You're damned right about it being an arms race. The way malware gets more and more sophisticated is the most amazing/scary thing that doesn't involve WMDs!
You're also right in wanting a varied toolset. Unfortunately, that doesn't do as much good as it should. LavaSoft has never put as much work into AdAware as they should, probably because they promised Steve Gibson that they'd always provide a free version of his invention -- which kind of removes their profit incentive. Spybot has only recently stopped being more than a hobby project, and is still overdependent on volunteers and donations. Established security companies like McAfee and Symantec waited way too long to enter the market, and their products are still pretty immature. Who else is there?
Windows 95 was not a 32-bit OS. It was just an incremental revision of Windows 3.1. You're thinking of WIN32S, a compatibility layer which kludged some 32-bit functionity onto Windows 3.1 and later. WIN32S came pre-installed on Win95 and later, but it wasn't an integral part of the OS.
The pain we experienced going from 16-bit to 32-bit Windows had nothing to do with bitness. Despite having the same name and a big feature overlap, these were actually two different OSs. The 16-bit OS evolved out of DOS, a nasty, buggy and incomplete OS designed by people who didn't even understand what an OS was supposed to do. The Windows layer didn't just provide GUI services, it kludged in basic OS functionality, like pre-emptive multitasking. By contrast, 32-bit Windows was written from scratch by OS geniuses who had previously worked on VMS. They did their best to provide backward compatibility, but there's a limit to what you can do about that wihout screwing up the new OS.
Porting from 16-bit Windows applications to 32-bit Windows is sort of comparible to the problems you face running Windows applications under Linux using WINE. In both cases, you're going to a new OS, and relying on a compatibility layer.
A 32-bit Windows application running under 64-bit Windows just won't face these issues. There will be some 64-bit features it won't be able to uses, that's all.
You're quite right -- Microsoft has a unique ability to screw up perfectly good products, and will undoubtedly turn Giant Antispyware into a piece of crap eventually. But until they do, it's the #1 antispyware product, and should be in every consultants toolset.
You have me confused with somebody who thinks they have all the answers. All I said was that it might be productive if the less kneejerky individuals on both sides of the debate started a dialog. I guess that's not going to happen, since intolerant persons like yourself always seem to dominate the debate.
Both the systems donated, a Sunblade 1000 and a Dell Precision 2650, are discontinued models, probably recycled after being used internally. And the software license costs them nothing to donate -- it's not as if they're losing a sale! It's nice that Sun supports this project, but lets not overstate their generosity.
Well, you can pay extra for a drive that is less likely to fail. But no matter how much you pay, you can't buy a drive that will absolutely never fail. Which is why God invented backups.
I notice that nobody has had the courage to point out that AdAware and Spybot are no longer the leading antispyware tools. The leader is (gasp) Microsoft Antispyware, and it catches a lot of stuff Spybot misses. Though Spybot also catches a few things MA misses. As for AdAware, it's fallen so far behind I rarely bother with it.
I still have one small piece of spyware hiding somewhere that none of the above can find. It only runs when I run IE (which I very rarely do these days), pathetically raising popup windows with nothing in them! I haven't bothered to chase it down, since it isn't that much of a nuisance. But maybe I'll apply some of the tricks I learned today, just for the exercise!
Which brings me to the #1 anti-spyware measure: run Internet Explorer as little as you can!
Your strategy makes economic sense. But consider why they can sell drives that fail so quickly, and still stay in business: drives are cheap. So even if you don't get that extended warantee, you're not out all that much money.
I think what pisses this guy off is the sheer waste of so much hardware ending up in the landfill after only a year or two in service.
Actually a lot of times confrontation will make the person realized they were out of line.
If that's your experience, you've been a lot luckier than I have. Even if you're right most of the time (and I don't think you are), we're not talking about confront or normal -- or rational -- person.
Maybe those of you who love guns but know they're not the solution to every problem can get together with those of us who hate guns but know how firmly embeded they are in American culture. Then maybe we can come up with a set of laws that support proper use of guns for hunting and self-protection, but don't cater to every idiot who thinks he's an action hero.
