GYAH!! I'll admit that lately it's had the "5-minutes of plot per 24 minute episode" problem that's plagued the Dragonballs, but once the month of flashbacks were over, it got a lot better very quickly, and I'm loving it.
Personally, I download them and copy them to my PDA to watch at my favorit bar. Today's selections include Naruto, Bleach, Trinity Blood, and I already watched the new Ah! My Goddess on the subway on the way to work.
I'm very impressed with the speed that they get translated, timed, encoded, and seeded. Even following RSS feeds from the fansubbing groups, once I get on, there's already another 20,000 peers already downloading the same episode, and it's frequently down in less time than it takes to watch.
Now the question becomes using BitTorrent to stream content like this, rather than downloading it and then watching it. I know that there's at least a plugin for MythTV that will search for torrents and then queue them up for download and make the content available once it's done, but howabout playback at the same time, prioritizing the beginning of the file to stream it as it comes down the pipe?
Could be cool. And no, I'm not gonna write it. I'm creative, but lazy.
Microsoft bought out Giant Company, and relabelled their antispyware product. Their general definition of "beta" would be more along the lines of "search and replace Giant Company with Microsoft".
Although the spyware reporting tool looks good. I'd like to see some kind of heuristics, but all in good time, I suppose. Personally, I've found the Giant/MS AntiSpyware product to be among the best of breed of this type of app.
Also, no scanner does multi-user scanning. They'll look at the directories, but that's as far as it will go, because user registries aren't loaded when the user's not logged in.
But yeah... no built in feedback mechanism isn't all that great, but then again, there's always microsoft's newsgroups: http://communities.microsoft.com/newsgroups/defaul t.asp?ICP=spyware&sLCID=us
The same is true for a number of active x controls that get installed via IE that are blatantly spyware/adware/malware/pornware/underwear... oh wait.
If you've ever done tech support and put any thought into why people do the things that they do (especially when they do them right in front of you), you'd know about how people react. The problem with UI design, is that people don't want options. They want a food pellet button. I'm not saying this is true for everyone, but take for example the new "wouldn't it be great if there was a single button to make everything easy?" I think that pretty much sums it up perfectly.
In other words, when people go to AOL, and it says that they have to install plugins X, Y, Z, Red, Yellow, and Green, and then they go to Tommy's Star Trek Haven on Geocities, and his page has been cracked by some kid who put a malware control on it and it asks them if they want to install this blatantly abusive program, they will instinctively click yes.
Re:Take the "5 days with Firefox" challenge
on
Firefox 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Well let's run a virus scan with mcafee... nope, nothing.
Adaware... nothing but cookies(thanks doubleclick)
Another virusscan with trend micro? nada.
IE =! viruses. Especially when you use your head. The average user will click on whatever comes up on their screen. This is the problem. And also, standards-compliant crap is still just crap.
Whether or not a site is standards compliant means approximately squat as to whether or not its information is relevant.
Kind of like how your statement about viruses and adware (remember, I don't have any on my system, because I use my head, and I teach my users the same thing, and they have signifigantly less problems than your average user.) is completely irrelevant to my previous statement.
I made no inference to the security of FireFox, but rather to its usability. If you have two tools where one is very user-friendly, and the other requires a lot of plugins and patches to become even close to as friendly, and it's still slow as molasses, which one do you think the users are going to pick?
And let me remind you who dictates the standards for things like web browsers. It's not admins and consultants. It's the users, because they're the ones that use the tools. And if they're given a choice between something that's complicated and slow, and something that's simple and fast, which one do you think they'll choose?
In addition, if you remove the choice, you're only becoming part of the problem. Geeks are inherently curious. Users want to be shown the way to do their work, play their games, watch their movies. But if you show the user that the way is to make intelligent decisions on their own, then you've just made a better user who's going to get less spyware and less viruses, because they'll see that pop-up(which isn't very frequent anymore, since sp2 came out, btw) that says "your computer may be infected with spyware! click here to install our nifty tool." and they'll think to themselves, "I may have already won $10,000,000 too, but you don't see me signing up for publishers clearing house".
Generally, viruses and worms and the like aren't written for the least secure tool/platform/hamburger. They're written for the most popular one. Everyone likes to see the little guy win, but when the little guy becomes the big guy, he becomes the target for people's frustrations.
Do I think Microsoft fumbled a lot with IE? Yep. Do I think IE is about as secure as a high school girl's panties on prom night? yep. Do I think IE is going to continue to be the most common browser that I see in my web logs? yep. Is that likely to change? yep. Today? nope.
