Do you? Or do you just put on some Homer glasses and sleep?
After 9/11, our company decided to institute better security. So we had to lock our front door and only let our students (we're a training company) use the restrooms at certain times. Right.
Beyond the absolute absurdity of taking adults to the restroom like schoolchildren, our front door is primarily glass. A well-aimed punch would break it. This is Homer glasses time.
Okay, so we listened. But we didn't implement. Real security, code or physical, isn't some bandage that can be wrapped around a wound. It must be well thought out, and vigilantly pursued, not mandated from on high. Real security in our case would have been closed-circuit TV coupled with 3 inch thick steel doors, self-contained facilities, and a well-trained and armed secretary at our front desk. Even then, all a terrorist would have to do would be to register for a class, and they'd be inside, ready to wreak havoc. Real code security won't come from an overcrowded seminar and some code fixes. The foundation is bad, so you're gonna have to rip it out, and start from scratch. Doesn't matter if it's a glass door or "glass code".
This is probably the best idea to hit/. in a while. Stop linking to Amazon, with their idiotic 1-Click patent, and start linking to someone who has better policies and practices. All my book links are going to them as of now.
Agreed about making the option available. That, in fact, was my gripe, really: at this point the option isn't available. Not so much that they should move to a third-party option, just that they might take a look at the third-party's mothodology and emulate it a little. Which would be quite a change for Apple.
To be honest, I like both methods. The Apple version just seems a little too inflexible (AFAIK, again, not much fiddling with it yet). With Apple, I can check daily, weekly or monthly, but at what time? When I boot up? When the system is idle? Midnight? 4 AM? It's a small quibble at best, but I like that flexibility. As to which packages to install, Red Hat's (seems) to let me pick and choose more, which is not to say that Apple doesn't let me choose at all, just not enough (for me).
OTOH, none of my Macs have ever really had good access to cron, which OS X has. So I should really just count my blessings and stop bitching because it's not everything I want it to be one year after introduction. 8)
I'd like a command-line accessible fortune, though. All the versions I've found so far are GUI.
I like Apple's Software Update, and it certainly makes keeping abreast of security patches easy. But I'd like Apple to take a look at Red Hat's up2date. It runs with a lot less interaction (mine runs in a cron job every night - a list of installed packages is waiting for me in the moring), and is a lot more flexible (I can pick and choose what type of updates to install). OTOH, Apple's Software Update doesn't require an account, as up2date does. But Software Update doesn't seem to be able to install without interaction with me. Of course, I've only been working with it for 5 days now (seems like longer, because it's pretty darn easy to use, one begins to feel like an expert very quickly).
Other than that, these same updates were available from Red Hat between 2 and 4 weeks ago depending on the package. Apple could be a little faster on the uptake, especially with security patches.
Frankly, I'm surprised that more hardware vendors who want to combat the Wintel cartel aren't using PPC chips. Sure, they're slower on the clock, but they are extremely powerful chips, and inexpensive when compared to Intel chips. I read over here hthat the latest, greatest G4 1 GHz chips are $295 for 10,000, whereas Intel's P4 2.4 GHz chips are $%620 for the same count. I suppose it might be a factor of 10 typo, but Motorola's chips are clearly less expensive to use that Intel's.
Why aren't more vendors who want to distribute Linux machines using PPC? Motherboard costs?
Of course this then begs the question of why Apple hardware is more expensive, but I'm typing this on my new iMac, so clearly I don't care.
The thing Microsoft has always had is great marketing. I teach Java programming and every once in a while someone brings up Microsoft and their latest big thing. I have on my desk at the moment some marketing for.NET versus J2EE. Evidently it takes a quarter of the number of lines of code to implement the same functionality. And the pretty graphs for Performance & Scalability are lovely to look at. But there's no depth to them. From what I can see, they have no information on what systems were used. Were they comparable systems? Or were they pitting an Ultra 5 against the latest Intel hardware? If you go to their website to look up more information, you notice their numbers don't match up: now it's a third of the number of lines of code. I'd download the whitepaper, but it's in Word format, and I won't read it. Strikes me that offereing it in Word format is kinda preaching to the choir.
In short, it's marketing, and good marketing in that the misdirection is well-concealed. But then, they know that the money guards in most companies respond better to pretty picutres and unsubstantiated graphs rather than real-world tests.
