And of course everything Mitnick says about Markoff is true. Everybody knows Mitnick is an innocent victim! But despite his innocence, he bears no malice to any of his accusers!
Your defense of Exchange is the same one we hear for so many other Microsoft products. "The product is perfectly secure and reliable IF you put in the effort required to make it so." Judging from the Exchange horror stories I've heard, this is a very big IF indeed. Perhaps you find it easy to administer, but you seem to be in the minority.
From what I'm hearing, Exchange has the same problem I've seen in every single Microsoft product I've used. It's feature bezerk. I don't mean it has too many features (how can you have too many features?). I mean that the features are piled on willy-nilly. They just want to make the feature list as long as they can. They don't think about making the features work together, or breaking backward/forward compatibility, or making it easy/reasonable/possible for the user to find the feature that has to do with what he wants to do. NOBODY LOOKS AT THE BIG PICTURE!!!
And that is why they have to assign so many people to developing and maintaining their products. It's not a matter of delivering the best product. It's a matter of simply keeping the thing from collapsing of its own weight!
IMAP works better for experience users than it does for the average user. Most clients have non intuitive implementations of this (eg, "Why does the email stay there after I delete it?").
I consider myself an experienced user, and I find most IMAP clients hopelessly obscure and complicated. But the IMAP implementation in Mozilla/Netscape is pretty good. It does use that weird delete-means-mark semantics by default, but that's easy to change.
Alas, Netscape seems to have totally abandoned calendar support. After spending all that money acquiring the technology, they never got around to properly integrating it! Pathetic.
Indeed. The feature list is pretty impressive. The one that catches my eye is:
The CommuniGate Pro MAPI Connector acts as a "MAPI provider". It accepts Messaging API requests from Microsoft Outlook (Outlook 98, Outlook 2000, Outlook 2002, Outlook XP and later) running in the "groupware" mode, and from other Windows applications. The MAPI Connector converts these requests into extended IMAP commands and sends them to the CommuniGate Pro Server.
Which leaves me with two questions: (1) Does CommuniGate really have all the groupware functionality of Exchange? (2) Are there extended IMAP clients that you can use to access this functionality, so you can get away from Outlook/Virusmaker and MAPI/Crashmaker?
Do any web servers besides IIS use NTLM? If your intranet sites are running IIS, then it's probably safe to assume that the content is full of IE-specific hacks. Especially if pages were authored with various Microsoft Office applications.
Is anyone at Mozilla working on a quirks mode for Word- or Excel-generated HTML? Don't even think about Powerpoint!
In the case of Solaris, it's corporate stupidity. Sun tells us that Solaris users don't need Microsoft software, but won't subsidize maintenance of Solaris Netscape. And given the number of Solaris desktops, it's hardly suprising that AOL won't do it for free.
In the case of IRIX, SGI is just facing reality: they've never made a dent in the desktop market, and it's not worth spending money to make their workstations do things people can do more cheaply with Wintel systems. When I worked there, they didn't even have up-to-date Quicktime codecs!
The whole Mozilla/Netscape effort is, alas, a prime example of the Buffy Syndrome. As Anthony Cordesman summarizes:
...each series of crises only
becomes predictable when it is over and is followed by a new and unfamiliar one.
While uncertainty is the dominating motif, the "Buffy paradigm" has the following additional characteristics:
What expertise there is consists largely of bad or uncertain advice and old, flawed, and
confusing technical data.
The importance of any given threat changes constantly, past threat behavior does not
predict future behavior, and methods of delivery keep changing.
Arcane knowledge is always inadequate and fails to predict, detect, and properly
characterize the threat.
The more certain and deterministic an expert is at the start, the more wrong they turn out
to be in practice.
The scenarios are unpredictable and have very unclear motivation. Any effort to predict
threat motivation and behavior in detail before the event does at least as much
Risk taking is not rationale or subject to predictable constraints and the motivation behind
escalation is erratic at best.
It is never clear whether the threat is internal, from an individual, or from an outside
organisation.
The attackers have no firm or predictable alliances, cooperate in nearly random ways, and
can suddenly change method of attack and willingness to take risks.
All efforts at planning a coherent strategy collapse in the face of tactical necessity and the
need to deal with unexpected facts on the ground.
The balance between external defense, homeland defense, and response changes
constantly.
No success, not matter how important at the time, ever eliminates the risk of future problems.
Of course, Cordesman is talking about terrorism, not software. Still...
Pining for the Fjords!
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I don't know whether to flame you or thank you for leaving "hl=no" in that URL. I guess I should thank you, since figuring out why Google was assuming I was Norwegian was very instructive!
Why can't we once in a while have an interesting non-tech article here without getting hundreds of comments that do nothing but expressing their boredom?
Jeez, do you really need to ask? Consider the kind of person that read Slashdot?!
Besides which, XP crashes a lot less than 2000. Plus it has greatly improved multithreading, which makes a lot of games run better.
If I were choosing purely on the basis of OS quality, Windows would be at the bottom of my list. (Though Linux would not be at the top!) But I'm not allowed to make that choice. There's a lot of Windows software I have to be able to run, and do so without jumping through a lot of comaptibility-layer hoops.
Consider approaching somebody who owns copyrighted content and asking for permission to use their stuff. Hollywood would probably blow you off, but smaller producers or documentarians would be happy for the exposure. Also check out local TV stations.
The only thing to do is figure out ways to work around it -- or to move to another country where the government officials aren't so stupid.
What a cop out. It's true that people with deep pockets have an unfair advantage. But grass-roots democracy isn't dead. At least, not until everyone cops out.
Suppose tennis rackets were very expensive to make. No one can afford to buy them, until somebody gets the idea of selling them at a loss, and making a profit by selling tennis court time. They've patented tennis courts, of course, so you can't just build your own. Then people discover that squash is public domain, so they start playing squash instead. How soon would it be before it was illegal to play squash with a tennis racket?
