"Microsoft chief executive Steven A. Ballmer said yesterday that there is "much, much, much" left to do to protect computer users from viruses, worms and other malicious software."
Where he said "computer users" I think he meant to say "Windows users." Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, hell, pretty much ever OS besides Windows has this pretty much sewn up. Not perfect, but on a security scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is "r00ted in 30 seconds" and 10 is "powered off", Windows is about a 2 and *nix is about a 9.8.
"One of his suggestions to secure your enterprise... turn off port 80 [135]"
No, no, no: turn them *all* off, and *open* them as needed. Jeez. They just... don't... get it. And then they come back later and say "windows and unix are equally secure, windows just gets attacked because it has more market share." They just do not understand basic security concepts.
Dell offers a 20" LCD for (usually) less than $1000. It is exactly 100dpi--20" diagonal on a 4:3 screen = 16"w x 12"h, and it runs at 1600x1200 (Easy math.:-) ) Open up a 300 dpi Photoshop document, zoom out to 33.3%, and poof! -- actual size.
Regardless, there's a precedent that Apple has set, that MS hasn't been able to follow (and, IMO, won't ever be able to): that is, with every new OS release, your computer gets faster.
Um, no. In fact, every OS since 7.5 (when I started using and upgrading Macs heavily) has gotten more and more bloated, and thus slow. I've taken computers from 7.5 to 9.1 (first G3 shipped with 7.5.x, remember) and they *always* run slower with each newer version. Plus the apps--I used to copy the old sherlock (pre brushed metal) onto new systems because I hated how much crap they added. (Hey, didja notice how 'find' on 10.2 is, you know, all stripped down and fast and usable, and 'sherlock' is now a separate app *just* for web searches? what does that tell you?!?) Not to mention that *huge* drop in perfromance from 9.x to 10.x. (Even discounting 10.0, which was nearly unusable even on dual-G4s.)
10.1 and 10.2 were dog slow on a computer like, say, my G3/300. IIRC, I could boot my G3 into OS 9 and launch Dreamweaver in 15 seconds, reboot to OS X and it took 25. I forget the exact numbers (sold it a year ago & bought an iBook) but it was prety severe--50% to over 100% longer--on every single app I tried it with. And those were carbon apps, so I was running the same executable file in each OS-- don't think I was using an older version in OS 9.
Each OS X gets faster and faster partly because yes, they did do the 'make it work, then optimize' thing, but moreso because they released it so damn early. The Public Beta was a Public Alpha, 10.0 was a public beta, and 10.1 was a 1.0. 10.2 and, from what I've seen, 10.3 did show speed increases. But, given my experience back to 1995, I'd say your statement that every OS from Apple gets faster is severely off the mark. I'll bet that 10.5 or 11 or whatever the next *major* rev is will once again be more bloated and slower than the last. In the meantime, I'm glad they're enhancing things, but the only 'precedent' they set was releasing the OS before it was fully cooked.
apple still doesn't really have a robust and easy to adminsiter means of locking down large numbers of systems
Lotsa replies already so I'll just nail this point.
System Preferences: Accounts: New User: enter name, pw, icon, etc. Don't make them an admin. Click OK, then click 'capabilities' and uncheck everything you don't want them to do. And that's without netboot, ASR, remote desktop, etc etc etc. And that's only if you want each student to have a unique name. If everyone is going to be "student" then you do those prefs once and put it into the image.
Users (or a phone answerer) enter problems (requests) into the system and the request gets fixed (implemented) or denied. If you want happy "customers" use a system where the bug isn't resolved (i.e., ticket isn't closed) until the user says so. I can't tell you how many times I've seen IT sweep through, not fix a problem, and close the ticket. It's not good until the user says so. (Unless the user is an idiot, then you need training, explainations, etc.)
The reason I don't build boxes anymore is economics. Back when I could build a system for a grand that was comparable to a $1500 OEM box, or save money by leaving off things I didn't need (first computer had no sound card), it was worth it. Plus my time wasn't worth as much--no family, low-paying job. Now, I can get a 2.2 GHz Dell with a 17" CRT for $499 (dell.com/tv) or I can go around and buy a bunch of parts for about the same amount, spend a couple hours putting it all together, hope you got all the jumpers right when you power it on, and still have to find a monitor and a pirated copy of Windows. Same with cars. You can spend 20 minutes and $20 at a drive-through oil place, or spend $12 on oil and filters so you can dig out your wheel chocks, jack up your car on your sloping driveway, and crawl around underneath for a half-hour scraping your knuckes on the frame.
