My current Mandrake install refuses to shut off my computer, hanging at 'power down system.'
That's a problem with power management; for some reason, either the kernel hasn't sent the necessary shutdown signal to the hardware, or your hardware has ignored it. Back in the old days, before most PCs could do that, that's what you'd be left staring at - remember Windows' "It is now safe to switch off your computer"?
You're right in that it shouldn't be happening, though. Unfortunately, it's been so long since I had to fix that sort of thing that I can't really give you any pointers.
IMHO, the only people these spammers hurt are the average consumers who have to put up with hundreds of junk mail messages in the inboxes every day.
Well, look at it this way - if the end users are getting "hundreds" of junk mails every day, how many hundreds of thousands are the ISPs and email providers having to carry and deliver?
MS runs Hotmail and MSN; their bandwidth and storage charges due to spam are at least as great as those of their end users. Spam hurts everyone involved, not just the end user. About the only people who don't suffer because of it are the spammers themselves.
But, that brings us to the question of "what is the purpose of my cell phone?" For most everyone that is to make phone calls and not to do all that other stuff.
Are you sure? Have you conducted a survey? Or are you just doing as this author is, and assuming that everyone uses their phone in the same way as you use yours?
I hardly ever make calls on mine, for instance. SMS messages, games, reminders, the calculator, camera, calendar, etc yes - but calls? Very rarely, compared to all the other uses I put it to. Now, I'm not saying that I'm the norm in that respect, but I know plenty of people who use their phones for more than just making calls. Maybe it's a UK thing.
I've experienced the opposite extreme - a usability consultant who wrote a functional spec solely from the point of view of the user. The interface was specified in excrutiating detail, but in many places the business logic was mentioned in passing, glossed over or omitted completely. There were also things specified that were great from a user's point of view, but fiendishly complicated to implement.
You have to strike a balance - assuming you have finite time, money and resources, you have to make some concessions to both sides. The trick is to get the balance right.
As of at least Mozilla 1.6, steps 1 and 2 are not necessary as they're on by default, and step 3 is not necessary as I have personally seen pages use the onLoad js handler to launch the installation dialogue. I also don't recall having to wait for the dialogue; I seem to remember the install/cancel buttons being available immediately.
I'm guessing that even some ex-MSIE users might not go through all that on the request of a malicious WWW site they have found.
Well, I've seen someone with a couple of decades experience in the (IT) industry, and someone who is well versed in all this sort of stuff as well as a multitude of other topics, absent-mindedly click the "ok" button on an activex installation dialogue, then immediately curse his stupidity.
Everyone makes mistakes, and as other people have pointed out, that's without taking social engineering into account.
maintenance for Windows computers, in the form of patch, antivirus and spyware/malware upkeep is more than just a chore.
Windows update will automatically check for, download and (if you wish) install critical updates. My *free* (as in beer) virus checker updates and runs itself on a daily schedule, and Adaware (were I to pay for it) will similarly update and run itself, cleaning my machine of any malware that I inadvertently install (I don't, but I digress).
Properly set up, keeping a Windows machine up to date is by no means a chore. Sure, it's a little more effort than it is for a Linux distro now (no malware or viruses to worry about), but as Linux grows in popularlity with users, so it will with the malcontents. All the security in the world won't save a machine from a user with the root password and the desire to install the cool new file sharing app/animated cursor/browser extension they've just found.
the run everything as Admin security model adopted on most home installations of Windows
And what makes you think that home installations of Linux would be any different?
You can run XP as a non-admin user *right now*, using the "Run As..." service to run stuff with admin privs as needed. Mark my words - when/if "the average user" starts to switch to Linux, either they'll run as root or, if the system supports it, they'll enter their root password to install stuff whenever prompted.
The security model of the OS is secondary to an educated user being sat at the keyboard.
