'd just hand the reigns back to the people that CREATED this industry in the first place (the engineers) - this problem would be fixed.
But no - nobody wants to show their dirty laundry.
the answer is NO and the reason is - because they don't have to.
Look at nearly every other industry in the US - they are held to either federal quality/safety standards, or are reviewed by independent consumer advocacy groups (like Consumer's Union).
So far, in my estimation, Consumer's Union has done a piss-poor job of reviewing computer hardware and software, and has been way too soft on an industry charging exhorbitant fees for what is essentially useless garbage.
Every hardware manufacturer tweaks for benchmarks.
The only thing you can do is to then benchmark hardware with a much wider variety of tests. Pentium is faster? Only on Floating Point Ops. Or is it only on Spec. Or maybe PPC is twice as fast? Was that on Spec? Vector calculations? or timed Photoshop tests.
The idea as a vendor is to SLANT the results of the benchmarking to make your hardware appear faster. As a consumer - you need to arm yourself with a wider variety of benchmarking - IF your requirements are a wide variety of performance scenarios. If all you're doing is playing quake that's cool.
On the other hand, the onus should be on the reviewer sites to NOT focus on narrow benchmark suites - otherwise they're guilty of biased reporting, misleading consumers, and contributing to the creation of a Corporate-Fascist state.
Open Source sucks at error handling? Look at the standards in the PC industry.
They've been declining in general for the past 10 years, and before that they sucked as well. I think the standard is really set by the hardware itself.
Typically drive errors can have symptoms of software running more slowly as the drive retries - or applications will simply appear to hang, or if it's an error reading code into memory, well, anything goes.
Network errors can go completely unknown until you haul out the crusty old hacker with a sniffer - oh gee, did you know that your card is dumping half it's packets?
Oh - especially network problems - where the software at the user level 90% time just sits there and goes "Duh!" for simple things like pulling the cable out.
Error checking and handling, in general, SUCKS and it's the main reason why computers suck - why the software industry spends billions of dollars chasing problems during the development phase that they never really get to pin down, so the problem ends up going into shipping products.
I blame the lax standards on the platform, and the dumbing down of programming in general (the over-reliance on high-level languages that remove the programmer progressively further and further from the hardware their programs run on).
If PC's had better standards for this sort of thing at the hardware level - and if the vendors adhered to those standards, then the software people could write software that handles errors better, and it would bubble up to the user level as more reliability, and much simpler troubleshooting, probably tens of billions of dollars saved in productivity alone, and probably the PC industry would be 10 times the size it is today, because people would actually trust them for important tasks, rather than the next nifty home killer-app like pirating music. (not meant to be a troll against MP3 trading - meant to be a troll against the apparent purpose and direction of the PC industry in general).
I guess this might also be cool if I could stream video or stills from my miniDV camera to this drive - thereby reducing my dependency on the exhorbitantly-priced Sony Memory Sticks.
How easy will it be for Apple to introduce CONTENT PROTECTION via a stealth firmware update or something once a market is established and they gain significant marketshare (not really likely at that price IMO)?
Once this thing gets out in significant numbers, Apple's media partners are going to be very unhappy with them - and very large Quicktime format standardization deals are going to hinge on how cooperative Apple is at introducing content protection features.
All Apple has to do is bundle some "gotta have feature" with an OS upgrade, which "breaks" compatibility with iTunes, and then provide an update to iTunes which enforces the content protection, and force the firmware update on iPod to be compatible with the new iTunes. It's not like Apple hasn't snuck unsavory changes into firmware updates in the past.
Raise your hand if you're willing to spend $400 on THIS particular device, with b/w screen, no handwriting recognition, actually rather TOO big (no bigger than Palm V is my ideal size), no PDA functions - oops, sorry, wrong market. . .
You don't want to compare some computer downtime to the death and destruction and economic fallout from the WTC disaster.
But compare it to something that can clearly be labelled a "terrorist act".
A suicide bomer walks into a bar, and orders a drink. He says "You should pat down your customers before they come in here, free Mitnick, God is Great" and sets his bomb to explode, slightly injuring several patrons, putting the bar out of business for a week for repairs.
Nobody was killed, the business lost a lot of money because people were afraid to go into the bar after that. But this is definately an act of terrorism.
Now, what if some skript kiddie attacks the VISA web site, and steals thousands of credit card numbers. VISA's profits plummet as people cut their cards, because they didn't like having $1000 charged to all of their accounts by this skript kiddie.
VISA's annual corporate donation to the World Hunger Program is cut in half due to the loss, and statistically, 10,000 children in Nairobi starve to death because of this.
This argument definately has some of the qualities of a slippery slope.
It still doesn't mean that white-hat hackers are terrorists though. They provide a vital service, which, on the surface, shakes people's confidence in the Internet.