This newest.NET push is simply more of the same. At last, the people who know technology are being allowed to have some say in purchasing decisions (in my company anyway), and they're not deciding on MS as much. So, MS has to get to the people who know, now. Sadly, their reputation is so tarnished with developers and tech-savvy people, they have to catch them young, before the truth gets out.
Where is.NET anyway? Anyone using it in a production environment? Last I heard, it was pushed back because of security concerns. Again.
Yeah. Microsoft's failure to include USB support in Windows 95 & Windows NT 4.0 really killed USB didn't it?
Well, almost. Until Apple went full-on USB in the iMac. M$ has a history of crapping on anything new until they can monopolize it. If it were left to M$, we'd all still be using parallel ports and serial mice.
Well . . . probably leather. They sure were comfortable. The food at this place was some seriously gourmet stuff: a number of excellent seafood dishes, steak, chicken. I had pork chops. The pork chops of the gods. Ambrosia Pork Chops. And the deserts . . . . Man, I'm gaining weight just remembering it. Plus an excellent selection of wines to boot. It was all reserved seating, too, no pushing and shoving. If you weren't done with dinner, the food was brought in to you. I had my desert in there (some kind of Grand Marnier chocolate mousse thingy). So, yeah, I dropped like $100 (for two) in the end, but I sure wouldn't have remembered seeing Art of War anywhere else. But hey, dinner and a nice movie setting? It's like a pseudo-classy night out. That'll run you $100 easy most places.
The name of the place (after looking it up - I don't live in Boston) is GC Framingham Premium Cinema (run by General Cinema), in, er, Framingham outside Boston. Wish there were more like it.
I myself had the good fortune to go to an Adults-Only (non-pr0n, dammit, how do I refer to this type of theater?) theater outside of Boston. It was great, no screaming kids, no idiot teeney-boppers. They had a bar and a restaurant, popcorn was free and delivered to your overstuffed leather chair. Too bad they were only showing The Art of War. The draw of that place is the quiet more than anything else. I'm more than willing to pay $20 for a movie ticket if I can get some silence.
Wireless 'net access though, sounds counter-intuitive to the real draw I found (the aforementioned quiet). We'll never see anything like this around Phoenix until someone razes Awahtukee and Anthem. Or at least until movie tickets are more expensive than babysitters.
Name me something I can't do, Coward. Run Windows? I can do that. Play games? I can do that. Run Office? I can do that. Bundled software? I can do that.
Burned by years of outrageously poor tech support, increasingly expensive software, and hardware that's almost instantly outdated, middle-class consumers aren't the least bit interested in the coolest new new thing. They want computing that works like TV does -- that's easy to use, takes little space, costs relatively little money and works every time you turn it on, year after year. The public is increasingly wise to tech scams like hardware that's obsolete every 18 months and software that doesn't even last that long.
My home network server is an SE/30. Built in 1993. Running software written in 1995. I'm still using a 7500 as my primary computer, purchased in 1996, with FireWire and USB and all manner of peripherals. I've got a Centris running 8.1 attached to my Cable router checking my e-mail and keeping track of my Slashdot headlines 24/7. This hardware and software is not obsolete in my "middle-America" home.
Apple's Tech Support is generally very good. Their computers last a long time (which has caused problems for them in the long run - no real forced upgrades), work consistently, and are very easy to use. Supporting them is cake. Look at any cross-platform manual: reams of paper for every little change in every version of Windows, three pages for Mac OS.
What this tells me is that what middle-America wants is cheap crap. C'mon, people, you get what you pay for. My inital investment in these computers was high, but over the course of 5 years . . . . Most of this "obsolete" hardware can be picked up for a song and used as I have used them for well under $500. Of course, I also buy used cars, and try to keep to brands with a proven standard of reliability. This is exactly why so many people are so deep in debt: unrealistic, myopic desires for the bigger, better deal (think SUV).
small footprint: iMacs have small footprints, always have done.
premium system: iMacs, while not premium Apples, are pretty premium computers
internal hard drives: well, OK, not a lot of room here, but swapping out a hard drive for a larger one isn't that hard (though the thermo-gel thing on the new iMacs seems a bit daunting). And I presume you meant internal, not external.
off-the-shelf components: IDE, PC100 RAM, Macs use a lot of off the shelf components these days. Like PCI. And AGP graphics slots. The iMacs also have ethernet, FireWire and USB built-in for scads of off-the-shelf expandibility, external though it may be.
both sides of the motherboard: it seems to me that the new iMacs have to be doing this, though I don't know for sure.
reduce electrical usage: the new iMac draws less than previous models (probably the reduced motherboard size and no CRT)
So, as I see it, an iMac, or perhaps a PowerMac (for the added expandibility for internal stuff - a box only holds x square whatevers of stuff - basic physics that is) is what you want.