As much as I want them to stop, this response makes a lot of sense, unfortunately: "So the key question now is, 'what will Verisign do?'... My gut reaction is to guess that they're not going to comply. Why should they? They're making mumble-mumble dollars per day on this 'feature,' which is multiples of what it will cost them to fight ICANN's demand, even if it goes to court. Every day that they drag it out is money in the bank... I predict that Verisign will very politely decline ICANN's "request," and state that the issue requires more study before coming to a conclusion. Much like any controversial aspect of ICANN's operation needs 'more study' before moving forward. It's worked in the past; I suspect it'll work now."
"This brings us to the keyword itself. Depending on the environment using "Computer" as the keyword or trigger may not be a good choice. For instance in an IT environment the word computer is likely to come up often which would cause undesirable commands to be arbitrarily executed in a voice recognition situation."
Am I the only one here who's ever played with the speech recognition on a Mac? Setting your key word is a cinch. Alone in my office, I simply set mine to a loud "Hey!"
Go to babelfish.altavista.com and ask it to translate "I may go to the beach in May" from English to Spanish. You have to capitalize it for it to work, but we're close. If you were to run it through something like MS Word's grammar checker first it's come right out--GC would know that you didn't mean 'in may' and the Google would get the proper query.
300 years? I've been talking to my Mac since 1997. And check out google's calculator for language recognition. I think it's 3 years away for the basics to start working. Hell, they could probably get basic-basic stuff working in a few months. Totally usable in 10 years.
"Where's the cost savings? Why on earth would people buy this...are they really so lazy that driving to the movie store is such an effort (please don't answer that!)."
Dude, it's not like there's four video stores between my house and my job I drive to and from each day. Oh, wait, there are. Yeah, wtf?!?!?
1) where do you live? It costs a lot more to live in SF or NY than Orlando or St. Louis.
2) Is this job full-time & permanent or is it a 1- to 12-month position? If it's a nice, permanent, long-term position they're offering (with bennies) then you'll be asking for a lot less than than if you're just contracting.
Contracting in SF? $100/hr, easy. Permanent in Orlando? $25/hr would be pretty damn good. Or anywhere in between, depending on where you are and how long they'll pay you.
I recently discovered this. (European father in law is in town and he watches TV with the english titles on so he can follow along better.) I was also surprised to learn that it works with the TiVo's slow-motion feature. Very good for explaining dialog.
Patent all you want, I'll still be richer than you thanks to my phat patent portfolio: - 10-button mouse - 7GHz processor - 131-key keyboard - Amp that goes to 11
I was given a Zire at Seybold. Looks nice but the lack of a backlight kills it. Also, the flimsy rubber cover is a bad joke (flip it out of the way and it springs back into place) and I like the clock (visible through the cover) on my m105. The Zire's USB is nice and it matches my iBook but I'll keep the m105 for now.
I haven't been this depressed since I read "Nickel and Dimed." Excellent book, btw, but don't read it expecting to be cheered up. Anyone who's out of a job, I wish you well. (Been unemployed a bit before; now I've got two.)
In Mozilla/Phoenix/etc (and, in fact, Netscape back to about 2.0) type this in the location box: view-source:http://meshier.com/fs/a/ I use Mozilla, so I'm not sure if AOL left this in Netscape or not. Also handy when you go to a website that has a neat thing but redirects you before you get a chance to pick 'view source' from the menu.
Any phone manufacturer who thinks lots of people want a phone with keys in anything other than the familiar 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 * 0 # pattern is on crack.
Slashdot Mirror
"Microsoft chief executive Steven A. Ballmer said yesterday that there is "much, much, much" left to do to protect computer users from viruses, worms and other malicious software."
Where he said "computer users" I think he meant to say "Windows users." Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, hell, pretty much ever OS besides Windows has this pretty much sewn up. Not perfect, but on a security scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is "r00ted in 30 seconds" and 10 is "powered off", Windows is about a 2 and *nix is about a 9.8.