But when Consumer Reports finds a defective car design that tends to explode and kill people - aren't consumers ultimately MORE secure in their purchases AFTER the design flaw is fixed?
The same should apply to the Internet.
The fact that the Firestone Tire recall happened after hundreds of people were killed was a disaster. And it was a shame that an organization like Consumer's Union didn't pick up on it before hand.
It would be an attrocity if it was found that this problem was kept quiet due to legislation similar to what's going on in the computer industry (where an EULA can silence free speech - prohibiting a customer from writing disparaging remarks about a company or their products).
You don't think that high-profile cases of Hotmail getting hacked or ecommerce vendor's credit card databases don't terrify people?
If people were 100% certain that their computer use was secure - don't you think that a LOT more people would rely on computers for a lot more economic activity?
As it is - the PC industry's poor reliability has been the greatest drawback. Who wants to trust important data to a PC that they KNOW will crash and lose it? The Industry has done a SHITTY job both with reliabiltiy, and with security.
Of course they want to point fingers at the hackers, white or black hat. They're all a pain in the ass to the industry from a PR standpoint, even though the white-hat hackers are actually more of a benefit.
So let's see how well people trust the Internet, and run out to buy PC's and broadband connections when all those nasty white-hat hackers are safely behind bars, and nobody is allowed to even print anything disparaging about our sacred Computer Companies' products.
After September 11, we now know that our airport security was lax, and SUCKED.
At some point, after the government has sucked up to the computer industry to the point where actual security is like a wet paper tissue, we'll see a day where all computer screens go blank, and we'll realize that those white-hat hackers and accountability was actually a good thing.
If the terrorists' aims were to cripple the US economy, that would be reasonable:
Step 1: make businesses afraid to send people to customers face to face. (or avoid sending workers to remote training, trade shows, etc.)
Step 2: make the business that relied upon travel, now relying upon the mail - afraid to rely upon the mail.
Step 3: now that businesses are afraid of interacting person to person, and through the mail, make them afraid to interact via the internet.
Something like nimda or code red would be consistent with this plan - however, I'm not hearing about any terrorist attacks on other systems that businesses rely on for interaction:
Highways/Busses/Trains.
And I don't think that nimda really was all that effective. At least not nearly as effective as the WTC attack and Anthrax attacks were.
Part of the Terrorist's aims in the Hijackings were to scare people into not using air travel, scare businesses into not locating their offices in high-profile targets. Scare people into not going to work. Scare people into not trusting the economy and their jobs - so they stop spending; in effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A hacker who hacks into an ATM is not a terrorist in that respect - he's just after money. But if you lose all your money in your account (which would only happen at a Credit Union, your Bank is federally insured!) - then people might be afraid to keep their money at the Bank - which would definately have a serious impact on the economy.
I'm CERTAIN that many hackers are writing to exploits in IIS for political reasons. Their motivation is to frighten people away from using such an insecure platform.
In this regard - the definition of Terrorism truly lies in the motivation of the perpetrator.
So you can't put a blanket over all hackers and say that they are terrorists. Some hackers don't care WHAT people use as a web server. They just want to hack to stroke their own ego. Or maybe they want to P#r33 |V|1+n1c|. (which could be defined as terrorism).
In that regard - most of us here, ideologically, are WITH the hacker/terrorists. Most of us are ideologically opposed to the corporate control of the Internet, software standards, and our legal system. To us - these "hacktivists" are freedom fighters.
Or possibly they're just "consumer advocates" - who want to make sure that "safety and quality" of software and computer services are well documented so that consumers can be informed.
So we may be a bit biased when we see characterizations of hackers as "terrorists" because these activities don't kill thousands of people in a fiery explosive. But they DO have a significant negative impact on the economy, and people's trust of the internet. Hacktivists see the fault lying in the corrupt corporate/political system, and as soon as things change there, the hacking activity would stop.
What do you think the hackers would do, if the US Govt revoked Microsoft's corporate charter as punishment for it's crimes against humanity? And then the US Govt mandated the use of OpenSource software on all Government activities and business? And if the US Govt mandated file formats? And if the US Govt finally got smart on patents and copyrights, and gave us our rights back? Would the hackers stop hacking systems out there? Or would they continue their "consumer advocate" activities?
The same arugment is being used to justify non-appeasement of the Terrorists. No matter how repulsed we are at Israel's current behavior - we're (the US) not going to back off of our support, because that would be seen as caving in to terroist demands and giving them a "victory" and also, license to continue terrorizing.
Clearly, we have to be strong, and act, and even break a few eggs, to put a stop to terrorism.
