Since I have customers (and coworkers) all over the globe, sometimes working radically different hours than I do, I've found that it's often better to toss an e-mail to some people than to attempt to contact them by other means.
We also get a lot of announcements, problem reports, status messages, and other things sent via e-mail at my current workplace.
Because of this, by e-mail client checks for new mail every five minutes. And depending on the type of message, sometimes that's too long a period of time.
Not all e-mail usage is strictly by choice.:-) Sometimes it's self-defense.
I can't count the number of times I've caught a Harvester in C&C gazing longingly across a river at a tiny little patch of timberium that it can't possibly get to, or getting so drunk after filling itself that it decides to wander over to an enemy base get a really close look at an enemy turret.
For those not familiar with the Scifi short story by (I think?) James Blish, _Surface Tension_ is the story of a human colony seedship (an interstellar colony ship which specialized in creating genetically engineered humans that can live in environments where normal humans could not) which crashes on a planet where the only life is microscopic and lives in various ponds and puddles.
The survivors manage to create microscopic humans that could successfully compete in a microscopic environment with various local creatures, and they engraved a significant amount of their knowledge databases on a series of microscopic metal plates before they died.
The short story (and the game) takes place in the context of those microscopic people who are living in a puddle and wondering what "space" and "stars" are.:-)
Assuming that a commercial/corporate level of system support is required, and assuming that a typical employee only needs access to software such as:
* general office applications (word processing, spreadsheet, database, drawing),
* file sharing with the existing CIFS network,
* network client software (browser/e-mail/FTP),
then I will reassert that Linux, OS/2, and/or eCS would be viable solutions, and FreeBSD might be, though you might end up running a lot of Linux binaries on the latter.
If you add the additional requitement that any replacement environment be a drop-on replacement that doesn't change the look or feel of existing applications, however, then your options are far more limited.
I would argue that to be an arbitrary requirement, however, and that the continued use of software such as Outlook or Word presents as many potential security risks to the organization as it does mild benefits due to training issues.
I'd tend to lean more towards using an eCS desktop running OpenOffice or Lotus SmartSuite, Mozilla and friends, etc, since it would have support available directly from IBM, would have none of the UI or clipboard issues you speak or, would drop right into a Windows network, and would not require the type of large-scale hardware replacement that a movement to the Mac would require.
To each his/her own, however...
No. Most programmers do custom in-house work.
on
McVoy Strikes Back
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· Score: 1
Most of the programmers I know are working on custom software in-house at various companies -- they don't work on software intended for commercial resale -- and I think that represents the vast majority of commercial programming effort being done today.
Because of this, the software development market isn't going away even if open source software becomes more prevalent.
FreeBSD could be an option, or eCS, or even BeOS in some cases.
These articles that equate x86 hardware to Windows and which present the Mac as the only alternative do little more than highlight the lack of knowledge on the part of the writer, IMO.
I only paid US$4.00 + S&H for the two Palm-branded Stowaway folding keyboards that I bought for my Palm m105.
eBay is a great place to find used Palms and add-ons. My second m105 was only US$28, and my two V.90 ClipModems (yes, a Palm m105 can do PPP and can also telnet via pTelnet or do web browsing via Xiino) were US$1.50 apiece, etc.
When I worked at Northwest Airlines as a programmer, I needed regular access to:
* Windows NT/Novell
* Three different Unisys OS2200 DEMAND environments for development/support.
* Three different Unisys OS2200 TIP environments for development/support (one USAS, two UNIMATIC).
* Two Solaris servers for development/support
* IBM TSO/ISPF (mainframe) for change management.
* IBM CICS environment for hours/projects (PCS).
* AIX server for maintaining intranet site.
The platforms involved had vastly different password length and content requirements and did not share security information.
At my current position, I need access to a Linux box, a Solaris box, three OS2200 boxes, Novell, and a whole pile of different applications (some web based, some not) for training, time reporting, change management, problem monitoring, and various other things.
Some of the latter could share a common password if the various vendors got together and agreed to implement a standard (since all are access via my Windows XP Pro box), but the former are all server logins on platforms which are quite different from each other (Solaris and Linux aren't, but neither is remotely like OS2200).
