The CEO does have the power to fire or just eliminate the position entirely too. The CIO is not on the board technically and is an independent position.
Infact, there is a huge push to get rid of this position as sales is much more important than that lowly cost center known as IT getting in the way of the CEO bonuses.
IT is heavily undervalued and is the exact opposite of 10 years ago when companies were in a competition to boast productivity to get ahead. Now productivity is measured by the least amount of workers doing the most amount of work while infrastructure freezes and falls apart while the focus is on sales and cost cutting only.
The current age of CEOs are all former accountants and finance professionals who moved up by fudging the books to boast the shareprice and cutting costs.
Not innovating like the old days.
Whenever I hear aliagns with the goals of the company that is newspeak for This guy needs only to focus on cutting cost and stop telling me to upgrade from IE 6 and Windows 2000 that it is somehow a liability. After all IT is just word and excel. It is not like specialized apps exist right??
The CIO then gets shit canned by IT directors and support asking why can't they upgrade their 10 year old XP/IE 6 desktops with 512 megs of ram that takes 10 minutes to boot up and is loaded with malware when they net in $2 billion a year? The CEO doesn't see the lost productivity in that and just focuses on GAAP rules as the holy grail of what is an investment and what is a cost with no shades of gray. So the CIO gets shit canned from the top to the bottom. Sounds like a crappy job if you ask me.
To the typical CEO of today, the Sales VPs make money while IT costs money.
CEO: All the CIOs keep saying we should waste money upgrading from IE 6 and our crappy Windows 2000 servers. All IT does is cost money money and I can't raise the share price by staying ahead of the competition when I can just let my infrastructure fall apart and lead by saving money and not innovating. Waaa CIOS suck
CEO: What?! What do you mean my IPAD can't display that IE 6 app properly? I pay for the state of the art outsourced development team. bla bla
Typical BS from CEOs who got promoted up for being good cost accountants with only an eye for increasing efficiency and cutting cost while not saying the forest from the trees.
20 years ago CEOs were former engineers and product developers. They understood investments and did not focus on just costs. WHenever I hear failing to be alianged with the needs of the business. I just picture someone being cheap and thinking all IT is good for is help desk and word and excel. Not anything else like database, ERP, or anything else that adds value. Its just a cost and nothing else.
I have made some money this past year contracting company upgrades from XP to Win 7. Yes companies are upgrading and seeing money by investing to stay ahead. Not saving the most to stay behind and sit on cas like yours.
Its not expensive if you are large relatively speaking in terms of revenue. It cost only a few million for 1000 systems. Unseen costs like downtime and 10 minute startup times for 10 year old systems went away. Users were thrilled though some didnt like IE 9 and aero so much.
The plc machines with IE 6 and 98 were dmzed into its own subnet. Easy fix.
Billions my ass. Your company lacks leadership and is run by bean counters who are pennywise but dollar dumb. Those numbers sound made up by someone who doest see constant malware slow performance and other issues of a crumbling infrastructure. By 2014 vs, office, win server 2012, sql server and html 5 websites will not run in your enterprise.
Them, my carrier, or myself? It seems the answer is them and the carrier. That is bullshit and a wall garden is requested. Its just htere. Its like saying IE 6 was chosen by its users for 10 years because it was a supperior product.
Was it? Or was it just there and for people just getting on the net for the first time in 2000 - 2003 (not us nerds) they click on the blue E. Apple has it to make sure they control competitor software and lock out free software so they can nickle and dime users. Sure there might be some benefits too for security but I do not like the concept.
HTML 5 is ok, but many hacks are needed for Javascript compared to other browsers and its getting quirky. Not to mention pepper, SPDY, and its own Dart screams that it wants to rewrite standards for their own. In Chromes credit it is not crappy as IE 6 was but starting with IE 4 and then IE 5 MS included innovations with things like AJAX but started to get buggy. Chrome seems to be Google's version of it.
If Google had the market pull like MS did in 2001 by including it with every PC you bet it would quickly turn into a seperate development and be just as bad as IE 6. Google is no different. Netscape was turning crappy too and would be just as bad and is worse to develop CSS for than IE 6 believe it or not if you talk to old timers.
MS today is at least trying to do good as they are scared shitless they are no longer in charge of the world wide web and software development and is making IE 10 a great browser surprisngly. Just comes to show no one company should have that much power. Facebook has too much in the social space and a competitor would clean them up.
You Willy_me have been tricked into using inferior browsers my friend.... on a more serious note I was a mac and powerpc fan in the 90s before I discovered NT. Apple was expensive but I did not have bullshit like 640k limit that had many hacks like extended vs expanded ram, autoexec.bat hacks because a mouse drive used the same expanded ram for a game... even though 6 megs of extended were unused, playing with Dos 6 memmaker, and the horrible graphics performance of Windows 3.11 and the complaints over crappy PCs were endless.
