I agree with the comments about GPL, Stallman and many of the GPL supporters. They simply refuse to underatand different philosophies. I prefer the apache license and think it or the BSD license are the true "free" software licenses.
Expect such somments here on/. to get mod'ed down becuase of the stong presence of GPL supporters.
I am quite disappointed. While the install is much simpler, I found the actual useability to be pretty awful. I'm running it on a 3.0 GHz system with hyperthreading and 1 Gb of memory and SATA hard drives.
I found the new shell very akward and clinky. Navigation was HARD, which shouldn't be the case. I can't see the other computers in the workgroup I set the system to be part of, although I can enter a UNC name of a share and see it. The virtual folders were hard to figure out. Just can't see a non-technical user figuring this out. The new start menu was OK and perhaps cleaner than the old style.
IE7 is just too little. The tabs are pathetic. Given the many examples out there, it is amazing that MS did such a poor job.
I've used a lot of MS beta 1 stuff since the Windows 3.1 days and while this one appears a bit more stable than most, given the hype, I was underwhelmed.
I did the same. The first thing I tried to do was download a document that described IE7 and, surprise, the browser crashed. The tabs are ugly. they have that little blank holder button at the end which looks awful The address bar and tas are one element instead of each being a toobar. You can't put the tabs right above the window.
The anti-phishing stuff looks possibly promising, at the cost of having your browser report your browsing activity to MS. hanven't tried CSS stuff yet or printing (they can rink a page to fit??).
What I hate about GPL is that is I use any of the code I am now working for the original author forever, Whatever I build belongs to that person as long as I started with that code, without limit. This is worse than most commercial deals, which usually have some limits or price you can pay / negotiate.
You have, of course, the choice of not using GPL code. I think FSF is disingenuous about the GPL and things under it being free for this reason. The Apache license makes software truly free. I can use it and do whatever I want and owe no one anything. Apache is true freedom. GPL is a social vision and a very "communist", in the true philosophical sense, vision of the world.
Most computers users (not the/. geek community) just want to have music played on their PC. They want things to just work. They could care less about the negligable differences between Real and WMP. To these folks the PC is an appliance and they want all the tools they need included.
This was not about the consumer, who has not really suffered because of this, but becuase the Europeans want to show that they have some power too. The result was a completely stupid decision. We all knew it, but should not be surprised that a bunch of lifer bureaucrats didn't get it.
Opening APIs and amking sure that any Windows component cna be replaced by a third party component in a way that will allow all other Windows components to still work and all MS and third party apps to work is the solution.
The real issue to me isn't whether Real was harmed but is the consumer harmed. Typically this is determined by price. Like it or not, MS has not raised prices and has continued to add capabilities for no increase in price. That is good for the consumer.
And, if you don't like MS and what they do, buy a Mac or Linux. There are alternatives. There is choice. Oh, you say a mac is more expensive? Guess that means you are getting benefit from MS creating a standard. You say Linux is harder to use? Then MS might be making things that meet the needs of their users better than the competition. You say that all the applications you want and need only run on Windows? That's the nature of capitalism. People build for the market where they can make the most money.
There is a Linux distribution called
DamnSmallLinux which is a Knoppix derivative, takes only 50Mb and can be booted from CD, installed on a USB key, your hard drive, etc. One of the cool things they do is include QEMU and a "bat" file so you can boot DamnSmall in QEMU and be running Linux as a process under Windows.
I have a Pentium M 1.7Ghz system and it runs pretty well.
What I worry about in the transition is lazy/bad programmers building yet bigger, bloated programs becuase they have all that memory space to work with. Give them a few years and just to install an IM client will require 4 Gb of memory and a 200Gb hard drive.
This is just the latest installment of the continuing/. saga, "Stupid Patent Tricks". The basic plot is some nefarious large corporation patents somehting like "breathing air". They dupe one of the people that the US Patent Office has hired for their lack of any knowledge about the world in which they live. Once granted, someone notices, posts to/., where the community of the righteous explodes in (what else) righteous indignation!
Linux (Knoppix and Damn Small) have been working fine for me using Virtual PC 2004. If they build a real VM environment, no reason why Linux shouldn't run. So support mist merely be saying that they will handle a phone call and, of course, get $$ for saying this.
OK, I've started several companies and am now working for a VC firm. Here are a few of my thoughts, having sat at both sides of the table.