There is no "consumer advocate" element in hijacking a plane and crashing into the twin-towers. Perhaps there was a side-effect of pointing out holes in our airport security system - keep in mind that since 9/11, many people have come forward to state that they've smuggled knives onto planes even with the hightened security measures. THOSE people should be respected, revered, and considered patriots.
In the same way, hackers who post exploits and things - those are the true "consumer advocates"; but the problem here, I think is that they're being lumped in together with the "free mitnick" people, the hacktivists. I think that the hacktivists are the ones that really need to be stopped. And, of course the 'criminals' - people who use exploits for illegal gain, money, etc. This is where this whole problem lies - we need to be wise and distinguish the black hats and white hats.
The spate of corporate-backed legislation, the SPA, and corporate rhetoric from the software and media giants - they're painting with an overly broad brush, because though the criminals are a true threat - the white-hats are a threat to their credibility and profitability. So they're attacking them too. People should differentiate between the ones who intend harm, and the ones who intend to help. Intent makes all the difference.
The only advice I have for white-hat hackers:
Keep up the good fight! Document EVERY step you take, every bit of work you do. Cover your ass. If you get hauled into court - make sure you have good legal help from either the ACLU and EFF, and show your documentation.
Any reasonable non-biased juror should be able to tell the difference between someone who means harm, and someone who's trying to be a consumer advocate.
A good example of this is recent rhetoric spouted by DeLay, (R).
He was opposed to federalization of airport security, on the grounds that it would add 30,000 unionized federal employees which he implied would be, in effect, a government-funded voter base for the Democratic party.
This is the way Republicans see things.
They don't really give a rat's ass about whether Government is interfering in Commerce. They just don't want their constituents' tax-dollars going to fund more federal programs and employees, because those individuals ineveitably vote Democratic, because that's job-security for them. It's a vicious cycle in their eyes.
So in the end, the DeLay Republicans would favor the handing over of airport security to a private contractor - where how well-trained, and how well-paid these security people are, becomes a matter of business accounting; rather than how effective we all require airline security to be - because ALL of us rely on it so heavily.
Bad security=more hijackings=more deaths=more fear=less airline customers=more airline bailouts=slower economy=more government borrowing=higher inflation=higher interest rates=more layoffs=downward spiral for EVERYBODY.
The self-empowerment philosophy of the Republicans and Libertarians does not allow for this kind of "let's all work together" thinking. That's Communism in their eyes.
Bush is using Diplomacy to unite the coalition. You don't use diplomacy on criminals. You use them on recognized legitimate governments. The Taliban are not the legitimate recognized government of Afghanistan, never have been, and never will be.
With the exception of two tin-pot dictatorships, and the foreign power that created them to keep Afghanistan off their back (namely Pakistan) - nobody recognizes the Taliban.
True, the Taliban are probably extending Nanawatai to OBL (Nanawatai is the sacred Pashtun tradition that binds the Taliban to shelter and protect OBL - it has nothing at all to do with Sharia, Islamic Law - it's a tradition unique to the Pashtun). We're in a bind as far as evidence goes - we have shown evidence to most other nations of the world - who have agreed that bin Laden is guilty.
If we show evidence to the Taliban, it could compromise our information gathering methods, because they could shut them down. It doesn't take a genius to understand that we could have under cover agents' lives at stake. I'm sure that the Taliban and Al Qaeda would love to know the source of any information leaks.
So if these facts aren't good enough for the Taliban, then they're just going to have to eat bombs for breakfast - because Justice is coming whether they like it or not. It's too bad that the poor Afghan citizens are going to get caught in the middle, but hasn't that been the way of things for much of human history? They say that the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. The problem is finding a benevolent dictator.
maybe, congress will listen to this person, whisper and nod to eachother, and then reach into their pockets and look at the 5-figure-checks that the RIAA goons wrote to their campaigns, and decided, gee, all that money really IS a bribe after all, and it was wrong to accept it - yeah, let's vote NO on this crappy unamerican unconstitutional bill!
Okay, for THREE years now, I've heard the Linux people on this board whine and complain that if Linux could only get a truly simple user interface (and a decent Office substitute), that Linux would "take over the world and Microsoft would go away".
Well, that's true. That would happen. But the point back then is the same point now:
MOST home computer users, and a whole lot of business users (ie. 95% of the market) don't understand the concept of something as simple as a directory.
Mac users are beginning to accept their niche-dom. Acceptance of niche-dom isn't very much fun, because you know that eventually, niche systems like Atari, Commadore, and Amiga were squeezed out by Microsoft.
I think perhaps the Linux community needs to plan for a "post-Microsoft Apocolypse" world. (ie - what will users need on an OS once MS has taken over the world, and the internet.)
Obviously, portability - we'll have to run on whatever hardware MS allows to be produced. Security, to prevent the RIAA from scanning your hard drives.