"One of his suggestions to secure your enterprise... turn off port 80 [135]"
No, no, no: turn them *all* off, and *open* them as needed. Jeez. They just... don't... get it. And then they come back later and say "windows and unix are equally secure, windows just gets attacked because it has more market share." They just do not understand basic security concepts.
Dell offers a 20" LCD for (usually) less than $1000. It is exactly 100dpi--20" diagonal on a 4:3 screen = 16"w x 12"h, and it runs at 1600x1200 (Easy math. :-) ) Open up a 300 dpi Photoshop document, zoom out to 33.3%, and poof! -- actual size.
Regardless, there's a precedent that Apple has set, that MS hasn't been able to follow (and, IMO, won't ever be able to): that is, with every new OS release, your computer gets faster.
Um, no. In fact, every OS since 7.5 (when I started using and upgrading Macs heavily) has gotten more and more bloated, and thus slow. I've taken computers from 7.5 to 9.1 (first G3 shipped with 7.5.x, remember) and they *always* run slower with each newer version. Plus the apps--I used to copy the old sherlock (pre brushed metal) onto new systems because I hated how much crap they added. (Hey, didja notice how 'find' on 10.2 is, you know, all stripped down and fast and usable, and 'sherlock' is now a separate app *just* for web searches? what does that tell you?!?) Not to mention that *huge* drop in perfromance from 9.x to 10.x. (Even discounting 10.0, which was nearly unusable even on dual-G4s.)
10.1 and 10.2 were dog slow on a computer like, say, my G3/300. IIRC, I could boot my G3 into OS 9 and launch Dreamweaver in 15 seconds, reboot to OS X and it took 25. I forget the exact numbers (sold it a year ago & bought an iBook) but it was prety severe--50% to over 100% longer--on every single app I tried it with. And those were carbon apps, so I was running the same executable file in each OS-- don't think I was using an older version in OS 9.
Each OS X gets faster and faster partly because yes, they did do the 'make it work, then optimize' thing, but moreso because they released it so damn early. The Public Beta was a Public Alpha, 10.0 was a public beta, and 10.1 was a 1.0. 10.2 and, from what I've seen, 10.3 did show speed increases. But, given my experience back to 1995, I'd say your statement that every OS from Apple gets faster is severely off the mark. I'll bet that 10.5 or 11 or whatever the next *major* rev is will once again be more bloated and slower than the last. In the meantime, I'm glad they're enhancing things, but the only 'precedent' they set was releasing the OS before it was fully cooked.
You mean like iChat does? When the other person is typing, you get a little baloon with '...' in it.
apple still doesn't really have a robust and easy to adminsiter means of locking down large numbers of systems
Lotsa replies already so I'll just nail this point.
System Preferences: Accounts: New User: enter name, pw, icon, etc. Don't make them an admin. Click OK, then click 'capabilities' and uncheck everything you don't want them to do. And that's without netboot, ASR, remote desktop, etc etc etc. And that's only if you want each student to have a unique name. If everyone is going to be "student" then you do those prefs once and put it into the image.
Users (or a phone answerer) enter problems (requests) into the system and the request gets fixed (implemented) or denied. If you want happy "customers" use a system where the bug isn't resolved (i.e., ticket isn't closed) until the user says so. I can't tell you how many times I've seen IT sweep through, not fix a problem, and close the ticket. It's not good until the user says so. (Unless the user is an idiot, then you need training, explainations, etc.)
The reason I don't build boxes anymore is economics. Back when I could build a system for a grand that was comparable to a $1500 OEM box, or save money by leaving off things I didn't need (first computer had no sound card), it was worth it. Plus my time wasn't worth as much--no family, low-paying job. Now, I can get a 2.2 GHz Dell with a 17" CRT for $499 (dell.com/tv) or I can go around and buy a bunch of parts for about the same amount, spend a couple hours putting it all together, hope you got all the jumpers right when you power it on, and still have to find a monitor and a pirated copy of Windows. Same with cars. You can spend 20 minutes and $20 at a drive-through oil place, or spend $12 on oil and filters so you can dig out your wheel chocks, jack up your car on your sloping driveway, and crawl around underneath for a half-hour scraping your knuckes on the frame.