A) Build a company, not a product: There are a number of great product ideas, but they are not things that make a company. A company is something that will have value for years to come. A roduct can sell now and typically has a more limited lifetime. You have to focus on a problem/market that your idea/technology can address over a long term with multile roducts or extensions. If you can show you are only sarting on the solution to a big problem and have lots of room to complete the solution/grow, you'll be building long term value. that is good for you, your employees and important to raising venture capital.
B) Of course VCs are looking for an exit strategy. VCs raise their money from wealthy individuals, pension funds, etc and they are called LPs. The LPs invest in the high risk venture to get a higher than normal return. The risks of start up investing are enormous. A fund lasts for 5 years or so and then the VC has to go out and raise more money. the thing potential LPs look at is the performance of the last fund!
The VC is always looking at ways to get their money out and make money at the same time. They want management who are motivated by making money. Many will talk of building great companies, etc, but this isn't exactly the whole truth. In order for a VC to get their money out they have to invest early, wait 3-5 years for an IPO and then 2-3 more years to sell their stake. Unless they invest in a company that has long term survival prospect they can not make the kind of return they need to satisfy the LPs. of 10 investments only 1 (at most) typically can make it to IPO. maybe 30-50% fail and the rest get a 2x -3x kind of returen over 3-5 years. It is the one IPO in 10 that makes the fund.
C) Sales is the key: There are a lot of reat ideas, but too many founders are very technical and have no clue about how to sell things. They think if they just hire the sales guy and send him out it will all be OK. Sales is very hard, especially for a new company with a new product. it takes a lot of effort toget the first customer. And then that same effort to get the second. it takes very talented people to make thses sales and they need a huge amount of patience becuase most potential customers say no and those interested take a long time to sell.
Most tech founders don't give the credit to or the support needed to the sales folks. They are not treated with enough respect. They are not listened to. What they say reflects what the customer is saying. if you think what the sales guy is saying is stupid, it is your own fault for not providing that person with the training and understanding to help the customer understand the value proposition.
D) Team is Key: A great team is key. There are huge challenges and risks and a lot of unknow territory for a start up to cross. A VC or a customer wans to see that the team has what it takes to see things through, can work well together in a crisis, is driven towards group/company success and not just for their own ego, etc.
E) Pick a VC More Carefully than a Spouse: Divorce rates are 50%. A divorce with a VC means you get tossed from the company you created or your business gets closed. People only look at the money or the size or prestige of a VC firm, and this is a mistake. Who is the partner that will sit on your board? Is that person someone you can trust and turn to for advice at a hard time/crucial moment. Does the VC firm have contacts/skills that can help you? The lesson of the dot-com bust is that VCs gave money to peole who had no business running a business and then just ignored them for the next new deal. Kind of like someone marrying you becuase you are cute and then after the marriage deserting you to spend time with the next cute person. You want a real partner. Interview the VC and due diligence on them in the same way they will be
It seems to me that all of the answers say "Writing great software has no value, but answer a question about it or writing a book is worth money". Doesn't this strike anyone else as strange? Why doesn't the prrogramming community put value on its labor, but then hapily spends $50 a book with O'Reilly. Why should someone answering a call be worth more money than the ori
Why should O'Reilly make money on the programmer's labor and not the programmer? A very strange ethos.
Why are we bashing Microsoft here when the fundemental issue is that Intel didn't design the architecture corrently. As has been said, we've known forever, that executable pages of memory should not be writable. It was well know before the i386 was designed. Intel deserves the lions share of the blame here.
Linux and UNIX are more secure becuase they use a file system with permissions and user accounts do not have permission to write into system directories. Most UNIX systems are administered and Linux systems are used by more techie folks. When it was just a FAT file system, there were no permissions so anyone could modify any critical file.
With NTFS, files in critical directories can be protected. The problem becomes getting people to take the step of not having user accounts have admin rights. People can already do this in XP Home, but few do. The problem is that this would be viewed as inconvenient to most home users who don't udnerstand enough to know why they need this extra step to protect them. As long as home users grant admin privileges to everyone on aa system and then blindly download and install software, this problem can not be solved.
Even then, Microsoft needs to extend the privilege model to only allow designated applications to insert code in the TCP stack, keyboard stack, etc. Their spyware stuff sort of detects many of these issues, but the OS needs to control them.
MS says they are serous about secrity and it is priority one. Allowing any kind of install of a system component without admin control is unacceptable if you want a secure system. To get security we are going to have to sacrificae some convenience and flexibility, but how do we implement this when so many users are so technically niave, unsophisticated, unwill to do the slighted extra work to keep their systems safe, etc.