AND - the ability to connect to an internet that, frankly, may not run true TCP/IP (but rather, a bastardized "innovative version" of MSTCP/IP).
A solar power station that Human civilization relied heavily upon would be the FIRST target I would take out if I were an invading alien fleet.
Or a disgruntled ex-math professor living in a shack in North Dakota. (okay - exactly HOW to take it out would be a challenge).
the other question is - solar cells are 15% efficient? I would hope that they could improve that before shooting them into space.
And HOW long do these solar panels last? 20 years tops? Could a station like this even be built within the lifespan of it's collectors?
What would be great would be a cheap backplane card that plugged into either an IDE or SCSI bus, on which you could mount zillions of old 4 meg 72-pin simms which are now obsolete.
I probably have a gig's worth of 4 and 8 meg 72-pin simms sitting around in my lab with no use other than collecting dust. It would be great if I could slap them into a device to use as fast storage. I guess the RAM companies would rather have us throw these old chips away and spend money on new RAM.
Oh yes. Microwaves. And the use of HAARP will allow us to cause earthquakes on their cities, and summon hurricanes, and strike every man woman child and mouse dead in a 100m radius. Super-killer death rays! uh huh.
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This is not security we're talking about here. This is IT lazyness.
IT people, for some reason, have this overwhelming urge to "lock down" environments so that they can limit the wide variety of things they have to support.
In the end, however, you need to look no further than the whole point and purpose of an IT department in the first place:
"To provide employees of a company with the tools they require to do their jobs".
When IT controls that definition "tools they require" - then without a doubt, the people who are trying to do their job become limited in how they work. Quite often, lattitude in how different people do a certain job differently will affect productivity in a HUGE way.
At the other end of the scale, when the end user controls the definition of "tools they require" - then pretty much anything goes, and when something breaks, an IT group can end up spending a lot of time, effort, and money trying to fix problems and keep things running smoothly.
So what we're seeing here is bean-counters running the show. Bean-counters who set up a corporation as a set of departments who have to compete with eachother for their budgets. This is the most counter-productive load of bullshit any person with an ounce of common sense could experience. The whole point of an IT department is to provide service. It's not to bill someone's department for "number of pages printed" or "number of helpdesk calls" - or "number of bits they transferred over the corporate network". When an IT person (or manger) gets the idea that they need to actually BILL people in their own company for services rendered, then they've lost the whole point of being in a company in the first place, and it looks like they'd really rather be running a separate company that basically is an outsourcing firm.
I think this whole notion is just a load of crap.
Give people machines, give them software, teach them how to use it, and leave them the fuck alone so they can do their job. If they want a different machine or platform - then you should, as a Computer Person - learn how to support that platform and fix problems. Otherwise, get the fuck out of the way, and let people who want to learn about different platforms help your company's employees to do their jobs.
IT used to be called MIS, Management Information SERVICES. Then they started calling it IS, or Information Services. Then, somewhere along the way, they scammed their way into dropping the word "Services". So exactly WHAT is the function of this department now? How do they contribute to the productivity of the company as a whole? It seems that nowadays, they only contribute as a barrier, rather than an enabler.
Another bunch of bean-counters trying to justify more headcount and bigger budgets so they can be little Napoleons in their corporate war to dominate their company. What does that have to do with doing business? Nothing. Get rid of the bums, I say.
really, I think that 99% of the support problems out there could be solved if companies were more open and not so paranoid about protecting their IP or "image".
At some point about 10 years ago - companies started to be afraid to list "known issues" of their products, or give users a database of problems to search.
Novell used to have a Support Encyclopedia. I don't know if they still do - but it used to be a great tool for finding problems. If you had a problem, it was usually documented in there, and a patch was usually available. The encyclopedia was updated quarterly, available on CD in a format that was searchable. Not just searchable, it had a totally great search engine that could find just about anything.
In comparison, online search engines in general today, from Microsoft to Apple - SUCK for finding information on problems.
Over the years - Novell started clamping down on the information more and more, and NSE became more of a big glob of marketing goo. And Microsoft's counterpart TechNet came out - and it was 99% marketing crap from the getgo, and remains as such today. Companies began to be afraid to even use the word "bug" because of it's negative connotations. So they used words like "problem" or "issue" - and guess what happened to those words? Now THEY have negative connotations. I've got news for you - it's a negative thing!
But being truthful and forthcoming to your customers is a POSITIVE thing. And the people who support these products, who are not PAID by the vendor to support them - appreciated this information.
I support products that run on Windows. A good 50-75% of my support issues are actually Windows problems. Either problems with the OS - or problems caused by something endemic to Windows - usually, a poorly-documented function where a programmer expected a certain behavior - and something unexpected happened in certain circumstances that wasn't documented, or was documented but not clearly explained.
