And also the socialist minded society that lives there. An excerpt from a new story recently:
------
PARIS - The head of US tyremaker Titan has mocked French workers for putting in only "three hours" a day and said his company would be "stupid" to take over a troubled French factory.
The letter from Titan CEO Maurice Taylor to French Industrial Renewal Minister Arnaud Montebourg was in response to a request for Titan to consider investing in a loss-making Goodyear plant in Amiens, northern France.
"I have visited that factory a couple of times. The French workforce gets paid high wages but only works three hours," Taylor said in the letter, dated February 8 and obtained by French business daily Les Echos.
"They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that's the French way!"
Goodyear said last month it was set to close the plant, which employs 1,173 workers, following five years of failed talks with unions.
Valve hires incredibly self-motivated and talented people. Most people are *NOT* incredibly self-motivated so taking Valve as a role model for the rest of workplace environments is utter foolishness. As the late and famous physicist Einstein once eluded to, the only thing larger than the universe is human stupidity, that's what you're drawing from if you try to think "big picture". So um, no.
Or said plugins don't even exist (I mean, same code, same author) and the problem never has a chance to manifest itself in Chrome. In my experience plugin management, or lack thereof, by ignorant users is one big problem compounded by a-hole companies installing plugins that have major performance ramifications (not of the positive kind) without even asking -- "Skype anyone?". Then again, some people don't know any better so it goes back to the ignorant part.
Yes, Firefox did fall behind the curve but that was with the 3.6.x branch. I don't find arguments of "Chrome is faster" to hold up to scrutiny, just do a search on the topic and be objective about what's being divulged.
And if you ever find yourself tethering, Firefox for many years has been the only major browser that supported HTTP pipelining, something that's been part of the HTTP/1.1 specification since 1999... yet Chrome just got or is just getting around to it (I knew it was recently added in the Chromium channel). While I applaud Google with the SPDY extensions, the HTTP servers you speak to with Chrome have to explicitly support the SPDY extensions, i.e. there's still a LOT of web servers out there that do not do SPDY. HTTP/Pipelining on the other hand has been in place for forever and it is not a question of web server operators have to update their existing web servers for end users to benefit. If you are on a higher latency connection, HTTP/Pipelining can make a *BIG* difference.
Finally, if you use Akamai (Content Distribution Network) to delivery of web content to your customers, Akamai funnels traffic to your web servers via HTTP/Pipelining for performance gains which cannot be classified as "minor". Our TCP connection count dropped to 1/10th of what it used to be. I've been using HTTP/Pipelining in Firefox since 2004.
If you don't like what Sony is charging... don't buy it. While it does seem like Sony is being a "prick", you aren't entitled to Whitney Houston music at some price. Worst case, just wait, it will go back down. However, it does seem a bit tasteless for Sony. But no one is forcing anyone to buy anything.
Even the only version of *NIX successful with consumers en masse, i.e., Mac OS X, is mediocre at gaming. (typing this up on my Mac).
And the other reason - Windows Media Center. Using the XBox360 as a media extender to watch things I've recorded with Windows 7 is very nice. Sorry, not interested in screwing around with MythTV et al.
I saw Skype character (executive) singing the praises of MS acquiring them and extolling the synergies because both Skype and MS innovated, blah, blah, blah. It was at that point I stopped the video, he had nothing meaningful to say. It was just rhetoric. MS hasn't innovated in 20 years. Windows 7 is good (whatever Mac OS X/LINUX people, it's great for gaming) but MS has drawn its revenues from product lines that are now decades old. That is not innovation.
Arguably one could give MS a point for the XBox360. However a gaming console isn't innovating. On a tangent they can be awarded points for XBox Live which is more robust for multi-player gaming and has engendered strong communities. Sony's PSN isn't as strong, something you'll consistently hear from many people, including those who cover the video game industry, e.g., Machinima.com.
There tends to be a lot of fanboy hatred against MS but the reasons people cite are generally crap. I live in Seattle and many tech people I've talked agree that MS' biggest problem is the person at the top - Steve Ballmer. He has no vision whatsoever and at best is a chief operating officer.
Ballmer can't even hire someone to find new locations for retail fronts... so what does he do, he opens stores by Apple's . Microsoft erected a big(ger) store just a few doors down from Apple's in one of the malls in the Seattle area (Bellevue Square). MS couldn't even pick some other part of the mall, it had to be close to Apple's. Wow, just wow.
I stream lots of content off the Net. Beyond that, I have Windows 7 on a desktop with an HDTV tuner card and over the air antenna and record lots of content with it. I then watch the recorded content on my HDTV by way of the Windows Media Center extension capabilities of the XBox360. (Aside: Spare me fanboy stuff) If you have an iDevice, check out RemotePotato. You can control what Windows Media Center records and stream videos to your iDevice when you're afar from home. With Netflix (streaming + discs), Hulu+ and recording shows over the air, it's difficult to keep up with all the content choices afforded to me. You might consider also using PlayOn which allows you to view Hulu content on your HDTV by way of the gaming consoles which can act as DLNA clients.