There is no excuse for this sort of behavior. Period. Next time he tries to do it, confront him. Remember, at this point, he needs you a lot more than you need him.
Which works if the boss is rational enough to act in his own self-interest. Doesn't like concept applies here.
You know, strictly speaking, it is his responsibility to find a replacement for your position, not yours. You should remind him of this in no uncertain terms.
And of course, he will say, "Oh silly me, you're right! Never mind!"
It's pretty obvious what's going on here: the boss is out of his depth, his own job is in jeopardy, maybe his personal life is also in the toilet, and he's blaming everyone but himself for his woes. Under those circumstances, confrontation of any kind is unlikely to help things, and could easily make things worse. What do I mean by "worse"? Maybe just a few harsh words, but this is a classic formula for workplace violence. One should step carefully.
The threat to withhold the final paycheck is, of course, illegal. The way to deal with this is to politely remind the boss of that fact. If that produces more outbursts, then you should take it to the HR department, and maybe your boss's boss, both of whom will be quite concerned at the legal exposure such a threat creates. Or, if the boss is also the proprietor, you should talk to the state employment commission.
And you should probably depart as soon as your statutory two weeks is up. There are many good reasons to remain longer: you want to act professionally, you don't want to leave your co-workers in the lurch, etc. But they just don't apply when you're being abused and threatened in this way.
For tens of thousands of years one of the most important skills was saying what needs to be said in a concise and direct manner. Apparently the world has been overrun by people who feel better about themselves by doing just the opposite.
"Thousands of years"? Have you read any Victorian writers? Simple. precise prose is a pretty recent invention.
It's true that a lot of tech manuals are badly written, and a lot tech writers place too much emphasis on creativity. But I think you'll find that most 800-page manuals owe their length to the need to describe lots of little things, not to prolixity.
I don't deny that online copy is hard to use. My point was simply that it doesn't have to be as hard as it is.
You mention the difficulty of browsing online manuals when you've only got one monitor. True -- but look back at the costs I estimated in my previous post. A single 800-page manual can cost you enough money to upgrade to a dual-head display!
The Imagerunner is a pretty fancy printer, judging from its web site. I 've never used it, but if its like other color laser printers, it'll cost 10 to 15 cents a page just for expendables. And a lot of companies don't buy their high-end printers, they lease them with a by-the-page charge of 25 to 30 cents. Better ask yourself whether you want to spend $200 plus binding costs just to have the manual in hard copy.
It's probably a good option to print the manual on a monochrome printer. The kind of graphics you see in most software manuals don't really suffer from being reduced to grayscale. Still pretty expensive, though.
It's very sad that programmers still feel the need to have hardcopy manuals, even as producing them becomes less and less practical. (Not just cost -- there's the difficulty of publishing and distributing physical documentation for rapidly-changing products.) For that, I have to apologize on behalf of my profession, Technical Writing, which has done a really lousing job of keeping up with the state of the art. We're still not good at creating the kind of well-structured electronic documents that make hard copy unnecessary. Even though most of our work never sees hardcopy, we're still horribly bound to desktop publishing models. We should delivering easy-to-use web sites and help files; instead we deliver stupid PDF files that are just huge page dumps. We don't even exploit the PDF format as much as we should -- it's a horribly obsolete format, but it does support some basic hypertext concepts that would be very helpful, if more people bothered to use them.
Then again, it's not all our fault. As I said, most techwriters are way behind the times in content management technology. But they only get away with it because documentation isn't a big priority. People in the software industry underestimate its importance and are unwilling to spend a lot of money on it. The don't grasp the skill it takes to do the job right, or the technical difficulties involved in creating and maintaining huge masses of documentation. Hint: it's not a lot easier than maintaining equivalent amounts of source code.
When I say "people in the software industry" I guess I mostly mean "developers". Whose perception drive a lot of decision making. Mangement often is dominated by former developers, and even when it isn't their decisions are colored by the code-hacker's view of reality. So maybe it is your guys' fault after all.
Dupe Articles seem to have interbred with Lame Ask Slashdots to produce Dupe Lame Ask Slashdots. For the last time: something isn't necessarily cheaper because it has fewer features. Leaving off standard features costs more, because speciality hardware costs more, because it has fewer customers.