The 1984 mac was 10 years ahead of Windows and just worked. I told a friend in school I would have wished Steve Jobs became the next Bill Gates.
My God do I regret saying that as of last year. Bill Gates is a cute kitten in comparison to what he is doing to Andriod users. Bill gates used deceptive business practices and had lots of crappy code for programmers to include to encourage win32 only development, but at least he didn't sue every computer maker for having round corners.
If Steve Jobs won my guess is he would sue every maker who used a mouse, graphical interface, and maybe X itself. Linux would be command line only to this day as Apple would send out ninja lawyers to have anything resemble a font, icon, or widget. Sure he didn't invent the gui but he is known to sure as hell go nuclear and patent implementations instead of copyright.
The World Wide Web would be an Apple only experience if Jobs had his way and his dream of being the next IBM materialized. We have seen this with the IPad and his war agaisn't Android and Samsung.
MS right now is fading. It is only strong in the corporate market because that market is 7 years behind the consumer market in this economy. With Metro/Win 8 failing and IOS and Android taking over the drive will be for HTML 5 apps on any device. MS wont be part of that. We will see what will happen in 5 years from now. My guess would be corporations will be using tablets with keyboards running Citrix virtualized sessions of IE 6/XP (still) and salesforce.com and other cloud based apps in HTML 5. Windows 7 will still be around but it will be fading in 5 years year from now as it ages and no one will be using PCs anymore.
If your a home user Chrome will take care of a lot of that.
Unfortunately, Java is needed at work and some people who run Eclipse as my example also enabled Java in FF and IE without knowing it. I always remember to backtrack to disable it. Java applets are dead yes, but java client software is not. Both Netbeans and Eclipse are good products for those who want a free ide that is not crippled unlike VS express editions that are multiplatform. They are java based as much as I hate Oracle and unfortunately. Worse if you use Andriod or Google apis you will be stuck with Java 6 as they are not Java 7 compatible that is more secure. Oracle needs to give up JavaFX and install java just as a JRE without browser support unless the user wants it.
My other gripe was about corporate users whose IT departments just install java without a GPO to restrict for whitelists. They use Java for old software because businesses still use IE 6 and need flash/java so they do not look like crap. Java should be intranet or whitelist only and I have never seen a single business EVER set it up that way.
Most IT administrators are lazy or do not know that its insecure to enable it sitewide on all sites. FLash too is bad at work and I wish you could setup IE to use flash for only youtube training videos like you can with Java applets? Flash is problematic as well. IT is too busy to keep track and update all of these plugins so they are almost always waaay out of date.
For Mac users its time to get a good anti virus product. Avast is going beta for it and hopefully will have a free version. Adobe products are insecure but at least if you go to www.filehippo.com you can get Foxit if you must view pdfs. I am a fan of it and it eliminates another vector. Thankfully mac users have their own pdf viewer.
This can be installed with just a user account too. Its a memory corruption bug so it simply injects itself to processes already running as admin through local priveldges. However the last malware would still run under a user account but the malware could be easily deleted by deleting the account. Still with more code it can infect key system files.
User privledges only add another step and are not foolproof.
Any Computer Science student typically learns Java. Eclipse is huge and so are Aptana, bit torrent clients (forgot the popular one written in Java), and corporations use banking, Kronos, and ADP sites that use java applets to make up for the fact they use IE 6 still. Java is another crappy workaround just like Flash to give a false sense of modern browsing with graphical effects.
However even slashdot nerds never once think about disabling java in the browsers. I see this at work too when they complain their users are keeping them busy cleaning infections on a daily basis. Disable java in all web browsers except through a whitelist via a GPO duh!
I agree the Java applet html tag was depreciated in 1999. It died on the web browser front many many years ago. IT and all of us need a refresher that you can still use java and just not use it in the browser. Chrome doesn't even support it.
A good anti virus software package will look for apps with strange behaviors and sandbox or block them.
For shit and kicks I weird download happened automatically from the PirateBay yesterday. I ran it through a VirtualBox and even though Avast! did not pick up the malware signature it did flag it and immediately sandboxed it as it said its behavior was typical of tojans and malware. I was impressed.
I know some slashdoters with very outdated 1990s knowledge think you are fine without any anti virus package as long as you do not click attachments are in a rude awakening. Even slashdot hosted malware in an ad about 2 weekends ago!
Anyway Norton is available for macs and Avast has a beta for IOS and MacOSX. I would recommend any mac user to use either one. You need more than a scanner to remain secure today and no platform that can execute data and use ram can ever be secure.
I have said this before here and will say this again.