As an industry we need to stop bashing MS and start educating users that security is their problem. leave your car unlocked in a high crime area with the keys in it and you should take the blame, not GM. The Internet is a high crime neighborhood and unless you take personal responsibility and avoid the dark alleys, giving your wallet to strangers and leaving your car and house unlocked, you are going to get robbed and assaulted.
Do folks remember Yourdon's book "Death of the American Programmer"? In the book, he predicted the move of software jobs to India way before the trned really exploded. I think the timing was delayed by the.com boom and Y2K. The book is a bit old, but it may still be worth a read, even though many other sources have covered the topic, in depth, since.
My 2 cents on the topic is that the trned will not end soon or at all, but that the value and savings have been blown out of proportion. Thre is work that makes great (economic) sense to offshore, but too many companies have tried to ush too much offshore. We will see some classes of work come back, but not see much press, because no one wants to admit failure. The people who self promoted how smart they were for doing this are not going to say "Ooops, I over did it" in ublic.
One thing that was astonishing to me was that the FCC approved WiFi but not cells and that the FCC and media don't understand that doing so enables phoning from an airplane. I'm sure all readers of/. know about VoIP and that many of us have PC based VoIP clients. If they give me WiFI I can make calls from a plane. And, while a WiFi session on a NYC-Tokyo flight is said to be likely to cost $30, I'd get unlimited calling minutes as part of that $30. Want to bet that when they enable cell phones we pay per minute charges and at premium rates???
I suspect that the satellite latencies will make the VoIP experience less than perfect, but I am interested in giving it a try!
I went to the A9 site and was shocked to see that it had my name. Obviously they have access to the Amazon cookie and are using the data. This means that they may not only be remembering your web searches for *your* convenience, but for Amazon's commercial uses. And what might they be??? Once Amazon has this data who else can get it? Can the government get it? Without my permission? You bet!
I don't want anyone watching over my shoulder when I browse the net. I certainly don't want Amazon doing it, becuase their use of my informaiton in A9 was not authorized by me. I read the privacy policy again, and it is not clear that this use is authorized, but then again, the privacy policy is *so* vague, it is hard to tell what use is prohibited.
Don't use A9 unless you want everal site on the Internet that has a relation with Amazon to know everything you are doing on the Web.
IT is an expense line in corporations. Executives don't understand IT, it is always delivering less thyan promised and taking longer than expected to do less than expected.
Off shoring doesn't make IT any more successful, it just makes it cheaper. Evne if it s worse, it is still cheaper, and execs can not judge if US workers could have done better. All they can judge is that it was still late and still didn't do what was promised, but was *cheaper*.
Any savings will go towards investment in parts of a business that CEOs do udnerstand and that they believe will generate incremental revenue. The mandate for IT will be hold the line or reduce bedgets. "Hey, you saved money last year in IT, so save more this year. We need to invest more in new widget factory automaiton so we can cut our remaining manufacturing jobs too!"
I really felt this article understaned how bad the situation has become. I'll describe my Dell "experience" below, but while this was for my home system, I also buy $500K+ per year for my company and am on a team that set policy for a $5 billion dollar company's purchases. Dell shouldn't assume that it is OK to send home users to India and keep corporate users in the US. many of us unimportant home users get to decide how oompany's spend their $$$.
I called Dell technical support. I initially had a terrible connection. One assumes the IP telephone technology wasn't working well at that point. Even when I tried back and went through all the menus again, the volume was low. I had to ask 3 times to get the person to speak up.
The next problem was that the people you get know very little. I'm a very expert computer user. The operator refused to listen to me when I described the problem and insisted on going through a checlkist of stuff about installing anti-virus, patches, etc. It was very aggrevating and they are not traied to recognize people who have expertise and not trivial problems.
The person's attitude was one of uncertainty and confusion at each step. They literally disappeared for 3-5 minutes at each step. I assume this was to read a document and then ask someone else what it meant. Very annoying. When I tried to discuss things they clearly could only reread the script. When I asked if there was someone more expert they said we had to go through the steps first.
I'm sure they were following procedure, but my problem was a hardware problem. I knew it and that was the issue that they agreed to after 30 minutes of wasting my time. I tried early in the call to just get to the hardware discussion, but had to give up and go through stupid questions and a variety of time wasting steps.