The irony is that if open source people didn't have a target to emulate, there's tons of things that would have never been written since a baseline and mindshare in the overall tech market wouldn't have existed:
lex = flex yacc = bison sh = bash UNIX = LINUX vi = vim
To name just a few.
So your complaint about "proprietary" falls on deaf ears. If nothing else, what you call proprietary seeds things.
Some projects are worthwhile, this smells of things like "ReactOS", i.e. something I would never use. I would suggest to the people on this project to go contribute to open source projects that would get people to even have an inclination of using a LINUX desktop.
Take the 7 year old boy that was executed by the Taliban in Afghanistan some weeks ago for being a "spy". The mere fact that we're in America lulls us into thinking of "entitlement". We wind up taking for granted the things we do have vs. the things we don't.
As Cheryl Crow sang, "It's wanting what you've got." What you are eluding to is social engineering by the government ("forced" - your word not mine) which doesn't work. Go join the Taliban.
This isn't shocking. IT is not a career based on soft skills. When you're early in your IT career you don't think about it much but the day will come where it can become a problem if your career isn't switched to "soft skills" (aka management). IT is about what you've done in the last year and/or whether your chosen skills continue to be pertinent in the IT marketplace. When was the last time you saw a posting for say Microsoft's COM? Was all the rage in say 1996. As individuals get married and have kids their ability to keep up with what's "vogue" goes south. It's just a fact of life. All you 25 somethings might say "It will never happen to me, I'll keep up with 'X' forever!" but to quote the late John Lennon of "The Beatles" fame, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."
To my knowledge Microsoft doesn't provide the source to psexec & DropMyRights either. The only reason I'm proselytizing what I've written is because it has a user friendly installer.
psexec & DropMyRights assume you're familiar with the command line.
Use the command line tools if you prefer.
Other than that, the end result of what you get from MS' tools and mine do not defer.
They're command line tools... your average user knows squat about the command line.
Allso, as I pointed out in my original post, many an IT professional that I've pointed them out to "doesn't get it".
The crux of what I've done is the installer. It creates shortcuts and labels them "SecureIE" & "SecureFirefox". As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. A turnkey solution increases user adoption by a very wide margin. I remember when I tried via IM to get a friend to use the command line tools and create shortcuts, I realized as I struggled to get them working that he wasn't putting a space between the.EXE being executed and the first argument, in the shortcut. What's obvious to me isn't obvious to others. Again, this is why the installer is a big deal.
Lastly, the command line tools have a dependency on the Win32 console runtime. If you create shortcuts and use them, there's a momentary flash. If you use these with average users (I'm not/. people) it changes what they're used to seeing and may cause them to reject what you've done since their experience changes. "What's that flash? What's that mean? Is something bad happening? You sure this won't do something bad?"
Again, I was motivated to do this based on my own personal experiences with evangelizing the command line tools.
-M
PS: As for the command line tools, psexec & DropMyRights -- Google them.
You are talking nonsense. When it comes to running an application such as a browser, there is no reason for it to be modifying the registry, the program files directory, etc., etc., etc.
The issue is that Microsoft never exposed a tool for *average* (note emphasis on AVERAGE) end users to leverage the power CreateRestrictedToken affords.
Currently, when creating a shortcut you can through its Advanced properties have Windows prompt you to change your user credentials but when SP2 came out Microsoft should have added a way to strip admin rights. A no brainer imho and *trivial* to implement.
There are many factors at play, including among them in house politics at Microsoft. In particular the fact that they don't have a central figure with the ability to dictate security policy among their product groups. A security czar if you will. Imagine if there was the equivalent of a Steve Jobs inside of Microsoft but the only thing he was worried about was security *THEN* shyt would get done.
Otherwise you have one too many individuals with "security" in their title with no ability to dictate policy in products. Developers inside of Microsoft are pressured by managers to make product deadlines so MS can show growth to the stockholders (hint: none of them are thinking about security) and the end result is nothing progressive, creative and user friendly on the security front gets done. This Dilbert strip eludes to what I'm talking about:
http://flickr.com/photos/fucuyama/3002208273/
What's more you have individuals like the guys on ZDNet's Security blog who love to post about the latest flaws in applications, whether they be QuickTime or Microsoft Office but never point out that many of these issues can be severely mitigated by not running with administrative credentials.
The "principle of least privilege" gives you the most bang for the buck when it comes to security yet Microsoft has been woefully bad at empowering Windows XP desktop users which lead to Windows' reputation of being insecure. Many security issues that are specific to an application, whether it's IE, Office, QuickTime, Adobe's PDF reader, etc., etc. become way less interesting when you remove administrative rights.
That's why there's 300,000 viruses in the Windows universe and like 7 on Mac OS X. Because Mac OS X has never had people running with administrative rights.
Vista with UAC is a big step in the right direction. Windows 7 presumably will cache the fact that you've approved an installer to do something and let it run its course up until the process (associated with the installer) terminates. This would eliminate prompting users multiple times and annoying the hell out of them.