For the Tech Support pros reading this 1. Use FoxitPDF or Summutra PDF. They will at least prompt you before blindly opening a PDF from a website and executing it in no sandbox with full javascript unlike Adobe Reader. 2. If you must support Java for corporate users create a GPO that enforces Java in Intranet only! No internet zone java if you must use crappy Kronos or ADP apps. If the users need Java in IE for an external site add it to a special custom security zone. 3. Use Chrome. It has its own PDF reader, does not support Java, and updates flash automatically without user interaction 4. Use Flashblock and keep it for sites like Pandora or youtube if you support home users or need training sessions in youtube for work. 5. Use antivirus software. THey are getting much better and no longer slow your whole computer down so much. Even the latest Norton is as light as MSE which is shocking! If you are one of the smirk users who are proud that you are virus free I have to say your an idiot and infected. How? Last week malware was hosted right here on slasdhot in an ad! If you came to slashdot last weekend or before you are infected. Avast! and MSE are both free and pretty decent and only add a few seconds more of boot time.
Java is not going away and neither is flash nor pdfs. Follow the above steps and you take care of 85% of all security issues unless you run unpatched Windows. I use Java for Eclipse and have Java disabled in all my browsers. Disable it in IE even if you do not use it. Some exploits may call to IE helper ojbects to execute so its a good idea anyway.
If you do IT and do not follow all of these procedures you are lazy and so many are as many get constant support calls for fake virus scans and slow computers through constant infection from running unpatched old versions of flash, java, and Windows. If you must run insecure old java then do it right and disable it from all sites except Kronos and ADP. That is it! Your infects will drop to near zero
If it looks similiar now equals copyright violation then SCO will go batshit on IBM and everyone who uses Linux. Could this be a real implication? Scary thought
If you take out if else fi and other structures in sh and bash in Linux then it isn't unix anymore. Sed, grep, and other long time Unix tools will be underfire for looking the same as I understand Oracle's definition of copyright.
MS and Oracle would surely join. Larry Elison would kill Andriod and force us to buy Windows or throw out that $1200 linux box for a $35,000 Oracle Solaris one with a $20,000 Oracle Database license we would not use anyway. MS and maybe Apple would surely fund such a move.
Lets hope I am wrong as this sounds very dangerous as Linux shares apis just like the java platform with unix ones in Solaris and Sco Unixware.
Find a laptop that doens't have that resolution? All the manufacturers care about is cost only. Since everyone only includes that resolution the price for a better one goes up astronomically high so that is the new standard.
1. Another reason to let XP die. People say its fine but its holding all of us back just like IE 6 and 7 are holding the best web experience to our phones only.
2. I will say my theory on why laptops only carry crappy 1366 x 768 is because cost accountants and not engineers make the decisions. Worse, because of economies of scale if you wanted to make a laptop screen with a better resolution it would significantly increase the cost forcing you to only include 1366 x 768 and making the problem worse. No one makes anything but 1366 for laptops so your customers would have to pay $$$$ and you would lose money.
I hate Apple these days but they are the only ones who make screens that do not get dark when sunlights hits them and are not cheap pieces of plastic crap. They have the power with economics of scale but even for them it raises the cost of the units. The race to the bottom is getting very old.
Retina may help but the demand for XP is quite huge from corporate on new equipment sadly and no cost accountant can justify spending more than.02% on any product.
3. Consumers are stupid. The Joe Six packs who bought P IV over the AthlonXPs because the Pentium IV was 3.2 ghz while the AthlonXP is only 1.8 ghz! Wow it must suck. 1366 is a bigger number than 1200 therefore to Joe 1366 must somehow be better probably witthout looking at the second number.
I have one but I use my headset with the USB hub keyboard on it and not the mouse though. People do not like the wires all over if the mouse is plugged so close to the keyboard and the hub does not have enough watts to support flash drives or wireless mice.
You think they or myself would care for the $199 for XP Pro in that situation?
ReactOS is not supported anyway. There is no $100 an hour support line and people who the manufactor can call to come help me out with ReactOS. Don't touch it and pray it doesn't break is the best option.
I doubt some hobbyist will care about the drivers for my wierd PLC set of equipment.
Of course my case was extreme but many server apps rely on IE 6 for the client and these are expensive as well. These ASP and IE 6 browsers can't run on ReactOS. Large enterprises can not leave. There is no strategy regardless of cost if you are huge that wont throw you out of business if your workers can't get anything done for just a single day.
How about displaying a warning for 2 months after support ends that world wide web access will be disabled.
Afterwards port 80 is closed.
This will anger many users with torches but it is a threat to the internet itself and hurts innovation to keep supporting old technology and standards while botnets can cause servre financial damage. Its not like before with Windows 98.
Its time to move on and these corporations can manually renable port 80 or keep them running equipment. But home users should not be on a public infrastructure. We have safety rules for cars do we not?