Finally, there was the launguage / accent problem. The person's English was passable and the accent was heavy and made udnerstanding difficult at times.
overall, I hated the experience. I will look for alternatives to Dell with US based support for my next purchases, including my $500K+ of corporate purchases.
The problem with software patents is *NOT* the concept of patents, but the inability of governments to effectively administer the systems. here are some of the issues:
Hard to do prior art: I see patents all the time for which I know prior art existed in the 70's. The problem is that it is difficult or impossible to find the prior art references. Unlike physical objects which last for decades, the systems with these technologies no longer exist. Further, there were many fewwer publications in the 70's and many of the magazines that had such content (remember Datamation) are not easily available. Worse, people didn't publish as much or thought publishing would reveal proprietary details of technology.
I also seem to remember that in the 1970's software was not patentable, or thought to be patentable.
What can be patented: We've had the US Patent office grant a huge number of stupid "business process patents" and patents on all kinds of silly and obvious stuff. it is clear that they don't have any sense and even less software knowledge or expertise.
When something stupid happens, it is too hard to fix: When a stupid patent is granted, we have to wait for the courts to sort it out. This is awful, becuase it gives a holder with large resources an unfair advantage over a competitor with small resources, even when the patent is widely known to be bogus. We need an alternative, low cost and fast challenge system that happens before a court case can be brought.
Early on, Microsoft understood that the platform battle is won by those that win the hearts and minds of developers. DOS was a *terrible* environment, but developers built some cool applicaitons and the platform became a huge success. You have to look at this announcement in conjunciton with the Unix Services for Windows announcement.
VB and the VB tools captured a good chunk of corporate developers. I hate VB, but you coul design and build simple forms based applications that talk to a database pretty quickly and easily. Visual Studio provide an excellent intregrated IDE (no flames from Borland lovers) for many C++ developers. it simplified a lot of routine stuff, made finding funcitons easy, integrated the debugger and more. Lots of folks.
IBM recognized that it needs developers for Java to succeed and the purchase of Rational was aimed at getting the corporate developer that is on VB and VC++.
With this compiler and the USFW annoucement, you can now take the *nix stuff and port it pretty easily and for free to Windows. No more need to assemble tools, install Cygwin or the like. There used to be a barrier to getting *nix stuff to Windows. it is now gone. Microsoft will now have a platform, that is free, to allow free software developers to make their stuff available on Windows as native applications. And you cna then add Windows extensions if you want.
The unreliguous among us will grab this and move *nix stuff we've been missing or haven't had access to.
This isn't an open / closed source issue. This is simply sheer negligence and stupidity on Cisso's part. It is hard to believe that ANYONE in this day and age would leave back doors in shipping code. What is worse is the statement that the back door can not be disabled. This borders on criminal stupidity. This is a complete lapse in management and development oversight.
Most F500 comapnies have language in all agreements that make the vendor attest that there are no back doors in any product. Cisco is going to have to fix this, and likely bear whatever cost is related, including replacing units. And their liability for any secruity breaches and losses that are a result will be large. Since someone has already posted a "how to" to exploit this, we can expect that people will.
Just amazing. My faith in Cisco is greatly rediced. They need to explain to the community how this happend, whether or not there are other products that have this issue and what they are doing to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Scott McNealy's company is in ig trouble, and this announcement was a diversion. Notice thaat at the same time he announced this deal, which received front page press, he was laying off 3300 people and announcing a 700-800 million dollar loss.
Sun was arrogant and just refused to see that the commodity hardware was going to catch them and destroy their server business. The 64 bit x86 chips spell the end of SPARC. McNealy never built a services business or a software business that wasn't tied to his platform. With Linux becoming the OS and x86 the hardware, what doe he have left?
McNealy needs to reposition to become a software and services company and he will probably need to ship Windows on his hardware and ship his software on Windows. He may hate the thought, but those are the facts. This announcement is nothing short of full surrender and an admission that Sun is no longer a driver in the computer business. They are surrendering and repositioning.
One of my first jobs involved staking a card desk that had the bianry version of a program, figuring out the assembly langauge version of the binary and then converting the assembly language into a COBOL program.
The original program was a COBOL program, but the source and assembly generated from the source had been lost. I did have the data input and print output but there were parts of the program that supported options that hadn't been used in over a year and the company needed to know what to input to get the options to work.
Needless to say, this was a while ago. If I tell you the date, you'll all say I'm too old to be reading/.
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I agree with the comments about GPL, Stallman and many of the GPL supporters. They simply refuse to underatand different philosophies. I prefer the apache license and think it or the BSD license are the true "free" software licenses.