Executive pay is increased when things are good, but only rarely is it decreased, and senior executives are rarely held accountable for mistakes.
The example of Carly at HP has already been given, and airline executives are still making big bucks even as their companies are flirting with (or are already in) bankruptcy.
I don't know that caps are the best idea, but some concrete level of accountability would be nice. If a CEO screws up and costs the company millions of billions of dollars, they should have to pay a real price, not a purely symbolic one.
...I want to point out (as one of the hundreds if not thousands of former airline IT pros that were let go in the months after 9/11) that the airline industry is still not in particularly good health, and that one should be very careful where one goes, at least if one is expecting to stay in a single position for a while.
Layoffs are not fun, especially if one has over a decade invested in a particular group and it still isn't enough seniority to ward off the axe.:-(
That said, it's an absolutely fascinating industry to work for! That's why I'm still in it, at least on the periphery...
OS/2 Warp 3.0 was released initially with two dialers -- one for IBM's internet service, and the other (called Dial Other Internet Providers, or DOIP) to connect with any other ISP who was using either SLIP or PPP for serial TCP/IP connections.
(Technically speaking, the original red-spine Warp 3.0 boxes were only shiopped with only SLIP support, but PPP support was a free download from IBM and could also be obtained on diskette).
At that point in time, very few home users had any need for network card support (home LANs were almost unheard of), and of course Windows 95 wasn't released until ten months later.
First, while IBM had a full licence deal to use Windows 3.1 (a bit remaining from the whole OS2/NT partnership), they made no real effort to make it work well inside their fancy 32bit OS (starting Windows programs resulted in a copy of Windows 3.1 actually being booted up just for that program).
This isn't correct, or rather, it's not an accurate representation of the effort IBM made with Windows for their WinOS2 subsystem.
IBM had access to the Windows source from Microsoft as part of the deal they cut during the breakup. In order to get it to run properly, they made some changes to the WinOS2 subsystem to allow it to run as a DPMI client under their new MVDM (Multiple Virtual DOS Machine) subsystem,they recompiled the code with Watcom's C compiler to improve performance, and they also redesigned the Windows video driver layer to allow a WinOS2 session to poke a hole in OS/2's native PM (Presentation Manager) desktop and display that WinOS2 session alongside the rest of the screen (which was controlled by PM).
The end result was called Seamless Windows, and was both fascinating in its flexibity and disconcerting in its mixing of two window APIs and two sets of Window frames and mouse cursors on the same desktop.
Not only did IBM tweak the video subsystem, but networking, sound, and other elements of the virtualized Windows environment were allowed to use the OS/2 networking, sound, and mouse services, resulting in a hybrid that ran Windows software quite nicely without having to have direct access to any of that hardware (or to use any Windows or DOS drivers).
The WinOS2 subsystem in OS/2 2.0 only supported Windows 3.0 programs (note that Windows 3.1 had been released in APril 1992, roughly the same time that OS/2 2.0 was finally released as a General Availability product), but OS/2 2.1 corrected that in May of 1993, and the so-called emulation of Windows 3.1 was so good between the 2.1 release and the release of Windows 95 that many software vendors saw no real point in supporting OS/2's own native API, and Microsoft chose to respond to this threat by creating over a dozen different "Win32S.dll" additions to the Windows 3.1 API to make Windows a moving target that IBM couldn't possibly keep up with.
The care taken for supporting old DOS programs (which they didn't need Microsoft's help for) was even worse - while Windows 95 needed tweaking options too, OS/2 presented users with a huge checklist that had to have been literally copied straight from the constant names in the C header file (the option names even included the underscore). The options where so badly labeled that even an expert had a hard time figuring out what each option did, let alone what option should be used to get a program to run.
This is total nonsense. The options presented for a VDM were numerous, that is true, but that's simply a reflection of the tremendous amount of flexibility that IBM designed into their MVDM subsystem (a subsystem which has survived almost unchanged though Warp 4 to eComStation today). The options were (and are) clearly labelled, had fairly extensive online help, and were quite clear to anyone familiar with the terminology and options that were present in a copy of actual DOS.
Think of a Windows 3.1 PIF file on steroids.