If i had my life savings in a business with equipment costing up to $300,000 all backed by 20 year loans from the bank I would not run a freeware non supported operating system. I would run whatever the manufactur put on the controller computer and fire anyone who coughs near it and lock the bitch down tighter than a virgins ass.
ReactOS is simply not an option. Of course I wont throw out the $300,000 piece of equipment until my 20 year loan is done.... and maybe keep it for 20 more years running XP?? I surely hope I could find hardware that can run that. I think XP embedded would be better as embedded hardware is supported for a very long time. Hell Intel just stopped making the 386 a year or two ago for embedded users.
If your shop had a piece of accounting software (assuming you were a CPA and not a computer shop) I am sure you would keep IE 6 and XP around too to run it and just use another browser to browse the web. It is cost efficient.
As much MS hatred there is here people like a supported OS that just works the drivers will work and even with ReactOS you can't be too sure GNU zealots wont force an abi to make sure all drivers are opensource like they did that killed Linux on the desktop.
Personally syscraft I am with you %100. I want XP, Ie 6/7, and a bunch of crappy windows 3.0 software to die a horrible death!
But how does that help a companys main goal of raising its shareprice? You are asking beancounters and CEOs to spend millions for something they already have?
IT Guy: Hey boss! You know that great intranet app that works fine that we blew too much money on when our old AS/400 worked fine? Boss: Yeah IT Guy: I think we should replace it and spend more money on a solution that may just work as well as what we have now. Boss: What? IT Guy" You see MS will cancel security updates and IE 6 SUCKS Boss: Wait a minute? IE 6 is so bad that employees now have to get work done and can't use facebook anymore?:-) IT Guy: Yeah. We need Windows 7 because its more secure and I am sure our +10,000 users who run 30 different apps that all communicate with each other, in 4 continents could easily install it and wouldn't mind the change. After all we can save $250,000 now by not having to pay MS for advanced support, by just spending $6,000,000 instead for something that may work as well and is oh so shiny. Boss:... Syscraft, don't you have something else better to do like help Susy wonder why internets are slow after trying out Bonzi Buddy?
1,2,3 are not practical. These enterprises will simply continue to use XP until 2038 with advanced contracts from MS. Security is not important to the bottom line in these corporations as that shareprice needs to keep growing so the CEO can keep his job and we all can work to fullfil his dreams.
Clouds and things like Salesforce.com are growing because companies are tired of this and just want to use any platform to log in to get their work done. Paying more money can not guarantee it will work through a browser. They were told their IE 6 apps would work forever regardless of platform last decade and were burned. Its fosilize time.
Go read the other comments here. A few say the same thing.
Its hard to imagine because we live in 2012 today. People forget that Netscape truly sucked and IE 6 was cutting edge. The standards and the rush to include the most before they were standardized created a buggy environment. CSS 2.1 really did not exist. CSS-P for layouts made it to CSS 2.1 but IE 6 did not support most of it or did it differently because sites looked like craigslist. Yahoo too had maybe 2 pics and lots of ugly blue underlined links if you google image search for what Yahoo used to look like 12 years ago.
IE 6 just can't handle the demands today without serious hacks as the old standards were very cutting edge and MS guestimated how they would be finalized on. To me its like saying Windows 7 sucks because I remember all the memory leaks in Windows 3.1 using MFCs and ignoring.NET.
ActiveX? Yeah that was a terrible move and I disabled activeX controls when I ran IE 6 9 years ago except for shockwave. I am not defending IE as a good browser again so no need to get personal.
Just that MS did what the industry was failing to do 12 years ago. Today IE 9 is out and its silly to keep using IE 6 while the bean counters refuse to upgrade. Browsers matured much like other technologies and are incredibly better which is forcing MS to quickly update IE now to catch up. Chrome scares me as it is making the same mistakes as IE. But Chrome is cool now just like IE was so it is on topic to bash the hypocracy.
PHBs now have finance and accounting backgrounds and refuse to upgrade and look at everything outside of sales as a cost and burden to contend with and not an asset.
IE 6 was supposed to be the way out to being tied into a platform. Instead it is the tying factor and many corporations already spent again for a solution that already worked in 1999 when their apps ran on mainframes that now run IE 6/ASP. Wait didn't we just spend $$$$ just 8 years? What! You want me to pay again for a third time! How do I know we wont have to repay for the same solution in 2020 when IE 8 is phased out? ETC.
That was not as big as a problem in 1999 when people still ran NT 4 and Windows 98. I would like to say an intranet site today will always be backwards compatible with future platforms and browsers but IE 6 has scared the shit out of many CIOs who wont believe anyone who says otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
The CEO does have the power to fire or just eliminate the position entirely too. The CIO is not on the board technically and is an independent position.
Infact, there is a huge push to get rid of this position as sales is much more important than that lowly cost center known as IT getting in the way of the CEO bonuses.