Don't forget to hit your local MozParty. Parties are listed at http://www.openforce.com/mozparty2
I'll be hosting the one for New York City. Info for that one at http://www.openforce.com/mozparty2/?party=179
Re:Take the "5 days with Firefox" challenge
on
Firefox 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Took the challenge. It's slower than IE, not as functional for what I use a browser for (not a fan of tabbed browsing), and a little too strict on the code. Although I have to admit that I did like the download manager quite a bit.
While I agree that all code should be standards compliant, the majority of sites have been designed with IE in mind, not the w3c. And IE will take bad code and try to work with it(this is actually probably where all of those lovely buffer overflows and hta exploits come from), and usually succeed.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I use a web browser to get information, and watch some entertainment(movie trailers, flash clips, webcomics, etc...). Whether or not someone's code is up to snuff is less of a concern than if I get my data or not. Call me naive, but isn't that the whole point of the web these days?
Like I said, while the answer regarding imap4 and pop3 would be technically correct, it was completely off the mark. Even the most eccentric of admins (platform regadless) would never use either of these for that reason, unless all they had access to was e-mail. Also, the exact question was "describe the primary usage differences between imap4 and pop3 and why you might configure a user for one over the other."
I wasn't looking for someone to quote the RFCs, just someone to explain the basic differences that they would describe to a user or office manager. "It's a type of file transfer protocol..." does not make for a very intelligent answer. And I did give the person some credit for saying that, but I would never hire someone who tried to bullshit me like that, because communication is highly important in consulting.
Also, what do you define as a proper OS? You claim you "don't need to run Windows based systems...". Does that mean that you don't need to, but you do anyway, because it helps to know more about something before you go trashing it, or is more along the lines of "Windows, Microsoft and Bill Gates are the Devil because.... just because they are." or "because they're closed source".
Bah.
Contact me outside of the forums. I'll give you my ips. Break me. I run 75% Windows at home (no, the other 25% is not my firewall).
Nothing, just like a systems engineering cert. However, my statement wasn't regarding the absurdity of sticking a square peg in a circular hole. I was adding my own little bit of fuel to the fire regarding how completely useless the mcse certification (and most certs for that matter) has become.
When I was interviewing people to take my job, I couldn't really bring them into the office because it was so small, so I'd just take them to breakfast or lunch on the company account. No one ever got anything...
Eventually hired someone with the skillset I was looking for (read: he was nuts, not certified, and had a bunch of computers in his house). Good thing to bring up in an interview: your lab. Even if you live in a closet, you need a lab to learn new things. If you fsck up on production hardware, that's not going to look too good. Especially when you end up doing your 12th reinstall before you get it right.
I'm a windows admin. I've been working with Windows since version 2.0, and NT since version 3.51 (couldn't get my hands on a copy of 3.1 when I was 14). Every job that I've had that has had MCSEs, MCPs, etc..., I end up taking over the majority of the department. It's not my intention when I go in, but the amount of incompetence that I see in these guys is astounding.
The problem with MCSEs, and more recently CCNAs (the only cisco cert that I still respect is CCIE, because it requires you to actually work) is that the people taking the tests rely on classes that guarantee you the cert or your money back, or they'll rely on braindumps to take the tests. They don't actually bother to learn anything. And then once they have the actual cert, they know nothing.
Fun things to ask MCSEs:
Name some commonly used services and their associated ports: ie ftp tcp/21 smtp tcp/25, pop3 tcp/110, rdp tcp/3389, netbios-session tcp/139, so on and so forth
also, ask them to describe the difference between similar basic protocols, like pop3 and imap4. I once had someone try to tell me that pop3 was mail, and imap4 was for file transfer, which while it's kinda sorta technically correct, it takes a lot of lenience to let that go.
And my personal favorite for getting the steam pouring out of their ears: ask them to think on their feet. Give them a weird scenario (server rebooting every 5 minutes on its own), and ask them how they'd troubleshoot it.
I've been seeing more and more "innovation" in the arena of keyboards, which is mostly complete crap. I like the concept of the apple keyboard that lights up briefly when & where you hit a key, but for the most part its all a waste of money. About 6 or 7 years ago, Gateway 2000 stopped carrying the 124 key AnyKey keyboard, made by maxi-switch. Now this is a mean keyboard. The thing has 4MB of ram on it for storing key sequences, and you can reprogram the keyboard itself, so if you want it to be a dvorak, for instance, you can make the change, and it will carry over with you when you take that keyboard to another computer, regardless of OS or current system state. Add to that the 8-way directional cursor keys, a second asterix key, a second spacebar (in the middle of the cursor keys), and a second set of function keys (great place to store key sequences), and you've got a hell of a keyboard. Not to mention that it's just got that right feel and weight to it. And it's virtually indestructible.