/. to get mod'ed down becuase of the stong presence of GPL supporters.
Expect such somments here on
I am quite disappointed. While the install is much simpler, I found the actual useability to be pretty awful. I'm running it on a 3.0 GHz system with hyperthreading and 1 Gb of memory and SATA hard drives.
I found the new shell very akward and clinky. Navigation was HARD, which shouldn't be the case. I can't see the other computers in the workgroup I set the system to be part of, although I can enter a UNC name of a share and see it. The virtual folders were hard to figure out. Just can't see a non-technical user figuring this out. The new start menu was OK and perhaps cleaner than the old style.
IE7 is just too little. The tabs are pathetic. Given the many examples out there, it is amazing that MS did such a poor job.
I've used a lot of MS beta 1 stuff since the Windows 3.1 days and while this one appears a bit more stable than most, given the hype, I was underwhelmed.
I did the same. The first thing I tried to do was download a document that described IE7 and, surprise, the browser crashed. The tabs are ugly. they have that little blank holder button at the end which looks awful The address bar and tas are one element instead of each being a toobar. You can't put the tabs right above the window.
The anti-phishing stuff looks possibly promising, at the cost of having your browser report your browsing activity to MS. hanven't tried CSS stuff yet or printing (they can rink a page to fit??).
Just started an install and there is no option to upgrade.
What I hate about GPL is that is I use any of the code I am now working for the original author forever, Whatever I build belongs to that person as long as I started with that code, without limit. This is worse than most commercial deals, which usually have some limits or price you can pay / negotiate.
You have, of course, the choice of not using GPL code. I think FSF is disingenuous about the GPL and things under it being free for this reason. The Apache license makes software truly free. I can use it and do whatever I want and owe no one anything. Apache is true freedom. GPL is a social vision and a very "communist", in the true philosophical sense, vision of the world.
Most computers users (not the /. geek community) just want to have music played on their PC. They want things to just work. They could care less about the negligable differences between Real and WMP. To these folks the PC is an appliance and they want all the tools they need included.
This was not about the consumer, who has not really suffered because of this, but becuase the Europeans want to show that they have some power too. The result was a completely stupid decision. We all knew it, but should not be surprised that a bunch of lifer bureaucrats didn't get it.
Opening APIs and amking sure that any Windows component cna be replaced by a third party component in a way that will allow all other Windows components to still work and all MS and third party apps to work is the solution.
The real issue to me isn't whether Real was harmed but is the consumer harmed. Typically this is determined by price. Like it or not, MS has not raised prices and has continued to add capabilities for no increase in price. That is good for the consumer.
And, if you don't like MS and what they do, buy a Mac or Linux. There are alternatives. There is choice. Oh, you say a mac is more expensive? Guess that means you are getting benefit from MS creating a standard. You say Linux is harder to use? Then MS might be making things that meet the needs of their users better than the competition. You say that all the applications you want and need only run on Windows? That's the nature of capitalism. People build for the market where they can make the most money.
There is a Linux distribution called DamnSmallLinux which is a Knoppix derivative, takes only 50Mb and can be booted from CD, installed on a USB key, your hard drive, etc. One of the cool things they do is include QEMU and a "bat" file so you can boot DamnSmall in QEMU and be running Linux as a process under Windows. I have a Pentium M 1.7Ghz system and it runs pretty well.
What I worry about in the transition is lazy/bad programmers building yet bigger, bloated programs becuase they have all that memory space to work with. Give them a few years and just to install an IM client will require 4 Gb of memory and a 200Gb hard drive.
This is just the latest installment of the continuing /. saga, "Stupid Patent Tricks". The basic plot is some nefarious large corporation patents somehting like "breathing air". They dupe one of the people that the US Patent Office has hired for their lack of any knowledge about the world in which they live. Once granted, someone notices, posts to /., where the community of the righteous explodes in (what else) righteous indignation!
Linux (Knoppix and Damn Small) have been working fine for me using Virtual PC 2004. If they build a real VM environment, no reason why Linux shouldn't run. So support mist merely be saying that they will handle a phone call and, of course, get $$ for saying this.
I work in a VC firm and 2 of the managing partners have 30K+ email messages in their inboxes. The problem was finding things and the savior was X1.
OK, I've started several companies and am now working for a VC firm. Here are a few of my thoughts, having sat at both sides of the table.