Prove it. I don't want anecdotal evidence, I want cold, hard facts - a list of projects that could be used to develop derivative software that you can guarantee are free of any patents. Given the nature of patents, that means that *no-one* holds a relevant patent - not the authors, not IBM, not Joe Blow sat at home in Texas, no-one.
Just because open-source projects don't generally take out patents on their work, doesn't mean no-one else has a patent covering it. To be sure that you're in the clear, you still need to do a patent search. Besides which, even writing code from scratch with absolutely no external input does not save you - patents protect the holder from independent discovery of the subject of the patent as well as from people copying it. (Don't forget that part of the patent application process involves revealing the details of the patented tech - there are no secrets involved, that's the whole point.)
Oh, you had meant COMMERCIAL, closed source software developers
If I'm writing software for my employers and want to build on third party code, then I have two choices: use something open-source released under a compatible licence, or obtain a licence from a commercial developer. In the former case, I have all the same problems as outlined above. In the latter case, I have a reasonable expectation of the commercial developer either holding the patent themselves, or having performed the necessary patent searches. If not, then at least I have someone to shout at - someone who presumably has money, too.
these small comanies would face the offers of cross licences offers from giants and would loose any benefit from their patent
Tell me - in what way does having to cross-license their patent prevent them from profiting from it? True, they now can't charge that particular company licencing fees, but they can still sell their product.
Boxen is a word, but it means "made of box wood" - the other two sources, citing it as the plural of box, are both from the jargon file and both admit that it is "fanciful" - ie not real...
I'm with you. I don't even have my home number listed. Why not? Because it's my home number, not my work number.
I've had the "but what about if you're involved in an accident?" conversation a few times. My answer is generally along the lines of my mobile in my pocket having plenty of contact numbers, and failing that, HR have my contact details.
Anyone who really needs it, can jump through a few hoops to get it. Anyone who isn't prepared to jump through the hoops, doesn't need it as much as they thought.
I work at a web agency, doing server-side Java development - servlet and jsp work, essentially. It's the bulk of the development we do.
You'd be surprised (and dismayed, probably) how many times people *here* have got the two confused. Not techy-types, of course, but sales, consultants and even project managers over the years...
Happily however, windows XP searches for and installs the latest updates without any user input whatsoever
No it doesn't. You can configure it to do so, but the default behaviour (iirc) is to notify the user that updates are available. You can then choose to download and install, or ignore them.
However, I'm not sure if automatic updating applies to service packs.
As far as I'm aware, the auto-update feature applies only to critical updates. How that criticality is determined I don't know, but presumably it's controlled by the windows update admin(s).
Java has always been an incredible memory hog for me. I don't like using java on the client. It's mostly slow and unresponsive.
While that's relatively true, in absolute terms it really depends on the spec of your machine. For instance, I use JBuilder at work, and on my machine there it's plenty responsive enough. Of course, I have a 3GHz P4 with a gig of RAM; on my old P2 450 with 512MB it was rather more painful.
Ok, I'll bite - in what way does NVidia control my computer if I use their drivers? Because they get to say what features go in and what are left out? I don't know the first thing about writing graphics card drivers, so either way, it's not up to me.
Because they could put $eevilMalwareFeature in them? With open source drivers, I'd still have to trust that this hasn't happened, as (as above) I wouldn't know a benign graphics driver from an eevil one, especially as I wouldn't look at the source.
Saying that NVidia controls my PC is akin to saying that Mandrake controls it - after all, open source or not, I have neither the time nor the inclination to check all that source. Either way, it could be doing *anything*, and I wouldn't know.
At the end of the day, you have to trust *someone*. Companies are not automatically evilly hegemonistic, company employees writing closed source code are not automatically evil, and open source coders are not automatically good.
I trust NVidia not to do anything stupid. They'd be found out eventually, and the backlash would surely more than cancel out whatever small benefit they derived from it. Being binary-only didn't stop people working out that the drivers cheated to improve performance for common benchmark tests, remember?
I suspect a lot of people here are. To me, and probably to most of them, UML is Unified Modelling Language. Hell, do a google search for UML and the top hit is to the UML website.