Slashdot Mirror
GYAH!! I'll admit that lately it's had the "5-minutes of plot per 24 minute episode" problem that's plagued the Dragonballs, but once the month of flashbacks were over, it got a lot better very quickly, and I'm loving it.
Personally, I download them and copy them to my PDA to watch at my favorit bar. Today's selections include Naruto, Bleach, Trinity Blood, and I already watched the new Ah! My Goddess on the subway on the way to work.
I'm very impressed with the speed that they get translated, timed, encoded, and seeded. Even following RSS feeds from the fansubbing groups, once I get on, there's already another 20,000 peers already downloading the same episode, and it's frequently down in less time than it takes to watch.
Now the question becomes using BitTorrent to stream content like this, rather than downloading it and then watching it. I know that there's at least a plugin for MythTV that will search for torrents and then queue them up for download and make the content available once it's done, but howabout playback at the same time, prioritizing the beginning of the file to stream it as it comes down the pipe?
Could be cool. And no, I'm not gonna write it. I'm creative, but lazy.
Get yours while supplies last!
Sorry, that one still makes me giggle.
Microsoft bought out Giant Company, and relabelled their antispyware product. Their general definition of "beta" would be more along the lines of "search and replace Giant Company with Microsoft".
... no built in feedback mechanism isn't all that great, but then again, there's always microsoft's newsgroups: http://communities.microsoft.com/newsgroups/defaul t.asp?ICP=spyware&sLCID=us
Although the spyware reporting tool looks good. I'd like to see some kind of heuristics, but all in good time, I suppose. Personally, I've found the Giant/MS AntiSpyware product to be among the best of breed of this type of app.
Also, no scanner does multi-user scanning. They'll look at the directories, but that's as far as it will go, because user registries aren't loaded when the user's not logged in.
But yeah
The same is true for a number of active x controls that get installed via IE that are blatantly spyware/adware/malware/pornware/underwear ... oh wait.
If you've ever done tech support and put any thought into why people do the things that they do (especially when they do them right in front of you), you'd know about how people react. The problem with UI design, is that people don't want options. They want a food pellet button. I'm not saying this is true for everyone, but take for example the new "wouldn't it be great if there was a single button to make everything easy?" I think that pretty much sums it up perfectly.
In other words, when people go to AOL, and it says that they have to install plugins X, Y, Z, Red, Yellow, and Green, and then they go to Tommy's Star Trek Haven on Geocities, and his page has been cracked by some kid who put a malware control on it and it asks them if they want to install this blatantly abusive program, they will instinctively click yes.
Well let's run a virus scan with mcafee ... nope, nothing.
... nothing but cookies(thanks doubleclick)
Adaware
Another virusscan with trend micro? nada.
IE =! viruses. Especially when you use your head. The average user will click on whatever comes up on their screen. This is the problem. And also, standards-compliant crap is still just crap.
Whether or not a site is standards compliant means approximately squat as to whether or not its information is relevant.
Kind of like how your statement about viruses and adware (remember, I don't have any on my system, because I use my head, and I teach my users the same thing, and they have signifigantly less problems than your average user.) is completely irrelevant to my previous statement.
I made no inference to the security of FireFox, but rather to its usability. If you have two tools where one is very user-friendly, and the other requires a lot of plugins and patches to become even close to as friendly, and it's still slow as molasses, which one do you think the users are going to pick?
And let me remind you who dictates the standards for things like web browsers. It's not admins and consultants. It's the users, because they're the ones that use the tools. And if they're given a choice between something that's complicated and slow, and something that's simple and fast, which one do you think they'll choose?
In addition, if you remove the choice, you're only becoming part of the problem. Geeks are inherently curious. Users want to be shown the way to do their work, play their games, watch their movies. But if you show the user that the way is to make intelligent decisions on their own, then you've just made a better user who's going to get less spyware and less viruses, because they'll see that pop-up(which isn't very frequent anymore, since sp2 came out, btw) that says "your computer may be infected with spyware! click here to install our nifty tool." and they'll think to themselves, "I may have already won $10,000,000 too, but you don't see me signing up for publishers clearing house".
Generally, viruses and worms and the like aren't written for the least secure tool/platform/hamburger. They're written for the most popular one. Everyone likes to see the little guy win, but when the little guy becomes the big guy, he becomes the target for people's frustrations.
Do I think Microsoft fumbled a lot with IE? Yep.
Do I think IE is about as secure as a high school girl's panties on prom night? yep.
Do I think IE is going to continue to be the most common browser that I see in my web logs? yep.
Is that likely to change? yep.
Today? nope.