IT is heavily undervalued and is the exact opposite of 10 years ago when companies were in a competition to boast productivity to get ahead. Now productivity is measured by the least amount of workers doing the most amount of work while infrastructure freezes and falls apart while the focus is on sales and cost cutting only.
Mod up!
The current age of CEOs are all former accountants and finance professionals who moved up by fudging the books to boast the shareprice and cutting costs.
Not innovating like the old days.
Whenever I hear aliagns with the goals of the company that is newspeak for This guy needs only to focus on cutting cost and stop telling me to upgrade from IE 6 and Windows 2000 that it is somehow a liability. After all IT is just word and excel. It is not like specialized apps exist right??
The CIO then gets shit canned by IT directors and support asking why can't they upgrade their 10 year old XP/IE 6 desktops with 512 megs of ram that takes 10 minutes to boot up and is loaded with malware when they net in $2 billion a year? The CEO doesn't see the lost productivity in that and just focuses on GAAP rules as the holy grail of what is an investment and what is a cost with no shades of gray. So the CIO gets shit canned from the top to the bottom. Sounds like a crappy job if you ask me.
To the typical CEO of today, the Sales VPs make money while IT costs money.
CEO: All the CIOs keep saying we should waste money upgrading from IE 6 and our crappy Windows 2000 servers. All IT does is cost money money and I can't raise the share price by staying ahead of the competition when I can just let my infrastructure fall apart and lead by saving money and not innovating. Waaa CIOS suck
CEO: What?! What do you mean my IPAD can't display that IE 6 app properly? I pay for the state of the art outsourced development team. bla bla
Typical BS from CEOs who got promoted up for being good cost accountants with only an eye for increasing efficiency and cutting cost while not saying the forest from the trees.
20 years ago CEOs were former engineers and product developers. They understood investments and did not focus on just costs. WHenever I hear failing to be alianged with the needs of the business. I just picture someone being cheap and thinking all IT is good for is help desk and word and excel. Not anything else like database, ERP, or anything else that adds value. Its just a cost and nothing else.
I have made some money this past year contracting company upgrades from XP to Win 7. Yes companies are upgrading and seeing money by investing to stay ahead. Not saving the most to stay behind and sit on cas like yours.
Its not expensive if you are large relatively speaking in terms of revenue. It cost only a few million for 1000 systems. Unseen costs like downtime and 10 minute startup times for 10 year old systems went away. Users were thrilled though some didnt like IE 9 and aero so much.
The plc machines with IE 6 and 98 were dmzed into its own subnet. Easy fix.
Billions my ass. Your company lacks leadership and is run by bean counters who are pennywise but dollar dumb. Those numbers sound made up by someone who doest see constant malware slow performance and other issues of a crumbling infrastructure. By 2014 vs, office, win server 2012, sql server and html 5 websites will not run in your enterprise.
Who owns my phone?
Them, my carrier, or myself? It seems the answer is them and the carrier. That is bullshit and a wall garden is requested. Its just htere. Its like saying IE 6 was chosen by its users for 10 years because it was a supperior product.
Was it? Or was it just there and for people just getting on the net for the first time in 2000 - 2003 (not us nerds) they click on the blue E. Apple has it to make sure they control competitor software and lock out free software so they can nickle and dime users. Sure there might be some benefits too for security but I do not like the concept.
Google is turning into the new IE of this decade.
HTML 5 is ok, but many hacks are needed for Javascript compared to other browsers and its getting quirky. Not to mention pepper, SPDY, and its own Dart screams that it wants to rewrite standards for their own. In Chromes credit it is not crappy as IE 6 was but starting with IE 4 and then IE 5 MS included innovations with things like AJAX but started to get buggy. Chrome seems to be Google's version of it.
If Google had the market pull like MS did in 2001 by including it with every PC you bet it would quickly turn into a seperate development and be just as bad as IE 6. Google is no different. Netscape was turning crappy too and would be just as bad and is worse to develop CSS for than IE 6 believe it or not if you talk to old timers.
MS today is at least trying to do good as they are scared shitless they are no longer in charge of the world wide web and software development and is making IE 10 a great browser surprisngly. Just comes to show no one company should have that much power. Facebook has too much in the social space and a competitor would clean them up.
You Willy_me have been tricked into using inferior browsers my friend. ... on a more serious note I was a mac and powerpc fan in the 90s before I discovered NT. Apple was expensive but I did not have bullshit like 640k limit that had many hacks like extended vs expanded ram, autoexec.bat hacks because a mouse drive used the same expanded ram for a game ... even though 6 megs of extended were unused, playing with Dos 6 memmaker, and the horrible graphics performance of Windows 3.11 and the complaints over crappy PCs were endless.
The 1984 mac was 10 years ahead of Windows and just worked. I told a friend in school I would have wished Steve Jobs became the next Bill Gates.