Or did you want Linux? Well, Mac OS X, the default as of, um, now, is BSD, is that close enough? Or did you want Windows? If so, why are you asking Slashdot?
However, where are the rest? Any estimates of damage done so far? The article itself points to the fact that it wouldn't be able to do anything via the broswer.
The second one (damn, now I'm contradicting myself) doesn't seem to have appeared until early 1999. Marginally more dangerous, but still seems to infect only other Java files. Since then, a whole lot of silence.
So, I guess I'll check back when.NET gets it's second virus. If it takes less than 4 years to appear, well . . .
Indeed the sandbox, though that was/is primarily the concept behind applet security. Java as a whole has scads of security built in to the JVM itself, not the least of which is code verification which tests that the underlying system security policies are not circumvented by Java bytecode. Sun's JVM can't really hurt a Windows system. Or a Mac system. Or a Palm Pilot. Or a PS2. Or Linux. Or Solaris.
Java has always been highly distributed, and for that reason, the designers took great care to ensure that Java could not become the next big virus language. It simply isn't allowed to do it. And neither should.NET, but, hey, nothing has ever stopped MS from rushing a poor implemetation to market.
Seriously, wouldn't a Java virus be great? I mean, it runs on just about anything (including your PlayStation 2). I wonder why there aren't any roaming the net . . .
Maybe because Sun actually put some effort into the security aspects of an inherently dangerous idea?
Personally, I think the idea of high-level languages and portable binaries is a good one, so I am actually excited about the Common Language Runtime (etc.) aspect of.NET. I hate hate hate the web services and passport bit, though...
Java: high-level language, portable binaries, no passport. Sane web services.
You know, Single Identification Number, from the Gibson books. IIRC, it wasn't impossible to be SIN-less, it just made your life very difficult. The main SIN-less character was in Mona Lisa Overdrive, and she had a pretty lousy existence. So, everybody line up for your original SIN. Or become a homeless, drug addicted hooker. Your choice, really. And that's freedom, right?
I'm on Cox@Home (for the moment) in AZ, and they, too, are running advert after advert about the benefits of Cable vs. DSL. I know, from e-mail, that I am going to soon recieve a "conversion pack" that I can use to set up on their new Cox-managed network, and also some information about when various services from @Home will no longer be available, like when my e-mail address will officially change over. Not that I relish an e-mail @cox.com.
No pack as of yet, and no further word from Cox. Still lots of adverts though. Not real happy about this, but not truly upset yet, since I still am getting speeds like I used to.
(1)(a). Mainstream scientific computing is done on big iron made by someone other than Intel. Solaris SPARCs are used a lot, for instance. My grad school days in Astronomy and Physics were spent on SGI Octanes (yummy).
(1)(b). You seem to have fallen prey to the MHz myths. Have you used a recent G3 or G4? The PowerPC architecture is *built* for heavy duty mathematical precoessing.
(2). Well, alright, point there.
(3). Sorting through this jumbled mass of points was a barrel of laughs. True, OS X won't go x86. And true, Apple makes a lot of money from hardware, thus supporting the lack of a port. Of course, this means that MS support can't send me to Intel and Intel can't send me right back to MS. If it's broke, you have only to make one call. That's as may be. Point me to reports of Apple alienating developers. They've spent loads of time and resources helping developers move to Cocoa. In fact, that's what Carbon is for. They also provide one of the best Java VMs out there. Apple is embracing (as in welcoming, not as in extending) the technology, rather than trying to quash it or "standarize it" out of existence. They even provide a Cocoa API for Java, should you wish to optimize further. They are bringing more developers on board, while making the trasnition from Classic to OS X as easy as possible. If anyone is alienating developers with their new OS, it's Microsoft.
Chances are that this has already had a patch released, I am sure. Chances are also that there are an awful lot of unpached machines out there. I have to say the social engineering on this one is pretty clever. Who hasn't gotten a message like that? I mean in Outlook.