Lately, I have noticed an iron curtain being erected with regard to product's internal information. So now, when you support a product that runs on a given platform, and something strange happens, it's anybody's guess what the fucking problem is. We're troubleshooting black boxes now. So all vendors support pretty much flies blind.
The latest example of this - where I'm deriving most of my current wrath from - is a DELL RAID driver. A customer has an older version - and Dell strongly recommends that customers upgrade. But do they have a list of specific changes from one version of this RAID driver to another? Hell no. So how do I know if this customer's problem might be related to behavior that they fixed in the later RAID driver? How do I justify to my customer that they should upgrade the driver, and do their own internal testing on a third-party product?
Our QA tests with the latest driver. The older driver isn't even immediately available. So in order to try to duplicate this customer's problem, I've got to get ahold of the hardware, back-rev the driver, set up the customer's environment, install our software and hope I can reproduce the problem so all this effort was worth my time.
All because the customer won't update their driver.
All because FUCKING DELL won't give out information on the problems they fixed, or why a customer should upgrade. They simply expect everyone to always run the latest driver.
Other examples of sucky support information - my DSL provider, PacBell - they'll waste HOURS of their own technician's time before they'll admit to a problem that they knew was happening up front.
Another Example - Apple's Support message boards. Used to be a great place to look for information from other peopl who were having problems. Now they've handed it over to the marketing people, and it's absolutely useless. Any problems people run into get censored off the board, so it's not really searchable - plus you have to jump through registration hoops, and their board's response time is 10 times slower than it used to be.
Personally - I find vendors who are open and forthcoming with information to be FAR more attractive than a vendor that claims to have a perfect product. Software and Hardware break in the real world, and the extent to which customers have to rely on their support people is determined by how much the vendor empowers it's customers to resolve issues on their own.
If a vendor clamps down on information - customers have to rely on the support services, which are typically for-pay, and in the fact that vendors will often have to waive support fees when it's apparent that it's their product that is broken, or in the event that the customer is a huge and valuable account - support is still not a money-making venture. And the end result is a frustrated customer who paid lots of money for a product that didn't work, and can't be made to work without paying more money, and there's no guarantee that paying more money will make the product work.
So why do you think people are afraid to spend money on software and computers? Why has the industry slowed down? Why don't people trust technology?
Because of the opacity of the products. Because of the influence of timid marketing and legal people in the major computer industry corporations.
If they'd just hand the reigns back to the people that CREATED this industry in the first place (the engineers) - this problem would be fixed.
But no - nobody wants to show their dirty laundry.
the answer is NO and the reason is - because they don't have to.
Look at nearly every other industry in the US - they are held to either federal quality/safety standards, or are reviewed by independent consumer advocacy groups (like Consumer's Union).
So far, in my estimation, Consumer's Union has done a piss-poor job of reviewing computer hardware and software, and has been way too soft on an industry charging exhorbitant fees for what is essentially useless garbage.
Every hardware manufacturer tweaks for benchmarks.
The only thing you can do is to then benchmark hardware with a much wider variety of tests. Pentium is faster? Only on Floating Point Ops. Or is it only on Spec. Or maybe PPC is twice as fast? Was that on Spec? Vector calculations? or timed Photoshop tests.
The idea as a vendor is to SLANT the results of the benchmarking to make your hardware appear faster. As a consumer - you need to arm yourself with a wider variety of benchmarking - IF your requirements are a wide variety of performance scenarios. If all you're doing is playing quake that's cool.
On the other hand, the onus should be on the reviewer sites to NOT focus on narrow benchmark suites - otherwise they're guilty of biased reporting, misleading consumers, and contributing to the creation of a Corporate-Fascist state.
That's always ATI's excuse. Before their drivers even get a chance to mature - the hardware is already obsolete.
Open Source sucks at error handling? Look at the standards in the PC industry.
They've been declining in general for the past 10 years, and before that they sucked as well. I think the standard is really set by the hardware itself.
Typically drive errors can have symptoms of software running more slowly as the drive retries - or applications will simply appear to hang, or if it's an error reading code into memory, well, anything goes.
Network errors can go completely unknown until you haul out the crusty old hacker with a sniffer - oh gee, did you know that your card is dumping half it's packets?
Oh - especially network problems - where the software at the user level 90% time just sits there and goes "Duh!" for simple things like pulling the cable out.
Error checking and handling, in general, SUCKS and it's the main reason why computers suck - why the software industry spends billions of dollars chasing problems during the development phase that they never really get to pin down, so the problem ends up going into shipping products.