A) Build a company, not a product: There are a number of great product ideas, but they are not things that make a company. A company is something that will have value for years to come. A roduct can sell now and typically has a more limited lifetime. You have to focus on a problem/market that your idea/technology can address over a long term with multile roducts or extensions. If you can show you are only sarting on the solution to a big problem and have lots of room to complete the solution/grow, you'll be building long term value. that is good for you, your employees and important to raising venture capital.
B) Of course VCs are looking for an exit strategy. VCs raise their money from wealthy individuals, pension funds, etc and they are called LPs. The LPs invest in the high risk venture to get a higher than normal return. The risks of start up investing are enormous. A fund lasts for 5 years or so and then the VC has to go out and raise more money. the thing potential LPs look at is the performance of the last fund!
The VC is always looking at ways to get their money out and make money at the same time. They want management who are motivated by making money. Many will talk of building great companies, etc, but this isn't exactly the whole truth. In order for a VC to get their money out they have to invest early, wait 3-5 years for an IPO and then 2-3 more years to sell their stake. Unless they invest in a company that has long term survival prospect they can not make the kind of return they need to satisfy the LPs. of 10 investments only 1 (at most) typically can make it to IPO. maybe 30-50% fail and the rest get a 2x -3x kind of returen over 3-5 years. It is the one IPO in 10 that makes the fund.
C) Sales is the key: There are a lot of reat ideas, but too many founders are very technical and have no clue about how to sell things. They think if they just hire the sales guy and send him out it will all be OK. Sales is very hard, especially for a new company with a new product. it takes a lot of effort toget the first customer. And then that same effort to get the second. it takes very talented people to make thses sales and they need a huge amount of patience becuase most potential customers say no and those interested take a long time to sell.
Most tech founders don't give the credit to or the support needed to the sales folks. They are not treated with enough respect. They are not listened to. What they say reflects what the customer is saying. if you think what the sales guy is saying is stupid, it is your own fault for not providing that person with the training and understanding to help the customer understand the value proposition.
D) Team is Key: A great team is key. There are huge challenges and risks and a lot of unknow territory for a start up to cross. A VC or a customer wans to see that the team has what it takes to see things through, can work well together in a crisis, is driven towards group/company success and not just for their own ego, etc.
E) Pick a VC More Carefully than a Spouse: Divorce rates are 50%. A divorce with a VC means you get tossed from the company you created or your business gets closed. People only look at the money or the size or prestige of a VC firm, and this is a mistake. Who is the partner that will sit on your board? Is that person someone you can trust and turn to for advice at a hard time/crucial moment. Does the VC firm have contacts/skills that can help you? The lesson of the dot-com bust is that VCs gave money to peole who had no business running a business and then just ignored them for the next new deal. Kind of like someone marrying you becuase you are cute and then after the marriage deserting you to spend time with the next cute person. You want a real partner. Interview the VC and due diligence on them in the same way they will be
It seems to me that all of the answers say "Writing great software has no value, but answer a question about it or writing a book is worth money". Doesn't this strike anyone else as strange? Why doesn't the prrogramming community put value on its labor, but then hapily spends $50 a book with O'Reilly. Why should someone answering a call be worth more money than the ori
Why should O'Reilly make money on the programmer's labor and not the programmer? A very strange ethos.
Why are we bashing Microsoft here when the fundemental issue is that Intel didn't design the architecture corrently. As has been said, we've known forever, that executable pages of memory should not be writable. It was well know before the i386 was designed. Intel deserves the lions share of the blame here.
Linux and UNIX are more secure becuase they use a file system with permissions and user accounts do not have permission to write into system directories. Most UNIX systems are administered and Linux systems are used by more techie folks. When it was just a FAT file system, there were no permissions so anyone could modify any critical file.
With NTFS, files in critical directories can be protected. The problem becomes getting people to take the step of not having user accounts have admin rights. People can already do this in XP Home, but few do. The problem is that this would be viewed as inconvenient to most home users who don't udnerstand enough to know why they need this extra step to protect them. As long as home users grant admin privileges to everyone on aa system and then blindly download and install software, this problem can not be solved.
Even then, Microsoft needs to extend the privilege model to only allow designated applications to insert code in the TCP stack, keyboard stack, etc. Their spyware stuff sort of detects many of these issues, but the OS needs to control them.
MS says they are serous about secrity and it is priority one. Allowing any kind of install of a system component without admin control is unacceptable if you want a secure system. To get security we are going to have to sacrificae some convenience and flexibility, but how do we implement this when so many users are so technically niave, unsophisticated, unwill to do the slighted extra work to keep their systems safe, etc.