Now for the usual run of blame: hackers for writing it, MS for releasing Outlook, users for not patching. For the real solution, see my sig.
Slashdot Mirror
They've already done that (Halo, Munch's Oddysee). Doesn't seem to have helped much. Besides, Halo isn't all it's cracked up to be.
After 9/11, our company decided to institute better security. So we had to lock our front door and only let our students (we're a training company) use the restrooms at certain times. Right.
Beyond the absolute absurdity of taking adults to the restroom like schoolchildren, our front door is primarily glass. A well-aimed punch would break it. This is Homer glasses time.
Okay, so we listened. But we didn't implement. Real security, code or physical, isn't some bandage that can be wrapped around a wound. It must be well thought out, and vigilantly pursued, not mandated from on high. Real security in our case would have been closed-circuit TV coupled with 3 inch thick steel doors, self-contained facilities, and a well-trained and armed secretary at our front desk. Even then, all a terrorist would have to do would be to register for a class, and they'd be inside, ready to wreak havoc. Real code security won't come from an overcrowded seminar and some code fixes. The foundation is bad, so you're gonna have to rip it out, and start from scratch. Doesn't matter if it's a glass door or "glass code".
Thinking in Java, Bruce Eckel
To be honest, I like both methods. The Apple version just seems a little too inflexible (AFAIK, again, not much fiddling with it yet). With Apple, I can check daily, weekly or monthly, but at what time? When I boot up? When the system is idle? Midnight? 4 AM? It's a small quibble at best, but I like that flexibility. As to which packages to install, Red Hat's (seems) to let me pick and choose more, which is not to say that Apple doesn't let me choose at all, just not enough (for me).
OTOH, none of my Macs have ever really had good access to cron, which OS X has. So I should really just count my blessings and stop bitching because it's not everything I want it to be one year after introduction. 8)
I'd like a command-line accessible fortune, though. All the versions I've found so far are GUI.
Other than that, these same updates were available from Red Hat between 2 and 4 weeks ago depending on the package. Apple could be a little faster on the uptake, especially with security patches.
This is constructive criticism, and nothing more.
Why aren't more vendors who want to distribute Linux machines using PPC? Motherboard costs?
Of course this then begs the question of why Apple hardware is more expensive, but I'm typing this on my new iMac, so clearly I don't care.
In short, it's marketing, and good marketing in that the misdirection is well-concealed. But then, they know that the money guards in most companies respond better to pretty picutres and unsubstantiated graphs rather than real-world tests.
This newest .NET push is simply more of the same. At last, the people who know technology are being allowed to have some say in purchasing decisions (in my company anyway), and they're not deciding on MS as much. So, MS has to get to the people who know, now. Sadly, their reputation is so tarnished with developers and tech-savvy people, they have to catch them young, before the truth gets out.
Where is .NET anyway? Anyone using it in a production environment? Last I heard, it was pushed back because of security concerns. Again.
Call back when you can uninstall IE from XP, thanks.
Well, almost. Until Apple went full-on USB in the iMac. M$ has a history of crapping on anything new until they can monopolize it. If it were left to M$, we'd all still be using parallel ports and serial mice.
The name of the place (after looking it up - I don't live in Boston) is GC Framingham Premium Cinema (run by General Cinema), in, er, Framingham outside Boston. Wish there were more like it.
Wireless 'net access though, sounds counter-intuitive to the real draw I found (the aforementioned quiet). We'll never see anything like this around Phoenix until someone razes Awahtukee and Anthem. Or at least until movie tickets are more expensive than babysitters.
When you consider that NEAT has less funding and fewer people than it takes to run a modest size McDonald's for a year.
Let me sum up: I can do that.
Of course, expecting a Coward to think is like expecting a pig to fly: both are patently impossible.
My home network server is an SE/30. Built in 1993. Running software written in 1995. I'm still using a 7500 as my primary computer, purchased in 1996, with FireWire and USB and all manner of peripherals. I've got a Centris running 8.1 attached to my Cable router checking my e-mail and keeping track of my Slashdot headlines 24/7. This hardware and software is not obsolete in my "middle-America" home.
Apple's Tech Support is generally very good. Their computers last a long time (which has caused problems for them in the long run - no real forced upgrades), work consistently, and are very easy to use. Supporting them is cake. Look at any cross-platform manual: reams of paper for every little change in every version of Windows, three pages for Mac OS.