My God do I regret saying that as of last year. Bill Gates is a cute kitten in comparison to what he is doing to Andriod users. Bill gates used deceptive business practices and had lots of crappy code for programmers to include to encourage win32 only development, but at least he didn't sue every computer maker for having round corners.
If Steve Jobs won my guess is he would sue every maker who used a mouse, graphical interface, and maybe X itself. Linux would be command line only to this day as Apple would send out ninja lawyers to have anything resemble a font, icon, or widget. Sure he didn't invent the gui but he is known to sure as hell go nuclear and patent implementations instead of copyright.
The World Wide Web would be an Apple only experience if Jobs had his way and his dream of being the next IBM materialized. We have seen this with the IPad and his war agaisn't Android and Samsung.
MS right now is fading. It is only strong in the corporate market because that market is 7 years behind the consumer market in this economy. With Metro/Win 8 failing and IOS and Android taking over the drive will be for HTML 5 apps on any device. MS wont be part of that. We will see what will happen in 5 years from now. My guess would be corporations will be using tablets with keyboards running Citrix virtualized sessions of IE 6/XP (still) and salesforce.com and other cloud based apps in HTML 5. Windows 7 will still be around but it will be fading in 5 years year from now as it ages and no one will be using PCs anymore.
And wrong you are realityimpaired!
Time to get with the program.
Go run malwarebytes? It was a fake virgin mobile ad
If your a home user Chrome will take care of a lot of that.
Unfortunately, Java is needed at work and some people who run Eclipse as my example also enabled Java in FF and IE without knowing it. I always remember to backtrack to disable it. Java applets are dead yes, but java client software is not. Both Netbeans and Eclipse are good products for those who want a free ide that is not crippled unlike VS express editions that are multiplatform. They are java based as much as I hate Oracle and unfortunately. Worse if you use Andriod or Google apis you will be stuck with Java 6 as they are not Java 7 compatible that is more secure. Oracle needs to give up JavaFX and install java just as a JRE without browser support unless the user wants it.
My other gripe was about corporate users whose IT departments just install java without a GPO to restrict for whitelists. They use Java for old software because businesses still use IE 6 and need flash/java so they do not look like crap. Java should be intranet or whitelist only and I have never seen a single business EVER set it up that way.
Most IT administrators are lazy or do not know that its insecure to enable it sitewide on all sites. FLash too is bad at work and I wish you could setup IE to use flash for only youtube training videos like you can with Java applets? Flash is problematic as well. IT is too busy to keep track and update all of these plugins so they are almost always waaay out of date.
For Mac users its time to get a good anti virus product. Avast is going beta for it and hopefully will have a free version. Adobe products are insecure but at least if you go to www.filehippo.com you can get Foxit if you must view pdfs. I am a fan of it and it eliminates another vector. Thankfully mac users have their own pdf viewer.
This can be installed with just a user account too. Its a memory corruption bug so it simply injects itself to processes already running as admin through local priveldges. However the last malware would still run under a user account but the malware could be easily deleted by deleting the account. Still with more code it can infect key system files.
User privledges only add another step and are not foolproof.
People do need Java.
Any Computer Science student typically learns Java. Eclipse is huge and so are Aptana, bit torrent clients (forgot the popular one written in Java), and corporations use banking, Kronos, and ADP sites that use java applets to make up for the fact they use IE 6 still. Java is another crappy workaround just like Flash to give a false sense of modern browsing with graphical effects.
However even slashdot nerds never once think about disabling java in the browsers. I see this at work too when they complain their users are keeping them busy cleaning infections on a daily basis. Disable java in all web browsers except through a whitelist via a GPO duh!
I agree the Java applet html tag was depreciated in 1999. It died on the web browser front many many years ago. IT and all of us need a refresher that you can still use java and just not use it in the browser. Chrome doesn't even support it.
A good anti virus software package will look for apps with strange behaviors and sandbox or block them.
For shit and kicks I weird download happened automatically from the PirateBay yesterday. I ran it through a VirtualBox and even though Avast! did not pick up the malware signature it did flag it and immediately sandboxed it as it said its behavior was typical of tojans and malware. I was impressed.
I know some slashdoters with very outdated 1990s knowledge think you are fine without any anti virus package as long as you do not click attachments are in a rude awakening. Even slashdot hosted malware in an ad about 2 weekends ago!
Anyway Norton is available for macs and Avast has a beta for IOS and MacOSX. I would recommend any mac user to use either one. You need more than a scanner to remain secure today and no platform that can execute data and use ram can ever be secure.
I have said this before here and will say this again.
For the Tech Support pros reading this
1. Use FoxitPDF or Summutra PDF. They will at least prompt you before blindly opening a PDF from a website and executing it in no sandbox with full javascript unlike Adobe Reader.