I know it's too much to ask OSS projects not to pick confusing acronyms and names, but I'd like to think that story submitters or at least editors could a little clearer.
I've personally used development tools costing in excess of $15,000. $1000 is nothing - my daily rate to our clients is more than that. Hell, my monitor cost more than that.
PS: ok, I can imagine how a GPL'd product could install bad stuff, but I can't imagine that it (the malware) would be around long enough to make it worth anybody's time to put in there
Well, that really depends. Sure, a distro or competent programmer could rip it out in next to no time, and release a "clean" version of the product. Once Linux starts attarcting significant numbers of users, however, a growing proportion of those users will be the sort who download cool stuff from wherever with no thought to possible unwanted consequences.
On Windows, for example, there are a great many P2P clients, some with malware, some without. The ones with still get used, however, despite the existence of the ones without. Moving to Linux won't change that sort of thing. People would still download the infested player (or whatever), even if a clean version existed.
It's a backdoor, they can do anything they want to your system.
As long as they have a valid (administrative) account on the target machine, yes. Otherwise no, they can't access it at all.
Up to date virus definitions are helpful but generally too difficult for the end user to keep up with.
Any decent antivirus software will have scheduled checking for updates built in - eg Grisoft's one. Even their free edition has this - set it, forget it.
Winblows itself
Factually wrong, conceptually wrong, and immature - we have a winner.
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My current Mandrake install refuses to shut off my computer, hanging at 'power down system.'
That's a problem with power management; for some reason, either the kernel hasn't sent the necessary shutdown signal to the hardware, or your hardware has ignored it. Back in the old days, before most PCs could do that, that's what you'd be left staring at - remember Windows' "It is now safe to switch off your computer"?
You're right in that it shouldn't be happening, though. Unfortunately, it's been so long since I had to fix that sort of thing that I can't really give you any pointers.
IMHO, the only people these spammers hurt are the average consumers who have to put up with hundreds of junk mail messages in the inboxes every day.
Well, look at it this way - if the end users are getting "hundreds" of junk mails every day, how many hundreds of thousands are the ISPs and email providers having to carry and deliver?
MS runs Hotmail and MSN; their bandwidth and storage charges due to spam are at least as great as those of their end users. Spam hurts everyone involved, not just the end user. About the only people who don't suffer because of it are the spammers themselves.
But, that brings us to the question of "what is the purpose of my cell phone?" For most everyone that is to make phone calls and not to do all that other stuff.
Are you sure? Have you conducted a survey? Or are you just doing as this author is, and assuming that everyone uses their phone in the same way as you use yours?
I hardly ever make calls on mine, for instance. SMS messages, games, reminders, the calculator, camera, calendar, etc yes - but calls? Very rarely, compared to all the other uses I put it to. Now, I'm not saying that I'm the norm in that respect, but I know plenty of people who use their phones for more than just making calls. Maybe it's a UK thing.
I've experienced the opposite extreme - a usability consultant who wrote a functional spec solely from the point of view of the user. The interface was specified in excrutiating detail, but in many places the business logic was mentioned in passing, glossed over or omitted completely. There were also things specified that were great from a user's point of view, but fiendishly complicated to implement.
You have to strike a balance - assuming you have finite time, money and resources, you have to make some concessions to both sides. The trick is to get the balance right.
As of at least Mozilla 1.6, steps 1 and 2 are not necessary as they're on by default, and step 3 is not necessary as I have personally seen pages use the onLoad js handler to launch the installation dialogue. I also don't recall having to wait for the dialogue; I seem to remember the install/cancel buttons being available immediately.
I'm guessing that even some ex-MSIE users might not go through all that on the request of a malicious WWW site they have found.
Well, I've seen someone with a couple of decades experience in the (IT) industry, and someone who is well versed in all this sort of stuff as well as a multitude of other topics, absent-mindedly click the "ok" button on an activex installation dialogue, then immediately curse his stupidity.