What this tells me is that what middle-America wants is cheap crap. C'mon, people, you get what you pay for. My inital investment in these computers was high, but over the course of 5 years . . . . Most of this "obsolete" hardware can be picked up for a song and used as I have used them for well under $500. Of course, I also buy used cars, and try to keep to brands with a proven standard of reliability. This is exactly why so many people are so deep in debt: unrealistic, myopic desires for the bigger, better deal (think SUV).
You will pay the price for your lack of vision.
So, as I see it, an iMac, or perhaps a PowerMac (for the added expandibility for internal stuff - a box only holds x square whatevers of stuff - basic physics that is) is what you want.
Or did you want Linux? Well, Mac OS X, the default as of, um, now, is BSD, is that close enough? Or did you want Windows? If so, why are you asking Slashdot?
However, where are the rest? Any estimates of damage done so far? The article itself points to the fact that it wouldn't be able to do anything via the broswer.
The second one (damn, now I'm contradicting myself) doesn't seem to have appeared until early 1999. Marginally more dangerous, but still seems to infect only other Java files. Since then, a whole lot of silence.
So, I guess I'll check back when .NET gets it's second virus. If it takes less than 4 years to appear, well . . .
Java has always been highly distributed, and for that reason, the designers took great care to ensure that Java could not become the next big virus language. It simply isn't allowed to do it. And neither should .NET, but, hey, nothing has ever stopped MS from rushing a poor implemetation to market.
Because now you won't have to bother with word macro virii and IIS virii and VBscript virii. You just jave to write one for .NET.
Java Virii: 0
Seriously, wouldn't a Java virus be great? I mean, it runs on just about anything (including your PlayStation 2). I wonder why there aren't any roaming the net . . .
Maybe because Sun actually put some effort into the security aspects of an inherently dangerous idea?
Java: high-level language, portable binaries, no passport. Sane web services.
You know, Single Identification Number, from the Gibson books. IIRC, it wasn't impossible to be SIN-less, it just made your life very difficult. The main SIN-less character was in Mona Lisa Overdrive, and she had a pretty lousy existence. So, everybody line up for your original SIN. Or become a homeless, drug addicted hooker. Your choice, really. And that's freedom, right?
The band Cat Five does all their work via systems hooked in to PowerBooks. Check out the article.
I'm on Cox@Home (for the moment) in AZ, and they, too, are running advert after advert about the benefits of Cable vs. DSL. I know, from e-mail, that I am going to soon recieve a "conversion pack" that I can use to set up on their new Cox-managed network, and also some information about when various services from @Home will no longer be available, like when my e-mail address will officially change over. Not that I relish an e-mail @cox.com.
No pack as of yet, and no further word from Cox. Still lots of adverts though. Not real happy about this, but not truly upset yet, since I still am getting speeds like I used to.
One point and two misconceptions, more like.
(1)(a). Mainstream scientific computing is done on big iron made by someone other than Intel. Solaris SPARCs are used a lot, for instance. My grad school days in Astronomy and Physics were spent on SGI Octanes (yummy).
(1)(b). You seem to have fallen prey to the MHz myths. Have you used a recent G3 or G4? The PowerPC architecture is *built* for heavy duty mathematical precoessing.
(2). Well, alright, point there.
(3). Sorting through this jumbled mass of points was a barrel of laughs. True, OS X won't go x86. And true, Apple makes a lot of money from hardware, thus supporting the lack of a port. Of course, this means that MS support can't send me to Intel and Intel can't send me right back to MS. If it's broke, you have only to make one call. That's as may be. Point me to reports of Apple alienating developers. They've spent loads of time and resources helping developers move to Cocoa. In fact, that's what Carbon is for. They also provide one of the best Java VMs out there. Apple is embracing (as in welcoming, not as in extending) the technology, rather than trying to quash it or "standarize it" out of existence. They even provide a Cocoa API for Java, should you wish to optimize further. They are bringing more developers on board, while making the trasnition from Classic to OS X as easy as possible. If anyone is alienating developers with their new OS, it's Microsoft.
Chances are that this has already had a patch released, I am sure. Chances are also that there are an awful lot of unpached machines out there. I have to say the social engineering on this one is pretty clever. Who hasn't gotten a message like that? I mean in Outlook.
Now for the usual run of blame: hackers for writing it, MS for releasing Outlook, users for not patching. For the real solution, see my sig.