"Update: 10/03 19:29 GMT by M: Verisign blinked."
Whew! Let's hope they stop. I've never been happier to be wrong.
As much as I want them to stop, this response makes a lot of sense, unfortunately: "So the key question now is, 'what will Verisign do?'... My gut reaction is to guess that they're not going to comply. Why should they? They're making mumble-mumble dollars per day on this 'feature,' which is multiples of what it will cost them to fight ICANN's demand, even if it goes to court. Every day that they drag it out is money in the bank... I predict that Verisign will very politely decline ICANN's "request," and state that the issue requires more study before coming to a conclusion. Much like any controversial aspect of ICANN's operation needs 'more study' before moving forward. It's worked in the past; I suspect it'll work now."
"This brings us to the keyword itself. Depending on the environment using "Computer" as the keyword or trigger may not be a good choice. For instance in an IT environment the word computer is likely to come up often which would cause undesirable commands to be arbitrarily executed in a voice recognition situation."
Am I the only one here who's ever played with the speech recognition on a Mac? Setting your key word is a cinch. Alone in my office, I simply set mine to a loud "Hey!"
"Hey! What time is it?" Works fine.
Go to babelfish.altavista.com and ask it to translate
"I may go to the beach in May" from English to Spanish. You have to capitalize it for it to work, but we're close. If you were to run it through something like MS Word's grammar checker first it's come right out--GC would know that you didn't mean 'in may' and the Google would get the proper query.
300 years? I've been talking to my Mac since 1997. And check out google's calculator for language recognition. I think it's 3 years away for the basics to start working. Hell, they could probably get basic-basic stuff working in a few months. Totally usable in 10 years.
"Where's the cost savings? Why on earth would people buy this...are they really so lazy that driving to the movie store is such an effort (please don't answer that!)."
Dude, it's not like there's four video stores between my house and my job I drive to and from each day. Oh, wait, there are. Yeah, wtf?!?!?
1) where do you live? It costs a lot more to live in SF or NY than Orlando or St. Louis.
2) Is this job full-time & permanent or is it a 1- to 12-month position? If it's a nice, permanent, long-term position they're offering (with bennies) then you'll be asking for a lot less than than if you're just contracting.
Contracting in SF? $100/hr, easy. Permanent in Orlando? $25/hr would be pretty damn good. Or anywhere in between, depending on where you are and how long they'll pay you.
I recently discovered this. (European father in law is in town and he watches TV with the english titles on so he can follow along better.) I was also surprised to learn that it works with the TiVo's slow-motion feature. Very good for explaining dialog.
Patent all you want, I'll still be richer than you thanks to my phat patent portfolio:
- 10-button mouse
- 7GHz processor
- 131-key keyboard
- Amp that goes to 11
I was given a Zire at Seybold. Looks nice but the lack of a backlight kills it. Also, the flimsy rubber cover is a bad joke (flip it out of the way and it springs back into place) and I like the clock (visible through the cover) on my m105. The Zire's USB is nice and it matches my iBook but I'll keep the m105 for now.
You can also use Samba to create a "virtual" network printer that will make PDFs.
Good piece. But it's "caught," not "catched." Not being a grammar nazi, just helping you make it nice for presentation to others.
I haven't been this depressed since I read "Nickel and Dimed." Excellent book, btw, but don't read it expecting to be cheered up. Anyone who's out of a job, I wish you well. (Been unemployed a bit before; now I've got two.)
Just finished watchin the Fanimatrix. Excellent work. And my BT window is still open, uploading at my DSL's 25K/s max.
In Mozilla/Phoenix/etc (and, in fact, Netscape back to about 2.0) type this in the location box:
view-source:http://meshier.com/fs/a/
I use Mozilla, so I'm not sure if AOL left this in Netscape or not. Also handy when you go to a website that has a neat thing but redirects you before you get a chance to pick 'view source' from the menu.
Any phone manufacturer who thinks lots of people want a phone with keys in anything other than the familiar
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9
* 0 #
pattern is on crack.
"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong."
Next on the chopping block: speed limits.