I blame the lax standards on the platform, and the dumbing down of programming in general (the over-reliance on high-level languages that remove the programmer progressively further and further from the hardware their programs run on).
If PC's had better standards for this sort of thing at the hardware level - and if the vendors adhered to those standards, then the software people could write software that handles errors better, and it would bubble up to the user level as more reliability, and much simpler troubleshooting, probably tens of billions of dollars saved in productivity alone, and probably the PC industry would be 10 times the size it is today, because people would actually trust them for important tasks, rather than the next nifty home killer-app like pirating music. (not meant to be a troll against MP3 trading - meant to be a troll against the apparent purpose and direction of the PC industry in general).
I guess this might also be cool if I could stream video or stills from my miniDV camera to this drive - thereby reducing my dependency on the exhorbitantly-priced Sony Memory Sticks.
How easy will it be for Apple to introduce CONTENT PROTECTION via a stealth firmware update or something once a market is established and they gain significant marketshare (not really likely at that price IMO)?
Once this thing gets out in significant numbers, Apple's media partners are going to be very unhappy with them - and very large Quicktime format standardization deals are going to hinge on how cooperative Apple is at introducing content protection features.
All Apple has to do is bundle some "gotta have feature" with an OS upgrade, which "breaks" compatibility with iTunes, and then provide an update to iTunes which enforces the content protection, and force the firmware update on iPod to be compatible with the new iTunes. It's not like Apple hasn't snuck unsavory changes into firmware updates in the past.
Raise your hand if you're willing to spend $400 on THIS particular device, with b/w screen, no handwriting recognition, actually rather TOO big (no bigger than Palm V is my ideal size), no PDA functions - oops, sorry, wrong market. . .
Well riddle me this:
You don't want to compare some computer downtime to the death and destruction and economic fallout from the WTC disaster.
But compare it to something that can clearly be labelled a "terrorist act".
A suicide bomer walks into a bar, and orders a drink. He says "You should pat down your customers before they come in here, free Mitnick, God is Great" and sets his bomb to explode, slightly injuring several patrons, putting the bar out of business for a week for repairs.
Nobody was killed, the business lost a lot of money because people were afraid to go into the bar after that. But this is definately an act of terrorism.
Now, what if some skript kiddie attacks the VISA web site, and steals thousands of credit card numbers. VISA's profits plummet as people cut their cards, because they didn't like having $1000 charged to all of their accounts by this skript kiddie.
VISA's annual corporate donation to the World Hunger Program is cut in half due to the loss, and statistically, 10,000 children in Nairobi starve to death because of this.
This argument definately has some of the qualities of a slippery slope.
It still doesn't mean that white-hat hackers are terrorists though. They provide a vital service, which, on the surface, shakes people's confidence in the Internet.
But when Consumer Reports finds a defective car design that tends to explode and kill people - aren't consumers ultimately MORE secure in their purchases AFTER the design flaw is fixed?
The same should apply to the Internet.
The fact that the Firestone Tire recall happened after hundreds of people were killed was a disaster. And it was a shame that an organization like Consumer's Union didn't pick up on it before hand.
It would be an attrocity if it was found that this problem was kept quiet due to legislation similar to what's going on in the computer industry (where an EULA can silence free speech - prohibiting a customer from writing disparaging remarks about a company or their products).
In either case, I believe it's called "blaming the victim".
You don't think that high-profile cases of Hotmail getting hacked or ecommerce vendor's credit card databases don't terrify people?
If people were 100% certain that their computer use was secure - don't you think that a LOT more people would rely on computers for a lot more economic activity?
As it is - the PC industry's poor reliability has been the greatest drawback. Who wants to trust important data to a PC that they KNOW will crash and lose it? The Industry has done a SHITTY job both with reliabiltiy, and with security.
Of course they want to point fingers at the hackers, white or black hat. They're all a pain in the ass to the industry from a PR standpoint, even though the white-hat hackers are actually more of a benefit.
So let's see how well people trust the Internet, and run out to buy PC's and broadband connections when all those nasty white-hat hackers are safely behind bars, and nobody is allowed to even print anything disparaging about our sacred Computer Companies' products.
After September 11, we now know that our airport security was lax, and SUCKED.
At some point, after the government has sucked up to the computer industry to the point where actual security is like a wet paper tissue, we'll see a day where all computer screens go blank, and we'll realize that those white-hat hackers and accountability was actually a good thing.
If the terrorists' aims were to cripple the US economy, that would be reasonable:
Step 1: make businesses afraid to send people to customers face to face. (or avoid sending workers to remote training, trade shows, etc.)
Step 2: make the business that relied upon travel, now relying upon the mail - afraid to rely upon the mail.
Step 3: now that businesses are afraid of interacting person to person, and through the mail, make them afraid to interact via the internet.