I'm saying this as a DOS user from 1988 through 1992 who switched to OS/2 2.0 in 1992 from a combination MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 environment for the main reason of running multiple virtual DOS machines for using my DOS software collection. I know the OS/2 VDM subsystem inside and out from a user perspective, and it was *trivial* for a knowledgable DOS user to master quickly.
DOS machines under OS/2, by default, used a virtual DOS kernel, not a real DOS kernel. That means they used an interface which looked like the real DOS interrupt interface, but which actually provided a link to OS/2's own system services. Because of this, a DOS program could usually use things like the mouse, soundcard, and networkin
Just not very effectively, at least compared to some of the other applications that I run on my OS/2 box.
It's a far cry better than Netscape Navigator was, though. But anything doing disk access or any other activities which could interfere with the UI should be spawned as a background process, IMO.
As I also said below, it should -- IBM people did the OS/2 port of Netscape and then Mozilla for years, and IBMers are still heavily (if informally) involved with the OS/2 ports of Mozilla and Firefox.
If Firefox was a multithreaded browser it would be a little bit better, though, at least under Warp.:-)
IBM has had employees working with Mozilla and with Firefox for years (the OS/2 ports of those browsers were paid for by IBM for quite some time), and the so-called "IBM Web Browser" that is provided to OS/2 users by IBM is based on Mozilla.
However, I've done periodic scanning with various other tools (NAV, F-Prot, Avast!, etc.), and none of them have been able to find something wrong.
I suspect AVG just dislikes something about my one Win2k system, and because of its instability I've nearly decided to pay for something like F-Prot for Windows (which I've used for years under DOS and OS/2 anyway, and which I admittedly trust a bit more than some of the newer scanners out there).
I think you're confusing viruses (which propogate by infecting executables and which could easily present a problem on "secure" platforms which enforce user permissions as long as users themselves are idiots) with worms, macroviruses, and other such threats (which would be addressed by better security on the part of Microsoft, but which are only a subset of the types of malware that AV companies address).
I agree that many types of malware would be better fixed by changing Windows itself, patching obvious entryways such as ActiveX and such, etc;, since the majority of those are actually exploits of Windows system flaws rather than viruses in the traditional sense.
I also agree that the simple release by Microsoft of a free anti-malware products is little more than a band-aid in terms of fixing the general malware problem found on Windows today.
I do, however, disagree that Windows is alone in having traditional viruses (the classic Mac was also hit very hard in the past), and I think the recent focus of AV companies on Windows-centric forms of exploitative malware in addition to their more traditional activities (the detection and removal of traditional viruses) has blurred the distinction between the two types of malware in your eyes.
The two classes of malware are NOT the same.
Even if Microsoft were to fix the massive security holes that exist on their platform, a market for third-party anti-virus tools would still exist.
However, a Microsoft AV offering has the potential to remove that marketplace comepletely.
Don't use Windows in situations where it's known to be vulnerable. There's no reason at all to abandon the x86 platform, or even to abandon Windows. Just stop being stupid when it comes to security issues.
I use a mix of platforms at home. Fileservers are all running Linux (nfs and Samba). My firewall is a Linux variant. My main desktop OSes for surfing, e-mail, etc., are OS/2 and Linux, and even on those I don't use clients which are stupid enough to execute code without my explicit permission. If I want to run an attachment, I save it to a file, scan it, and run it manually.
I use Windows for gaming, MIDI, and some other things, but those boxes are not exposed to the net during typical usage, and when they *are* used for network activities I use clients like Firefox or Thunderbird rather than MSIE or Outlook variants.
I've been doing this for something like ten years, and I've run a number of spyware detectors and other things just for grins. Guess how much spyware they've found? That's right, none.
A simple AV signature scanner or heuristic code scanner doesn't really care about the kernel -- all it cares about is the executable file formats that it's scanning.
Such scanners look for known code sequences and suspicious patterns of instructions and API calls -- and while some API calls might change over time as a kernel adds/drops/changes features, it's only the core system services calls that are typically an issue, and those don't change all that quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, wait. Geeks can't get married, right? :-)
We have both Office 95 Pro and Office 97 Pro at home, and I actually prefer to use the former (older) version when I have to produce Word documents.
Since I have customers (and coworkers) all over the globe, sometimes working radically different hours than I do, I've found that it's often better to toss an e-mail to some people than to attempt to contact them by other means.