Everyone makes mistakes, and as other people have pointed out, that's without taking social engineering into account.
What it's doing in ./ other than as a troll, I don't know.
Two things:
* generating page impressions and therefore ad impressions
* giving everyone something else to point and laugh at about MS
Meanwhile, MS are taking OSS seriously and working to maitain (or regain, if you prefer) the upper hand.
Move on people, nothing to see here; your time would be better spent working to prevent this prediction from coming true, if that's your preference.
Snail mail; it's one of the options on the activation screen.
maintenance for Windows computers, in the form of patch, antivirus and spyware/malware upkeep is more than just a chore.
Windows update will automatically check for, download and (if you wish) install critical updates. My *free* (as in beer) virus checker updates and runs itself on a daily schedule, and Adaware (were I to pay for it) will similarly update and run itself, cleaning my machine of any malware that I inadvertently install (I don't, but I digress).
Properly set up, keeping a Windows machine up to date is by no means a chore. Sure, it's a little more effort than it is for a Linux distro now (no malware or viruses to worry about), but as Linux grows in popularlity with users, so it will with the malcontents. All the security in the world won't save a machine from a user with the root password and the desire to install the cool new file sharing app/animated cursor/browser extension they've just found.
the run everything as Admin security model adopted on most home installations of Windows
And what makes you think that home installations of Linux would be any different?
You can run XP as a non-admin user *right now*, using the "Run As..." service to run stuff with admin privs as needed. Mark my words - when/if "the average user" starts to switch to Linux, either they'll run as root or, if the system supports it, they'll enter their root password to install stuff whenever prompted.
The security model of the OS is secondary to an educated user being sat at the keyboard.
Both offer vast ammounts of patent-free code
Prove it. I don't want anecdotal evidence, I want cold, hard facts - a list of projects that could be used to develop derivative software that you can guarantee are free of any patents. Given the nature of patents, that means that *no-one* holds a relevant patent - not the authors, not IBM, not Joe Blow sat at home in Texas, no-one.
Just because open-source projects don't generally take out patents on their work, doesn't mean no-one else has a patent covering it. To be sure that you're in the clear, you still need to do a patent search. Besides which, even writing code from scratch with absolutely no external input does not save you - patents protect the holder from independent discovery of the subject of the patent as well as from people copying it. (Don't forget that part of the patent application process involves revealing the details of the patented tech - there are no secrets involved, that's the whole point.)
Oh, you had meant COMMERCIAL, closed source software developers
If I'm writing software for my employers and want to build on third party code, then I have two choices: use something open-source released under a compatible licence, or obtain a licence from a commercial developer. In the former case, I have all the same problems as outlined above. In the latter case, I have a reasonable expectation of the commercial developer either holding the patent themselves, or having performed the necessary patent searches. If not, then at least I have someone to shout at - someone who presumably has money, too.
these small comanies would face the offers of cross licences offers from giants and would loose any benefit from their patent
Tell me - in what way does having to cross-license their patent prevent them from profiting from it? True, they now can't charge that particular company licencing fees, but they can still sell their product.
That's exactly what I was thinking. When I read the article summary, the first thing I thought was "but what problem are you trying to solve?"
From the sounds of it, they're trying to solve the lack of machine learning technology in Firefox; that doesn't really sound like a problem to me.
It is a near perfect description of our current technological ability to change the orbit of a NEO.
You know what they say - practice makes perfect.
Boxen is a word, but it means "made of box wood" - the other two sources, citing it as the plural of box, are both from the jargon file and both admit that it is "fanciful" - ie not real...
I'm with you. I don't even have my home number listed. Why not? Because it's my home number, not my work number.
I've had the "but what about if you're involved in an accident?" conversation a few times. My answer is generally along the lines of my mobile in my pocket having plenty of contact numbers, and failing that, HR have my contact details.
Anyone who really needs it, can jump through a few hoops to get it. Anyone who isn't prepared to jump through the hoops, doesn't need it as much as they thought.