I hear you saying, "That's lame. You can't use regulate people's behavior to that level." I certainly agree. And eventually the big IP hoarders will figure this out. But in the meantime -- well, I was never any good at tennis.
All they want is a boot-loader that is digitally signed so it can run on the xbox WITHOUT A MOD CHIP.
Which Microsoft will never do. Once such a boot loader was out there, you could run any software on an XBox. If Microsoft is unable to control what software gets run on the XBox, they get no licensing fees from XBox developers. Since the XBox itself is sold at a loss, that'd be the end of the whole platform.
A decent story, but I much prefer the way he explored the same issue at depth in The Ophiuchi Hotline. Very amusing to open the book, which begins with a criminal indictment that ends, "The prosecution seeks permanent death."
There's also a good story called, "Overdrawn at the memory bank" which got made into a very bad movie.
But I gotta say, I'm a little tired of this concept. It was vaguely interesting 30 years ago. But now that I've had all this time to think about it, and know more about the human brain works, I find the concept silly and naive. A human personality is a complex, poorly understood entity. Its physical implementation is subtle and controversial. "Recording" a mind will never be as simple as ripping a CD. It will take decades, maybe centuries, of research and experiment.
Which is where the concept gets really stupid. Because these things don't happen all at once. Long before you're able to perform a literal brain dump, we will have learned tons about how the brain actually works. And that will process will change humans and human society far more than anything I've seen an SF story.
No, there was no flood that wiped out ALL LIFE on Earth except what was in Noah's boat (though there may have been a big flood).
Probably more than one. Most cultures have a Noah's Ark myth. My own favorite theory is that early urban centers tended to get founded on flood plains (that's where the best farming land is) and then destroyed by the next century flood. This still happens, but nowadays you have a surrounding civilization to help clean things up. Five thousand years ago, your flood plain urband center was your civilization, and its destruction was a permanent, traumatic event, blamed on divine retribution for the misdeads of the evil city dwellers.
Yours is the something like the fifth response I've gotten that says, "you don't have to buy your phone from the provider". I know this. I even mention it in the post. Doesn't anybody read a post before responding?
Slashdot Mirror
And of course everything Mitnick says about Markoff is true. Everybody knows Mitnick is an innocent victim! But despite his innocence, he bears no malice to any of his accusers!
From what I'm hearing, Exchange has the same problem I've seen in every single Microsoft product I've used. It's feature bezerk. I don't mean it has too many features (how can you have too many features?). I mean that the features are piled on willy-nilly. They just want to make the feature list as long as they can. They don't think about making the features work together, or breaking backward/forward compatibility, or making it easy/reasonable/possible for the user to find the feature that has to do with what he wants to do. NOBODY LOOKS AT THE BIG PICTURE!!!
And that is why they have to assign so many people to developing and maintaining their products. It's not a matter of delivering the best product. It's a matter of simply keeping the thing from collapsing of its own weight!
Alas, Netscape seems to have totally abandoned calendar support. After spending all that money acquiring the technology, they never got around to properly integrating it! Pathetic.
Is anyone at Mozilla working on a quirks mode for Word- or Excel-generated HTML? Don't even think about Powerpoint!
OK, I jumped to conclusions. But netscape.com does manage to imply that only Windows, OS X, and Linux versions are available.
In the case of IRIX, SGI is just facing reality: they've never made a dent in the desktop market, and it's not worth spending money to make their workstations do things people can do more cheaply with Wintel systems. When I worked there, they didn't even have up-to-date Quicktime codecs!
I don't know whether to flame you or thank you for leaving "hl=no" in that URL. I guess I should thank you, since figuring out why Google was assuming I was Norwegian was very instructive!
If I were choosing purely on the basis of OS quality, Windows would be at the bottom of my list. (Though Linux would not be at the top!) But I'm not allowed to make that choice. There's a lot of Windows software I have to be able to run, and do so without jumping through a lot of comaptibility-layer hoops.
The Amazons on TV do no such thing. Those are the only ones we care about. Forget all that Greek myth crap!
Every Buffy fan knows what shiny really means!
I think I'm staying away from you!
Consider approaching somebody who owns copyrighted content and asking for permission to use their stuff. Hollywood would probably blow you off, but smaller producers or documentarians would be happy for the exposure. Also check out local TV stations.
Where you been? The bubble got burst. People no longer consider a "brand" something that you can make money with even though it doesn't mean anything.
But who's going to pay those license fees to Microsoft if they can develop the same games for XBox/Linux for free?
I hear you saying, "That's lame. You can't use regulate people's behavior to that level." I certainly agree. And eventually the big IP hoarders will figure this out. But in the meantime -- well, I was never any good at tennis.
There's also a good story called, "Overdrawn at the memory bank" which got made into a very bad movie.
But I gotta say, I'm a little tired of this concept. It was vaguely interesting 30 years ago. But now that I've had all this time to think about it, and know more about the human brain works, I find the concept silly and naive. A human personality is a complex, poorly understood entity. Its physical implementation is subtle and controversial. "Recording" a mind will never be as simple as ripping a CD. It will take decades, maybe centuries, of research and experiment.
Which is where the concept gets really stupid. Because these things don't happen all at once. Long before you're able to perform a literal brain dump, we will have learned tons about how the brain actually works. And that will process will change humans and human society far more than anything I've seen an SF story.
It works in the movies!
Yours is the something like the fifth response I've gotten that says, "you don't have to buy your phone from the provider". I know this. I even mention it in the post. Doesn't anybody read a post before responding?
I knew I could buy my own, but (as I think I made it clear) I'm wary of the risks. Maybe there aren't any...???