:-) Sometimes it's self-defense.
We also get a lot of announcements, problem reports, status messages, and other things sent via e-mail at my current workplace.
Because of this, by e-mail client checks for new mail every five minutes. And depending on the type of message, sometimes that's too long a period of time.
Not all e-mail usage is strictly by choice.
I can't count the number of times I've caught a Harvester in C&C gazing longingly across a river at a tiny little patch of timberium that it can't possibly get to, or getting so drunk after filling itself that it decides to wander over to an enemy base get a really close look at an enemy turret.
:-) :-)
Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!
Damn things need a babysitter.
For those not familiar with the Scifi short story by (I think?) James Blish, _Surface Tension_ is the story of a human colony seedship (an interstellar colony ship which specialized in creating genetically engineered humans that can live in environments where normal humans could not) which crashes on a planet where the only life is microscopic and lives in various ponds and puddles.
:-)
The survivors manage to create microscopic humans that could successfully compete in a microscopic environment with various local creatures, and they engraved a significant amount of their knowledge databases on a series of microscopic metal plates before they died.
The short story (and the game) takes place in the context of those microscopic people who are living in a puddle and wondering what "space" and "stars" are.
Individual servers could be puddles, etc.
Assuming that a commercial/corporate level of system support is required, and assuming that a typical employee only needs access to software such as:
* general office applications (word processing, spreadsheet, database, drawing),
* file sharing with the existing CIFS network,
* network client software (browser/e-mail/FTP),
then I will reassert that Linux, OS/2, and/or eCS would be viable solutions, and FreeBSD might be, though you might end up running a lot of Linux binaries on the latter.
If you add the additional requitement that any replacement environment be a drop-on replacement that doesn't change the look or feel of existing applications, however, then your options are far more limited.
I would argue that to be an arbitrary requirement, however, and that the continued use of software such as Outlook or Word presents as many potential security risks to the organization as it does mild benefits due to training issues.
I'd tend to lean more towards using an eCS desktop running OpenOffice or Lotus SmartSuite, Mozilla and friends, etc, since it would have support available directly from IBM, would have none of the UI or clipboard issues you speak or, would drop right into a Windows network, and would not require the type of large-scale hardware replacement that a movement to the Mac would require.
To each his/her own, however...
Most of the programmers I know are working on custom software in-house at various companies -- they don't work on software intended for commercial resale -- and I think that represents the vast majority of commercial programming effort being done today.
Because of this, the software development market isn't going away even if open source software becomes more prevalent.
FreeBSD could be an option, or eCS, or even BeOS in some cases.
These articles that equate x86 hardware to Windows and which present the Mac as the only alternative do little more than highlight the lack of knowledge on the part of the writer, IMO.
Or isn't it considered a blog?
I only paid US$4.00 + S&H for the two Palm-branded Stowaway folding keyboards that I bought for my Palm m105.
eBay is a great place to find used Palms and add-ons. My second m105 was only US$28, and my two V.90 ClipModems (yes, a Palm m105 can do PPP and can also telnet via pTelnet or do web browsing via Xiino) were US$1.50 apiece, etc.
When I worked at Northwest Airlines as a programmer, I needed regular access to:
* Windows NT/Novell
* Three different Unisys OS2200 DEMAND environments for development/support.
* Three different Unisys OS2200 TIP environments for development/support (one USAS, two UNIMATIC).
* Two Solaris servers for development/support
* IBM TSO/ISPF (mainframe) for change management.
* IBM CICS environment for hours/projects (PCS).
* AIX server for maintaining intranet site.
The platforms involved had vastly different password length and content requirements and did not share security information.
At my current position, I need access to a Linux box, a Solaris box, three OS2200 boxes, Novell, and a whole pile of different applications (some web based, some not) for training, time reporting, change management, problem monitoring, and various other things.
Some of the latter could share a common password if the various vendors got together and agreed to implement a standard (since all are access via my Windows XP Pro box), but the former are all server logins on platforms which are quite different from each other (Solaris and Linux aren't, but neither is remotely like OS2200).
Some of the systems where I work require a new password every 30 days, and one of those is a system I only have to access once or twice a week.
By the time I have the PW memorized, it's time to change it again.