As an industry we need to stop bashing MS and start educating users that security is their problem. leave your car unlocked in a high crime area with the keys in it and you should take the blame, not GM. The Internet is a high crime neighborhood and unless you take personal responsibility and avoid the dark alleys, giving your wallet to strangers and leaving your car and house unlocked, you are going to get robbed and assaulted.
Do folks remember Yourdon's book "Death of the American Programmer"? In the book, he predicted the move of software jobs to India way before the trned really exploded. I think the timing was delayed by the .com boom and Y2K. The book is a bit old, but it may still be worth a read, even though many other sources have covered the topic, in depth, since.
My 2 cents on the topic is that the trned will not end soon or at all, but that the value and savings have been blown out of proportion. Thre is work that makes great (economic) sense to offshore, but too many companies have tried to ush too much offshore. We will see some classes of work come back, but not see much press, because no one wants to admit failure. The people who self promoted how smart they were for doing this are not going to say "Ooops, I over did it" in ublic.
One thing that was astonishing to me was that the FCC approved WiFi but not cells and that the FCC and media don't understand that doing so enables phoning from an airplane. I'm sure all readers of /. know about VoIP and that many of us have PC based VoIP clients. If they give me WiFI I can make calls from a plane. And, while a WiFi session on a NYC-Tokyo flight is said to be likely to cost $30, I'd get unlimited calling minutes as part of that $30. Want to bet that when they enable cell phones we pay per minute charges and at premium rates???
I suspect that the satellite latencies will make the VoIP experience less than perfect, but I am interested in giving it a try!
I went to the A9 site and was shocked to see that it had my name. Obviously they have access to the Amazon cookie and are using the data. This means that they may not only be remembering your web searches for *your* convenience, but for Amazon's commercial uses. And what might they be??? Once Amazon has this data who else can get it? Can the government get it? Without my permission? You bet!
I don't want anyone watching over my shoulder when I browse the net. I certainly don't want Amazon doing it, becuase their use of my informaiton in A9 was not authorized by me. I read the privacy policy again, and it is not clear that this use is authorized, but then again, the privacy policy is *so* vague, it is hard to tell what use is prohibited.
Don't use A9 unless you want everal site on the Internet that has a relation with Amazon to know everything you are doing on the Web.
IT is an expense line in corporations. Executives don't understand IT, it is always delivering less thyan promised and taking longer than expected to do less than expected.
Off shoring doesn't make IT any more successful, it just makes it cheaper. Evne if it s worse, it is still cheaper, and execs can not judge if US workers could have done better. All they can judge is that it was still late and still didn't do what was promised, but was *cheaper*.
Any savings will go towards investment in parts of a business that CEOs do udnerstand and that they believe will generate incremental revenue. The mandate for IT will be hold the line or reduce bedgets. "Hey, you saved money last year in IT, so save more this year. We need to invest more in new widget factory automaiton so we can cut our remaining manufacturing jobs too!"
I really felt this article understaned how bad the situation has become. I'll describe my Dell "experience" below, but while this was for my home system, I also buy $500K+ per year for my company and am on a team that set policy for a $5 billion dollar company's purchases. Dell shouldn't assume that it is OK to send home users to India and keep corporate users in the US. many of us unimportant home users get to decide how oompany's spend their $$$.
I called Dell technical support. I initially had a terrible connection. One assumes the IP telephone technology wasn't working well at that point. Even when I tried back and went through all the menus again, the volume was low. I had to ask 3 times to get the person to speak up.
The next problem was that the people you get know very little. I'm a very expert computer user. The operator refused to listen to me when I described the problem and insisted on going through a checlkist of stuff about installing anti-virus, patches, etc. It was very aggrevating and they are not traied to recognize people who have expertise and not trivial problems.
The person's attitude was one of uncertainty and confusion at each step. They literally disappeared for 3-5 minutes at each step. I assume this was to read a document and then ask someone else what it meant. Very annoying. When I tried to discuss things they clearly could only reread the script. When I asked if there was someone more expert they said we had to go through the steps first.
I'm sure they were following procedure, but my problem was a hardware problem. I knew it and that was the issue that they agreed to after 30 minutes of wasting my time. I tried early in the call to just get to the hardware discussion, but had to give up and go through stupid questions and a variety of time wasting steps.