Something like nimda or code red would be consistent with this plan - however, I'm not hearing about any terrorist attacks on other systems that businesses rely on for interaction:
Highways/Busses/Trains.
And I don't think that nimda really was all that effective. At least not nearly as effective as the WTC attack and Anthrax attacks were.
I can see the point though.
Part of the Terrorist's aims in the Hijackings were to scare people into not using air travel, scare businesses into not locating their offices in high-profile targets. Scare people into not going to work. Scare people into not trusting the economy and their jobs - so they stop spending; in effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A hacker who hacks into an ATM is not a terrorist in that respect - he's just after money. But if you lose all your money in your account (which would only happen at a Credit Union, your Bank is federally insured!) - then people might be afraid to keep their money at the Bank - which would definately have a serious impact on the economy.
I'm CERTAIN that many hackers are writing to exploits in IIS for political reasons. Their motivation is to frighten people away from using such an insecure platform.
In this regard - the definition of Terrorism truly lies in the motivation of the perpetrator.
So you can't put a blanket over all hackers and say that they are terrorists. Some hackers don't care WHAT people use as a web server. They just want to hack to stroke their own ego. Or maybe they want to P#r33 |V|1+n1c|. (which could be defined as terrorism).
In that regard - most of us here, ideologically, are WITH the hacker/terrorists. Most of us are ideologically opposed to the corporate control of the Internet, software standards, and our legal system. To us - these "hacktivists" are freedom fighters.
Or possibly they're just "consumer advocates" - who want to make sure that "safety and quality" of software and computer services are well documented so that consumers can be informed.
So we may be a bit biased when we see characterizations of hackers as "terrorists" because these activities don't kill thousands of people in a fiery explosive. But they DO have a significant negative impact on the economy, and people's trust of the internet. Hacktivists see the fault lying in the corrupt corporate/political system, and as soon as things change there, the hacking activity would stop.
What do you think the hackers would do, if the US Govt revoked Microsoft's corporate charter as punishment for it's crimes against humanity? And then the US Govt mandated the use of OpenSource software on all Government activities and business? And if the US Govt mandated file formats? And if the US Govt finally got smart on patents and copyrights, and gave us our rights back? Would the hackers stop hacking systems out there? Or would they continue their "consumer advocate" activities?
The same arugment is being used to justify non-appeasement of the Terrorists. No matter how repulsed we are at Israel's current behavior - we're (the US) not going to back off of our support, because that would be seen as caving in to terroist demands and giving them a "victory" and also, license to continue terrorizing.
Clearly, we have to be strong, and act, and even break a few eggs, to put a stop to terrorism.
There is no "consumer advocate" element in hijacking a plane and crashing into the twin-towers. Perhaps there was a side-effect of pointing out holes in our airport security system - keep in mind that since 9/11, many people have come forward to state that they've smuggled knives onto planes even with the hightened security measures. THOSE people should be respected, revered, and considered patriots.
In the same way, hackers who post exploits and things - those are the true "consumer advocates"; but the problem here, I think is that they're being lumped in together with the "free mitnick" people, the hacktivists. I think that the hacktivists are the ones that really need to be stopped. And, of course the 'criminals' - people who use exploits for illegal gain, money, etc. This is where this whole problem lies - we need to be wise and distinguish the black hats and white hats.
The spate of corporate-backed legislation, the SPA, and corporate rhetoric from the software and media giants - they're painting with an overly broad brush, because though the criminals are a true threat - the white-hats are a threat to their credibility and profitability. So they're attacking them too. People should differentiate between the ones who intend harm, and the ones who intend to help. Intent makes all the difference.
The only advice I have for white-hat hackers:
Keep up the good fight! Document EVERY step you take, every bit of work you do. Cover your ass. If you get hauled into court - make sure you have good legal help from either the ACLU and EFF, and show your documentation.
Any reasonable non-biased juror should be able to tell the difference between someone who means harm, and someone who's trying to be a consumer advocate.
A good example of this is recent rhetoric spouted by DeLay, (R).
He was opposed to federalization of airport security, on the grounds that it would add 30,000 unionized federal employees which he implied would be, in effect, a government-funded voter base for the Democratic party.
This is the way Republicans see things.
They don't really give a rat's ass about whether Government is interfering in Commerce. They just don't want their constituents' tax-dollars going to fund more federal programs and employees, because those individuals ineveitably vote Democratic, because that's job-security for them. It's a vicious cycle in their eyes.
So in the end, the DeLay Republicans would favor the handing over of airport security to a private contractor - where how well-trained, and how well-paid these security people are, becomes a matter of business accounting; rather than how effective we all require airline security to be - because ALL of us rely on it so heavily.