Executive pay is increased when things are good, but only rarely is it decreased, and senior executives are rarely held accountable for mistakes.
The example of Carly at HP has already been given, and airline executives are still making big bucks even as their companies are flirting with (or are already in) bankruptcy.
I don't know that caps are the best idea, but some concrete level of accountability would be nice. If a CEO screws up and costs the company millions of billions of dollars, they should have to pay a real price, not a purely symbolic one.
...I want to point out (as one of the hundreds if not thousands of former airline IT pros that were let go in the months after 9/11) that the airline industry is still not in particularly good health, and that one should be very careful where one goes, at least if one is expecting to stay in a single position for a while.
:-(
Layoffs are not fun, especially if one has over a decade invested in a particular group and it still isn't enough seniority to ward off the axe.
That said, it's an absolutely fascinating industry to work for! That's why I'm still in it, at least on the periphery...
Even relatively "simple" things like PC/GEOS have a hard time under XP.
OS/2 Warp 3.0 was released initially with two dialers -- one for IBM's internet service, and the other (called Dial Other Internet Providers, or DOIP) to connect with any other ISP who was using either SLIP or PPP for serial TCP/IP connections.
(Technically speaking, the original red-spine Warp 3.0 boxes were only shiopped with only SLIP support, but PPP support was a free download from IBM and could also be obtained on diskette).
At that point in time, very few home users had any need for network card support (home LANs were almost unheard of), and of course Windows 95 wasn't released until ten months later.
First, while IBM had a full licence deal to use Windows 3.1 (a bit remaining from the whole OS2/NT partnership), they made no real effort to make it work well inside their fancy 32bit OS (starting Windows programs resulted in a copy of Windows 3.1 actually being booted up just for that program).
This isn't correct, or rather, it's not an accurate representation of the effort IBM made with Windows for their WinOS2 subsystem.
IBM had access to the Windows source from Microsoft as part of the deal they cut during the breakup. In order to get it to run properly, they made some changes to the WinOS2 subsystem to allow it to run as a DPMI client under their new MVDM (Multiple Virtual DOS Machine) subsystem,they recompiled the code with Watcom's C compiler to improve performance, and they also redesigned the Windows video driver layer to allow a WinOS2 session to poke a hole in OS/2's native PM (Presentation Manager) desktop and display that WinOS2 session alongside the rest of the screen (which was controlled by PM).
The end result was called Seamless Windows, and was both fascinating in its flexibity and disconcerting in its mixing of two window APIs and two sets of Window frames and mouse cursors on the same desktop.
Not only did IBM tweak the video subsystem, but networking, sound, and other elements of the virtualized Windows environment were allowed to use the OS/2 networking, sound, and mouse services, resulting in a hybrid that ran Windows software quite nicely without having to have direct access to any of that hardware (or to use any Windows or DOS drivers).
The WinOS2 subsystem in OS/2 2.0 only supported Windows 3.0 programs (note that Windows 3.1 had been released in APril 1992, roughly the same time that OS/2 2.0 was finally released as a General Availability product), but OS/2 2.1 corrected that in May of 1993, and the so-called emulation of Windows 3.1 was so good between the 2.1 release and the release of Windows 95 that many software vendors saw no real point in supporting OS/2's own native API, and Microsoft chose to respond to this threat by creating over a dozen different "Win32S.dll" additions to the Windows 3.1 API to make Windows a moving target that IBM couldn't possibly keep up with.
The care taken for supporting old DOS programs (which they didn't need Microsoft's help for) was even worse - while Windows 95 needed tweaking options too, OS/2 presented users with a huge checklist that had to have been literally copied straight from the constant names in the C header file (the option names even included the underscore). The options where so badly labeled that even an expert had a hard time figuring out what each option did, let alone what option should be used to get a program to run.
This is total nonsense. The options presented for a VDM were numerous, that is true, but that's simply a reflection of the tremendous amount of flexibility that IBM designed into their MVDM subsystem (a subsystem which has survived almost unchanged though Warp 4 to eComStation today). The options were (and are) clearly labelled, had fairly extensive online help, and were quite clear to anyone familiar with the terminology and options that were present in a copy of actual DOS.
Think of a Windows 3.1 PIF file on steroids.