Finally, there was the launguage / accent problem. The person's English was passable and the accent was heavy and made udnerstanding difficult at times.
overall, I hated the experience. I will look for alternatives to Dell with US based support for my next purchases, including my $500K+ of corporate purchases.
The problem with software patents is *NOT* the concept of patents, but the inability of governments to effectively administer the systems. here are some of the issues:
Hard to do prior art: I see patents all the time for which I know prior art existed in the 70's. The problem is that it is difficult or impossible to find the prior art references. Unlike physical objects which last for decades, the systems with these technologies no longer exist. Further, there were many fewwer publications in the 70's and many of the magazines that had such content (remember Datamation) are not easily available. Worse, people didn't publish as much or thought publishing would reveal proprietary details of technology.
I also seem to remember that in the 1970's software was not patentable, or thought to be patentable.
What can be patented: We've had the US Patent office grant a huge number of stupid "business process patents" and patents on all kinds of silly and obvious stuff. it is clear that they don't have any sense and even less software knowledge or expertise.
When something stupid happens, it is too hard to fix: When a stupid patent is granted, we have to wait for the courts to sort it out. This is awful, becuase it gives a holder with large resources an unfair advantage over a competitor with small resources, even when the patent is widely known to be bogus. We need an alternative, low cost and fast challenge system that happens before a court case can be brought.
Early on, Microsoft understood that the platform battle is won by those that win the hearts and minds of developers. DOS was a *terrible* environment, but developers built some cool applicaitons and the platform became a huge success. You have to look at this announcement in conjunciton with the Unix Services for Windows announcement.
VB and the VB tools captured a good chunk of corporate developers. I hate VB, but you coul design and build simple forms based applications that talk to a database pretty quickly and easily. Visual Studio provide an excellent intregrated IDE (no flames from Borland lovers) for many C++ developers. it simplified a lot of routine stuff, made finding funcitons easy, integrated the debugger and more. Lots of folks.
IBM recognized that it needs developers for Java to succeed and the purchase of Rational was aimed at getting the corporate developer that is on VB and VC++.
With this compiler and the USFW annoucement, you can now take the *nix stuff and port it pretty easily and for free to Windows. No more need to assemble tools, install Cygwin or the like. There used to be a barrier to getting *nix stuff to Windows. it is now gone. Microsoft will now have a platform, that is free, to allow free software developers to make their stuff available on Windows as native applications. And you cna then add Windows extensions if you want.
The unreliguous among us will grab this and move *nix stuff we've been missing or haven't had access to.
I started using VC++ seriously in 1999 and never had this problem.
This isn't an open / closed source issue. This is simply sheer negligence and stupidity on Cisso's part. It is hard to believe that ANYONE in this day and age would leave back doors in shipping code. What is worse is the statement that the back door can not be disabled. This borders on criminal stupidity. This is a complete lapse in management and development oversight.
Most F500 comapnies have language in all agreements that make the vendor attest that there are no back doors in any product. Cisco is going to have to fix this, and likely bear whatever cost is related, including replacing units. And their liability for any secruity breaches and losses that are a result will be large. Since someone has already posted a "how to" to exploit this, we can expect that people will.
Just amazing. My faith in Cisco is greatly rediced. They need to explain to the community how this happend, whether or not there are other products that have this issue and what they are doing to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Scott McNealy's company is in ig trouble, and this announcement was a diversion. Notice thaat at the same time he announced this deal, which received front page press, he was laying off 3300 people and announcing a 700-800 million dollar loss.
Sun was arrogant and just refused to see that the commodity hardware was going to catch them and destroy their server business. The 64 bit x86 chips spell the end of SPARC. McNealy never built a services business or a software business that wasn't tied to his platform. With Linux becoming the OS and x86 the hardware, what doe he have left?
McNealy needs to reposition to become a software and services company and he will probably need to ship Windows on his hardware and ship his software on Windows. He may hate the thought, but those are the facts. This announcement is nothing short of full surrender and an admission that Sun is no longer a driver in the computer business. They are surrendering and repositioning.
One of my first jobs involved staking a card desk that had the bianry version of a program, figuring out the assembly langauge version of the binary and then converting the assembly language into a COBOL program.
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The original program was a COBOL program, but the source and assembly generated from the source had been lost. I did have the data input and print output but there were parts of the program that supported options that hadn't been used in over a year and the company needed to know what to input to get the options to work.
Needless to say, this was a while ago. If I tell you the date, you'll all say I'm too old to be reading