Don't forget to hit your local MozParty. Parties are listed at http://www.openforce.com/mozparty2
I'll be hosting the one for New York City. Info for that one at http://www.openforce.com/mozparty2/?party=179
Took the challenge. It's slower than IE, not as functional for what I use a browser for (not a fan of tabbed browsing), and a little too strict on the code. Although I have to admit that I did like the download manager quite a bit.
While I agree that all code should be standards compliant, the majority of sites have been designed with IE in mind, not the w3c. And IE will take bad code and try to work with it(this is actually probably where all of those lovely buffer overflows and hta exploits come from), and usually succeed.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I use a web browser to get information, and watch some entertainment(movie trailers, flash clips, webcomics, etc...). Whether or not someone's code is up to snuff is less of a concern than if I get my data or not. Call me naive, but isn't that the whole point of the web these days?
Like I said, while the answer regarding imap4 and pop3 would be technically correct, it was completely off the mark. Even the most eccentric of admins (platform regadless) would never use either of these for that reason, unless all they had access to was e-mail. Also, the exact question was "describe the primary usage differences between imap4 and pop3 and why you might configure a user for one over the other."
..." does not make for a very intelligent answer. And I did give the person some credit for saying that, but I would never hire someone who tried to bullshit me like that, because communication is highly important in consulting.
.... just because they are." or "because they're closed source".
I wasn't looking for someone to quote the RFCs, just someone to explain the basic differences that they would describe to a user or office manager. "It's a type of file transfer protocol
Also, what do you define as a proper OS? You claim you "don't need to run Windows based systems...". Does that mean that you don't need to, but you do anyway, because it helps to know more about something before you go trashing it, or is more along the lines of "Windows, Microsoft and Bill Gates are the Devil because
Bah.
Contact me outside of the forums. I'll give you my ips. Break me. I run 75% Windows at home (no, the other 25% is not my firewall).
Nothing, just like a systems engineering cert. However, my statement wasn't regarding the absurdity of sticking a square peg in a circular hole. I was adding my own little bit of fuel to the fire regarding how completely useless the mcse certification (and most certs for that matter) has become.
Who here still keeps their CNE and CNA up?
When I was interviewing people to take my job, I couldn't really bring them into the office because it was so small, so I'd just take them to breakfast or lunch on the company account. No one ever got anything...
Eventually hired someone with the skillset I was looking for (read: he was nuts, not certified, and had a bunch of computers in his house). Good thing to bring up in an interview: your lab. Even if you live in a closet, you need a lab to learn new things. If you fsck up on production hardware, that's not going to look too good. Especially when you end up doing your 12th reinstall before you get it right.
hear hear!!
I'm a windows admin. I've been working with Windows since version 2.0, and NT since version 3.51 (couldn't get my hands on a copy of 3.1 when I was 14). Every job that I've had that has had MCSEs, MCPs, etc..., I end up taking over the majority of the department. It's not my intention when I go in, but the amount of incompetence that I see in these guys is astounding.
The problem with MCSEs, and more recently CCNAs (the only cisco cert that I still respect is CCIE, because it requires you to actually work) is that the people taking the tests rely on classes that guarantee you the cert or your money back, or they'll rely on braindumps to take the tests. They don't actually bother to learn anything. And then once they have the actual cert, they know nothing.
Fun things to ask MCSEs:
Name some commonly used services and their associated ports: ie ftp tcp/21 smtp tcp/25, pop3 tcp/110, rdp tcp/3389, netbios-session tcp/139, so on and so forth
also, ask them to describe the difference between similar basic protocols, like pop3 and imap4. I once had someone try to tell me that pop3 was mail, and imap4 was for file transfer, which while it's kinda sorta technically correct, it takes a lot of lenience to let that go.
And my personal favorite for getting the steam pouring out of their ears: ask them to think on their feet. Give them a weird scenario (server rebooting every 5 minutes on its own), and ask them how they'd troubleshoot it.
I've been seeing more and more "innovation" in the arena of keyboards, which is mostly complete crap. I like the concept of the apple keyboard that lights up briefly when & where you hit a key, but for the most part its all a waste of money. About 6 or 7 years ago, Gateway 2000 stopped carrying the 124 key AnyKey keyboard, made by maxi-switch. Now this is a mean keyboard. The thing has 4MB of ram on it for storing key sequences, and you can reprogram the keyboard itself, so if you want it to be a dvorak, for instance, you can make the change, and it will carry over with you when you take that keyboard to another computer, regardless of OS or current system state. Add to that the 8-way directional cursor keys, a second asterix key, a second spacebar (in the middle of the cursor keys), and a second set of function keys (great place to store key sequences), and you've got a hell of a keyboard. Not to mention that it's just got that right feel and weight to it. And it's virtually indestructible.