I'm saying this as a DOS user from 1988 through 1992 who switched to OS/2 2.0 in 1992 from a combination MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 environment for the main reason of running multiple virtual DOS machines for using my DOS software collection. I know the OS/2 VDM subsystem inside and out from a user perspective, and it was *trivial* for a knowledgable DOS user to master quickly.
DOS machines under OS/2, by default, used a virtual DOS kernel, not a real DOS kernel. That means they used an interface which looked like the real DOS interrupt interface, but which actually provided a link to OS/2's own system services. Because of this, a DOS program could usually use things like the mouse, soundcard, and networkin
Just not very effectively, at least compared to some of the other applications that I run on my OS/2 box.
;-)
It's a far cry better than Netscape Navigator was, though. But anything doing disk access or any other activities which could interfere with the UI should be spawned as a background process, IMO.
Of course, I could be wrong.
As I also said below, it should -- IBM people did the OS/2 port of Netscape and then Mozilla for years, and IBMers are still heavily (if informally) involved with the OS/2 ports of Mozilla and Firefox.
:-)
If Firefox was a multithreaded browser it would be a little bit better, though, at least under Warp.
IBM has had employees working with Mozilla and with Firefox for years (the OS/2 ports of those browsers were paid for by IBM for quite some time), and the so-called "IBM Web Browser" that is provided to OS/2 users by IBM is based on Mozilla.
However, I've done periodic scanning with various other tools (NAV, F-Prot, Avast!, etc.), and none of them have been able to find something wrong.
I suspect AVG just dislikes something about my one Win2k system, and because of its instability I've nearly decided to pay for something like F-Prot for Windows (which I've used for years under DOS and OS/2 anyway, and which I admittedly trust a bit more than some of the newer scanners out there).
I think you're confusing viruses (which propogate by infecting executables and which could easily present a problem on "secure" platforms which enforce user permissions as long as users themselves are idiots) with worms, macroviruses, and other such threats (which would be addressed by better security on the part of Microsoft, but which are only a subset of the types of malware that AV companies address).
I agree that many types of malware would be better fixed by changing Windows itself, patching obvious entryways such as ActiveX and such, etc;, since the majority of those are actually exploits of Windows system flaws rather than viruses in the traditional sense.
I also agree that the simple release by Microsoft of a free anti-malware products is little more than a band-aid in terms of fixing the general malware problem found on Windows today.
I do, however, disagree that Windows is alone in having traditional viruses (the classic Mac was also hit very hard in the past), and I think the recent focus of AV companies on Windows-centric forms of exploitative malware in addition to their more traditional activities (the detection and removal of traditional viruses) has blurred the distinction between the two types of malware in your eyes.
The two classes of malware are NOT the same.
Even if Microsoft were to fix the massive security holes that exist on their platform, a market for third-party anti-virus tools would still exist.
However, a Microsoft AV offering has the potential to remove that marketplace comepletely.
That's the difference...
Don't use Windows in situations where it's known to be vulnerable. There's no reason at all to abandon the x86 platform, or even to abandon Windows. Just stop being stupid when it comes to security issues.
I use a mix of platforms at home. Fileservers are all running Linux (nfs and Samba). My firewall is a Linux variant. My main desktop OSes for surfing, e-mail, etc., are OS/2 and Linux, and even on those I don't use clients which are stupid enough to execute code without my explicit permission. If I want to run an attachment, I save it to a file, scan it, and run it manually.
I use Windows for gaming, MIDI, and some other things, but those boxes are not exposed to the net during typical usage, and when they *are* used for network activities I use clients like Firefox or Thunderbird rather than MSIE or Outlook variants.
I've been doing this for something like ten years, and I've run a number of spyware detectors and other things just for grins. Guess how much spyware they've found? That's right, none.
It's all about common sense, people...
That plus MS Office are Microsoft's main sources of revenue. Look at their financial numbers.
A simple AV signature scanner or heuristic code scanner doesn't really care about the kernel -- all it cares about is the executable file formats that it's scanning.
Such scanners look for known code sequences and suspicious patterns of instructions and API calls -- and while some API calls might change over time as a kernel adds/drops/changes features, it's only the core system services calls that are typically an issue, and those don't change all that quickly.