2. If you must support Java for corporate users create a GPO that enforces Java in Intranet only! No internet zone java if you must use crappy Kronos or ADP apps. If the users need Java in IE for an external site add it to a special custom security zone.
3. Use Chrome. It has its own PDF reader, does not support Java, and updates flash automatically without user interaction
4. Use Flashblock and keep it for sites like Pandora or youtube if you support home users or need training sessions in youtube for work.
5. Use antivirus software. THey are getting much better and no longer slow your whole computer down so much. Even the latest Norton is as light as MSE which is shocking! If you are one of the smirk users who are proud that you are virus free I have to say your an idiot and infected. How? Last week malware was hosted right here on slasdhot in an ad! If you came to slashdot last weekend or before you are infected. Avast! and MSE are both free and pretty decent and only add a few seconds more of boot time.
Java is not going away and neither is flash nor pdfs. Follow the above steps and you take care of 85% of all security issues unless you run unpatched Windows. I use Java for Eclipse and have Java disabled in all my browsers. Disable it in IE even if you do not use it. Some exploits may call to IE helper ojbects to execute so its a good idea anyway.
If you do IT and do not follow all of these procedures you are lazy and so many are as many get constant support calls for fake virus scans and slow computers through constant infection from running unpatched old versions of flash, java, and Windows. If you must run insecure old java then do it right and disable it from all sites except Kronos and ADP. That is it! Your infects will drop to near zero
The poor students in Tennesse who had dreams of becoming biologists or much worse women in Afghanistan.
Just 50 years ago it was a very different place before the fundies from the middle east moved in and brainwashed and changed the culture.
Worse.
If it looks similiar now equals copyright violation then SCO will go batshit on IBM and everyone who uses Linux. Could this be a real implication? Scary thought
If you take out if else fi and other structures in sh and bash in Linux then it isn't unix anymore. Sed, grep, and other long time Unix tools will be underfire for looking the same as I understand Oracle's definition of copyright.
MS and Oracle would surely join. Larry Elison would kill Andriod and force us to buy Windows or throw out that $1200 linux box for a $35,000 Oracle Solaris one with a $20,000 Oracle Database license we would not use anyway. MS and maybe Apple would surely fund such a move.
Lets hope I am wrong as this sounds very dangerous as Linux shares apis just like the java platform with unix ones in Solaris and Sco Unixware.
Find a laptop that doens't have that resolution? All the manufacturers care about is cost only. Since everyone only includes that resolution the price for a better one goes up astronomically high so that is the new standard.
1. Another reason to let XP die. People say its fine but its holding all of us back just like IE 6 and 7 are holding the best web experience to our phones only.
2. I will say my theory on why laptops only carry crappy 1366 x 768 is because cost accountants and not engineers make the decisions. Worse, because of economies of scale if you wanted to make a laptop screen with a better resolution it would significantly increase the cost forcing you to only include 1366 x 768 and making the problem worse. No one makes anything but 1366 for laptops so your customers would have to pay $$$$ and you would lose money.
I hate Apple these days but they are the only ones who make screens that do not get dark when sunlights hits them and are not cheap pieces of plastic crap. They have the power with economics of scale but even for them it raises the cost of the units. The race to the bottom is getting very old.
Retina may help but the demand for XP is quite huge from corporate on new equipment sadly and no cost accountant can justify spending more than .02% on any product.
3. Consumers are stupid. The Joe Six packs who bought P IV over the AthlonXPs because the Pentium IV was 3.2 ghz while the AthlonXP is only 1.8 ghz! Wow it must suck. 1366 is a bigger number than 1200 therefore to Joe 1366 must somehow be better probably witthout looking at the second number.
Gamer keyboards do.
I have one but I use my headset with the USB hub keyboard on it and not the mouse though. People do not like the wires all over if the mouse is plugged so close to the keyboard and the hub does not have enough watts to support flash drives or wireless mice.
You think they or myself would care for the $199 for XP Pro in that situation?
ReactOS is not supported anyway. There is no $100 an hour support line and people who the manufactor can call to come help me out with ReactOS. Don't touch it and pray it doesn't break is the best option.
I doubt some hobbyist will care about the drivers for my wierd PLC set of equipment.
Of course my case was extreme but many server apps rely on IE 6 for the client and these are expensive as well. These ASP and IE 6 browsers can't run on ReactOS. Large enterprises can not leave. There is no strategy regardless of cost if you are huge that wont throw you out of business if your workers can't get anything done for just a single day.
How about displaying a warning for 2 months after support ends that world wide web access will be disabled.
Afterwards port 80 is closed.
This will anger many users with torches but it is a threat to the internet itself and hurts innovation to keep supporting old technology and standards while botnets can cause servre financial damage. Its not like before with Windows 98.