Bad security=more hijackings=more deaths=more fear=less airline customers=more airline bailouts=slower economy=more government borrowing=higher inflation=higher interest rates=more layoffs=downward spiral for EVERYBODY.
The self-empowerment philosophy of the Republicans and Libertarians does not allow for this kind of "let's all work together" thinking. That's Communism in their eyes.
Bush is using Diplomacy to unite the coalition. You don't use diplomacy on criminals. You use them on recognized legitimate governments. The Taliban are not the legitimate recognized government of Afghanistan, never have been, and never will be.
With the exception of two tin-pot dictatorships, and the foreign power that created them to keep Afghanistan off their back (namely Pakistan) - nobody recognizes the Taliban.
True, the Taliban are probably extending Nanawatai to OBL (Nanawatai is the sacred Pashtun tradition that binds the Taliban to shelter and protect OBL - it has nothing at all to do with Sharia, Islamic Law - it's a tradition unique to the Pashtun). We're in a bind as far as evidence goes - we have shown evidence to most other nations of the world - who have agreed that bin Laden is guilty.
If we show evidence to the Taliban, it could compromise our information gathering methods, because they could shut them down. It doesn't take a genius to understand that we could have under cover agents' lives at stake. I'm sure that the Taliban and Al Qaeda would love to know the source of any information leaks.
So if these facts aren't good enough for the Taliban, then they're just going to have to eat bombs for breakfast - because Justice is coming whether they like it or not. It's too bad that the poor Afghan citizens are going to get caught in the middle, but hasn't that been the way of things for much of human history? They say that the best form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. The problem is finding a benevolent dictator.
maybe, congress will listen to this person, whisper and nod to eachother, and then reach into their pockets and look at the 5-figure-checks that the RIAA goons wrote to their campaigns, and decided, gee, all that money really IS a bribe after all, and it was wrong to accept it - yeah, let's vote NO on this crappy unamerican unconstitutional bill!
Okay, for THREE years now, I've heard the Linux people on this board whine and complain that if Linux could only get a truly simple user interface (and a decent Office substitute), that Linux would "take over the world and Microsoft would go away".
Well, that's true. That would happen. But the point back then is the same point now:
MOST home computer users, and a whole lot of business users (ie. 95% of the market) don't understand the concept of something as simple as a directory.
Mac users are beginning to accept their niche-dom. Acceptance of niche-dom isn't very much fun, because you know that eventually, niche systems like Atari, Commadore, and Amiga were squeezed out by Microsoft.
I think perhaps the Linux community needs to plan for a "post-Microsoft Apocolypse" world. (ie - what will users need on an OS once MS has taken over the world, and the internet.)
Obviously, portability - we'll have to run on whatever hardware MS allows to be produced. Security, to prevent the RIAA from scanning your hard drives.
AND - the ability to connect to an internet that, frankly, may not run true TCP/IP (but rather, a bastardized "innovative version" of MSTCP/IP).
A solar power station that Human civilization relied heavily upon would be the FIRST target I would take out if I were an invading alien fleet.
Or a disgruntled ex-math professor living in a shack in North Dakota. (okay - exactly HOW to take it out would be a challenge).
the other question is - solar cells are 15% efficient? I would hope that they could improve that before shooting them into space.
And HOW long do these solar panels last? 20 years tops? Could a station like this even be built within the lifespan of it's collectors?
Space dust?
Micrometeors?
These guys watch too much star-trek.
Aluminum powder is also EXTREMELY flammible, burns intensely hot, and a fire that's difficult to extinguish.
Hydrogen IS actually VERY explosive.
Plus, when you have a SMALL leak, and burn it, it burns with an invisible flame.
(Plus there's all the storage "problems", migration, alloying, temperature/volume considerations)
I just don't think that hydrogen's feasible yet.
What would be great would be a cheap backplane card that plugged into either an IDE or SCSI bus, on which you could mount zillions of old 4 meg 72-pin simms which are now obsolete.
I probably have a gig's worth of 4 and 8 meg 72-pin simms sitting around in my lab with no use other than collecting dust. It would be great if I could slap them into a device to use as fast storage. I guess the RAM companies would rather have us throw these old chips away and spend money on new RAM.
If that's true, then why are we so fucking overpopulated still?
the thing to remember about these stinger missiles is, we sent them old models, out of date models. That was even 15 years ago.
Most of them were used against Russia's gunships. Some were bought back. A large percentage of them are no longer in a functional state.
They're not much of a threat anymore, unless they've been resupplied illegally. (which isn't necessarily out of the question).
Oh yes. Microwaves. And the use of HAARP will allow us to cause earthquakes on their cities, and summon hurricanes, and strike every man woman child and mouse dead in a 100m radius. Super-killer death rays! uh huh.