I often (usually!) have problems playing streaming videos, and I have a pretty good connection. This thing started playing almost immediately, and never glitched, which is both unusual and impressive. Pity the content wasn't as cool.
Perhaps the/. editors just don't feel like writing a 4 paragraph summary of how the courts work in the US whenever they post a story about them...
Jeez, think about what you just said. You're responding to a post that summarizes the whole issue in a couple of sentences! It's not about the number of facts you throw at the reader, it's about stating the facts clearly and simply.
So basically, you want a PC-style phone. (Or to give credit where credit is due, an Apple II-style phone, that being the system that pioneered the open architecure that's now standard in PCs.) That would have both positive and negative effects.
Positive effects: Lots of innovation, as hackers create their favorite add ins. And more consumer choice, as people refrain from buying all those stupid bundled features that nobody needs.
Negative effects: Lots and lots of kludgy crap. I mean, think back to what it was like when ISA bus systems were still new. IRQ conflicts, flaky hardware, confusing documentation. It's goten a lot better with PCI and Plug-and -Play. But there are still a lot of problems only a professional geek can solve. The thought of dealing with that short of shit every time they make a phone call is not something most consumers would go for!
Trust me, naked Californias are just as ugly as naked people on the rest of the planet. Even in Hollywood. It's all done with mirrors, digital editing, makeup, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
You're also right in wanting a varied toolset. Unfortunately, that doesn't do as much good as it should. LavaSoft has never put as much work into AdAware as they should, probably because they promised Steve Gibson that they'd always provide a free version of his invention -- which kind of removes their profit incentive. Spybot has only recently stopped being more than a hobby project, and is still overdependent on volunteers and donations. Established security companies like McAfee and Symantec waited way too long to enter the market, and their products are still pretty immature. Who else is there?
Microsoft Antispyware includes a BHO editor. Though I may have forgotten to run it...
Windows 95 was not a 32-bit OS. It was just an incremental revision of Windows 3.1. You're thinking of WIN32S, a compatibility layer which kludged some 32-bit functionity onto Windows 3.1 and later. WIN32S came pre-installed on Win95 and later, but it wasn't an integral part of the OS.
Porting from 16-bit Windows applications to 32-bit Windows is sort of comparible to the problems you face running Windows applications under Linux using WINE. In both cases, you're going to a new OS, and relying on a compatibility layer.
A 32-bit Windows application running under 64-bit Windows just won't face these issues. There will be some 64-bit features it won't be able to uses, that's all.
You're quite right -- Microsoft has a unique ability to screw up perfectly good products, and will undoubtedly turn Giant Antispyware into a piece of crap eventually. But until they do, it's the #1 antispyware product, and should be in every consultants toolset.
And where did I make either of those statements?
You have me confused with somebody who thinks they have all the answers. All I said was that it might be productive if the less kneejerky individuals on both sides of the debate started a dialog. I guess that's not going to happen, since intolerant persons like yourself always seem to dominate the debate.
Both the systems donated, a Sunblade 1000 and a Dell Precision 2650, are discontinued models, probably recycled after being used internally. And the software license costs them nothing to donate -- it's not as if they're losing a sale! It's nice that Sun supports this project, but lets not overstate their generosity.
Well, you can pay extra for a drive that is less likely to fail. But no matter how much you pay, you can't buy a drive that will absolutely never fail. Which is why God invented backups.
Laws are usually judged by quality, not quantity.
I still have one small piece of spyware hiding somewhere that none of the above can find. It only runs when I run IE (which I very rarely do these days), pathetically raising popup windows with nothing in them! I haven't bothered to chase it down, since it isn't that much of a nuisance. But maybe I'll apply some of the tricks I learned today, just for the exercise!
Which brings me to the #1 anti-spyware measure: run Internet Explorer as little as you can!
I think what pisses this guy off is the sheer waste of so much hardware ending up in the landfill after only a year or two in service.
Maybe those of you who love guns but know they're not the solution to every problem can get together with those of us who hate guns but know how firmly embeded they are in American culture. Then maybe we can come up with a set of laws that support proper use of guns for hunting and self-protection, but don't cater to every idiot who thinks he's an action hero.