Its time to move on and these corporations can manually renable port 80 or keep them running equipment. But home users should not be on a public infrastructure. We have safety rules for cars do we not?
If i had my life savings in a business with equipment costing up to $300,000 all backed by 20 year loans from the bank I would not run a freeware non supported operating system. I would run whatever the manufactur put on the controller computer and fire anyone who coughs near it and lock the bitch down tighter than a virgins ass.
ReactOS is simply not an option. Of course I wont throw out the $300,000 piece of equipment until my 20 year loan is done. ... and maybe keep it for 20 more years running XP?? I surely hope I could find hardware that can run that. I think XP embedded would be better as embedded hardware is supported for a very long time. Hell Intel just stopped making the 386 a year or two ago for embedded users.
If your shop had a piece of accounting software (assuming you were a CPA and not a computer shop) I am sure you would keep IE 6 and XP around too to run it and just use another browser to browse the web. It is cost efficient.
As much MS hatred there is here people like a supported OS that just works the drivers will work and even with ReactOS you can't be too sure GNU zealots wont force an abi to make sure all drivers are opensource like they did that killed Linux on the desktop.
Personally syscraft I am with you %100. I want XP, Ie 6/7, and a bunch of crappy windows 3.0 software to die a horrible death!
But how does that help a companys main goal of raising its shareprice? You are asking beancounters and CEOs to spend millions for something they already have?
IT Guy: Hey boss! You know that great intranet app that works fine that we blew too much money on when our old AS/400 worked fine? :-) ... Syscraft, don't you have something else better to do like help Susy wonder why internets are slow after trying out Bonzi Buddy?
Boss: Yeah
IT Guy: I think we should replace it and spend more money on a solution that may just work as well as what we have now.
Boss: What?
IT Guy" You see MS will cancel security updates and IE 6 SUCKS
Boss: Wait a minute? IE 6 is so bad that employees now have to get work done and can't use facebook anymore?
IT Guy: Yeah. We need Windows 7 because its more secure and I am sure our +10,000 users who run 30 different apps that all communicate with each other, in 4 continents could easily install it and wouldn't mind the change. After all we can save $250,000 now by not having to pay MS for advanced support, by just spending $6,000,000 instead for something that may work as well and is oh so shiny.
Boss:
1,2,3 are not practical. These enterprises will simply continue to use XP until 2038 with advanced contracts from MS. Security is not important to the bottom line in these corporations as that shareprice needs to keep growing so the CEO can keep his job and we all can work to fullfil his dreams.
Clouds and things like Salesforce.com are growing because companies are tired of this and just want to use any platform to log in to get their work done. Paying more money can not guarantee it will work through a browser. They were told their IE 6 apps would work forever regardless of platform last decade and were burned. Its fosilize time.
Go read the other comments here. A few say the same thing.
Its hard to imagine because we live in 2012 today. People forget that Netscape truly sucked and IE 6 was cutting edge. The standards and the rush to include the most before they were standardized created a buggy environment. CSS 2.1 really did not exist. CSS-P for layouts made it to CSS 2.1 but IE 6 did not support most of it or did it differently because sites looked like craigslist. Yahoo too had maybe 2 pics and lots of ugly blue underlined links if you google image search for what Yahoo used to look like 12 years ago.
IE 6 just can't handle the demands today without serious hacks as the old standards were very cutting edge and MS guestimated how they would be finalized on. To me its like saying Windows 7 sucks because I remember all the memory leaks in Windows 3.1 using MFCs and ignoring .NET.
ActiveX? Yeah that was a terrible move and I disabled activeX controls when I ran IE 6 9 years ago except for shockwave. I am not defending IE as a good browser again so no need to get personal.
Just that MS did what the industry was failing to do 12 years ago. Today IE 9 is out and its silly to keep using IE 6 while the bean counters refuse to upgrade. Browsers matured much like other technologies and are incredibly better which is forcing MS to quickly update IE now to catch up. Chrome scares me as it is making the same mistakes as IE. But Chrome is cool now just like IE was so it is on topic to bash the hypocracy.
It is different.
PHBs now have finance and accounting backgrounds and refuse to upgrade and look at everything outside of sales as a cost and burden to contend with and not an asset.
IE 6 was supposed to be the way out to being tied into a platform. Instead it is the tying factor and many corporations already spent again for a solution that already worked in 1999 when their apps ran on mainframes that now run IE 6/ASP. Wait didn't we just spend $$$$ just 8 years? What! You want me to pay again for a third time! How do I know we wont have to repay for the same solution in 2020 when IE 8 is phased out? ETC.
That was not as big as a problem in 1999 when people still ran NT 4 and Windows 98. I would like to say an intranet site today will always be backwards compatible with future platforms and browsers but IE 6 has scared the shit out of many CIOs who wont believe anyone who says otherwise.