I work at a web agency, doing server-side Java development - servlet and jsp work, essentially. It's the bulk of the development we do.
You'd be surprised (and dismayed, probably) how many times people *here* have got the two confused. Not techy-types, of course, but sales, consultants and even project managers over the years...
Happily however, windows XP searches for and installs the latest updates without any user input whatsoever
No it doesn't. You can configure it to do so, but the default behaviour (iirc) is to notify the user that updates are available. You can then choose to download and install, or ignore them.
However, I'm not sure if automatic updating applies to service packs.
As far as I'm aware, the auto-update feature applies only to critical updates. How that criticality is determined I don't know, but presumably it's controlled by the windows update admin(s).
Java has always been an incredible memory hog for me. I don't like using java on the client. It's mostly slow and unresponsive.
While that's relatively true, in absolute terms it really depends on the spec of your machine. For instance, I use JBuilder at work, and on my machine there it's plenty responsive enough. Of course, I have a 3GHz P4 with a gig of RAM; on my old P2 450 with 512MB it was rather more painful.
you have to let nVidia control your computer
Ok, I'll bite - in what way does NVidia control my computer if I use their drivers? Because they get to say what features go in and what are left out? I don't know the first thing about writing graphics card drivers, so either way, it's not up to me.
Because they could put $eevilMalwareFeature in them? With open source drivers, I'd still have to trust that this hasn't happened, as (as above) I wouldn't know a benign graphics driver from an eevil one, especially as I wouldn't look at the source.
Saying that NVidia controls my PC is akin to saying that Mandrake controls it - after all, open source or not, I have neither the time nor the inclination to check all that source. Either way, it could be doing *anything*, and I wouldn't know.
At the end of the day, you have to trust *someone*. Companies are not automatically evilly hegemonistic, company employees writing closed source code are not automatically evil, and open source coders are not automatically good.
I trust NVidia not to do anything stupid. They'd be found out eventually, and the backlash would surely more than cancel out whatever small benefit they derived from it. Being binary-only didn't stop people working out that the drivers cheated to improve performance for common benchmark tests, remember?
Installing software (except perhaps kernels) doesn't require rebooting the system.
And neither does it require a reboot under XP generally. In fact, most patches/updates haven't required reboots for quite a while either.
I suspect a lot of people here are. To me, and probably to most of them, UML is Unified Modelling Language. Hell, do a google search for UML and the top hit is to the UML website.
I know it's too much to ask OSS projects not to pick confusing acronyms and names, but I'd like to think that story submitters or at least editors could a little clearer.
I've personally used development tools costing in excess of $15,000. $1000 is nothing - my daily rate to our clients is more than that. Hell, my monitor cost more than that.
PS: ok, I can imagine how a GPL'd product could install bad stuff, but I can't imagine that it (the malware) would be around long enough to make it worth anybody's time to put in there
Well, that really depends. Sure, a distro or competent programmer could rip it out in next to no time, and release a "clean" version of the product. Once Linux starts attarcting significant numbers of users, however, a growing proportion of those users will be the sort who download cool stuff from wherever with no thought to possible unwanted consequences.
On Windows, for example, there are a great many P2P clients, some with malware, some without. The ones with still get used, however, despite the existence of the ones without. Moving to Linux won't change that sort of thing. People would still download the infested player (or whatever), even if a clean version existed.
Well, if Apple computers "aren't realistic for many people", then neither is any OS other than Windows, so it doesn't really matter...
It's a backdoor, they can do anything they want to your system.
As long as they have a valid (administrative) account on the target machine, yes. Otherwise no, they can't access it at all.
Up to date virus definitions are helpful but generally too difficult for the end user to keep up with.
Any decent antivirus software will have scheduled checking for updates built in - eg Grisoft's one. Even their free edition has this - set it, forget it.
Winblows itself
Factually wrong, conceptually wrong, and immature - we have a winner.