It's pretty obvious what's going on here: the boss is out of his depth, his own job is in jeopardy, maybe his personal life is also in the toilet, and he's blaming everyone but himself for his woes. Under those circumstances, confrontation of any kind is unlikely to help things, and could easily make things worse. What do I mean by "worse"? Maybe just a few harsh words, but this is a classic formula for workplace violence. One should step carefully.
The threat to withhold the final paycheck is, of course, illegal. The way to deal with this is to politely remind the boss of that fact. If that produces more outbursts, then you should take it to the HR department, and maybe your boss's boss, both of whom will be quite concerned at the legal exposure such a threat creates. Or, if the boss is also the proprietor, you should talk to the state employment commission.
And you should probably depart as soon as your statutory two weeks is up. There are many good reasons to remain longer: you want to act professionally, you don't want to leave your co-workers in the lurch, etc. But they just don't apply when you're being abused and threatened in this way.
It's true that a lot of tech manuals are badly written, and a lot tech writers place too much emphasis on creativity. But I think you'll find that most 800-page manuals owe their length to the need to describe lots of little things, not to prolixity.
You mention the difficulty of browsing online manuals when you've only got one monitor. True -- but look back at the costs I estimated in my previous post. A single 800-page manual can cost you enough money to upgrade to a dual-head display!
It's probably a good option to print the manual on a monochrome printer. The kind of graphics you see in most software manuals don't really suffer from being reduced to grayscale. Still pretty expensive, though.
It's very sad that programmers still feel the need to have hardcopy manuals, even as producing them becomes less and less practical. (Not just cost -- there's the difficulty of publishing and distributing physical documentation for rapidly-changing products.) For that, I have to apologize on behalf of my profession, Technical Writing, which has done a really lousing job of keeping up with the state of the art. We're still not good at creating the kind of well-structured electronic documents that make hard copy unnecessary. Even though most of our work never sees hardcopy, we're still horribly bound to desktop publishing models. We should delivering easy-to-use web sites and help files; instead we deliver stupid PDF files that are just huge page dumps. We don't even exploit the PDF format as much as we should -- it's a horribly obsolete format, but it does support some basic hypertext concepts that would be very helpful, if more people bothered to use them.
Then again, it's not all our fault. As I said, most techwriters are way behind the times in content management technology. But they only get away with it because documentation isn't a big priority. People in the software industry underestimate its importance and are unwilling to spend a lot of money on it. The don't grasp the skill it takes to do the job right, or the technical difficulties involved in creating and maintaining huge masses of documentation. Hint: it's not a lot easier than maintaining equivalent amounts of source code.
When I say "people in the software industry" I guess I mostly mean "developers". Whose perception drive a lot of decision making. Mangement often is dominated by former developers, and even when it isn't their decisions are colored by the code-hacker's view of reality. So maybe it is your guys' fault after all.
Dupe Articles seem to have interbred with Lame Ask Slashdots to produce Dupe Lame Ask Slashdots. For the last time: something isn't necessarily cheaper because it has fewer features. Leaving off standard features costs more, because speciality hardware costs more, because it has fewer customers.
I often (usually!) have problems playing streaming videos, and I have a pretty good connection. This thing started playing almost immediately, and never glitched, which is both unusual and impressive. Pity the content wasn't as cool.
Lame movies. But somebody's really good at doing streaming video in Flash.
Positive effects: Lots of innovation, as hackers create their favorite add ins. And more consumer choice, as people refrain from buying all those stupid bundled features that nobody needs.
Negative effects: Lots and lots of kludgy crap. I mean, think back to what it was like when ISA bus systems were still new. IRQ conflicts, flaky hardware, confusing documentation. It's goten a lot better with PCI and Plug-and -Play. But there are still a lot of problems only a professional geek can solve. The thought of dealing with that short of shit every time they make a phone call is not something most consumers would go for!
Trust me, naked Californias are just as ugly as naked people on the rest of the planet. Even in Hollywood. It's all done with mirrors, digital editing, makeup, etc.