Slashdot Mirror
And also the socialist minded society that lives there. An excerpt from a new story recently:
------
PARIS - The head of US tyremaker Titan has mocked French workers for putting in only "three hours" a day and said his company would be "stupid" to take over a troubled French factory.
The letter from Titan CEO Maurice Taylor to French Industrial Renewal Minister Arnaud Montebourg was in response to a request for Titan to consider investing in a loss-making Goodyear plant in Amiens, northern France.
"I have visited that factory a couple of times. The French workforce gets paid high wages but only works three hours," Taylor said in the letter, dated February 8 and obtained by French business daily Les Echos.
"They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that's the French way!"
Goodyear said last month it was set to close the plant, which employs 1,173 workers, following five years of failed talks with unions.
Valve hires incredibly self-motivated and talented people. Most people are *NOT* incredibly self-motivated so taking Valve as a role model for the rest of workplace environments is utter foolishness. As the late and famous physicist Einstein once eluded to, the only thing larger than the universe is human stupidity, that's what you're drawing from if you try to think "big picture". So um, no.
Or said plugins don't even exist (I mean, same code, same author) and the problem never has a chance to manifest itself in Chrome. In my experience plugin management, or lack thereof, by ignorant users is one big problem compounded by a-hole companies installing plugins that have major performance ramifications (not of the positive kind) without even asking -- "Skype anyone?". Then again, some people don't know any better so it goes back to the ignorant part.
Yes, Firefox did fall behind the curve but that was with the 3.6.x branch. I don't find arguments of "Chrome is faster" to hold up to scrutiny, just do a search on the topic and be objective about what's being divulged.
And if you ever find yourself tethering, Firefox for many years has been the only major browser that supported HTTP pipelining, something that's been part of the HTTP/1.1 specification since 1999... yet Chrome just got or is just getting around to it (I knew it was recently added in the Chromium channel). While I applaud Google with the SPDY extensions, the HTTP servers you speak to with Chrome have to explicitly support the SPDY extensions, i.e. there's still a LOT of web servers out there that do not do SPDY. HTTP/Pipelining on the other hand has been in place for forever and it is not a question of web server operators have to update their existing web servers for end users to benefit. If you are on a higher latency connection, HTTP/Pipelining can make a *BIG* difference.
Finally, if you use Akamai (Content Distribution Network) to delivery of web content to your customers, Akamai funnels traffic to your web servers via HTTP/Pipelining for performance gains which cannot be classified as "minor". Our TCP connection count dropped to 1/10th of what it used to be. I've been using HTTP/Pipelining in Firefox since 2004.
I concur.
Annoying that is. Your average person will likely welcome it.
aka Mediocrity-R-Us
If you don't like what Sony is charging... don't buy it. While it does seem like Sony is being a "prick", you aren't entitled to Whitney Houston music at some price. Worst case, just wait, it will go back down. However, it does seem a bit tasteless for Sony. But no one is forcing anyone to buy anything.
Even the only version of *NIX successful with consumers en masse, i.e., Mac OS X, is mediocre at gaming. (typing this up on my Mac).
And the other reason - Windows Media Center. Using the XBox360 as a media extender to watch things I've recorded with Windows 7 is very nice. Sorry, not interested in screwing around with MythTV et al.
I saw Skype character (executive) singing the praises of MS acquiring them and extolling the synergies because both Skype and MS innovated, blah, blah, blah. It was at that point I stopped the video, he had nothing meaningful to say. It was just rhetoric. MS hasn't innovated in 20 years. Windows 7 is good (whatever Mac OS X/LINUX people, it's great for gaming) but MS has drawn its revenues from product lines that are now decades old. That is not innovation.
Arguably one could give MS a point for the XBox360. However a gaming console isn't innovating. On a tangent they can be awarded points for XBox Live which is more robust for multi-player gaming and has engendered strong communities. Sony's PSN isn't as strong, something you'll consistently hear from many people, including those who cover the video game industry, e.g., Machinima.com.
There tends to be a lot of fanboy hatred against MS but the reasons people cite are generally crap. I live in Seattle and many tech people I've talked agree that MS' biggest problem is the person at the top - Steve Ballmer. He has no vision whatsoever and at best is a chief operating officer.
Ballmer can't even hire someone to find new locations for retail fronts... so what does he do, he opens stores by Apple's . Microsoft erected a big(ger) store just a few doors down from Apple's in one of the malls in the Seattle area (Bellevue Square). MS couldn't even pick some other part of the mall, it had to be close to Apple's. Wow, just wow.
We all know who the omega is here.
-M
"Why in my days..." (use your imagination to fill in the rest)
Not the 1% who use LINUX desktops. Spare me the trolling. I like Ubuntu a lot, but I'm a tech person. Most people aren't, get over it.
I stream lots of content off the Net. Beyond that, I have Windows 7 on a desktop with an HDTV tuner card and over the air antenna and record lots of content with it. I then watch the recorded content on my HDTV by way of the Windows Media Center extension capabilities of the XBox360. (Aside: Spare me fanboy stuff) If you have an iDevice, check out RemotePotato. You can control what Windows Media Center records and stream videos to your iDevice when you're afar from home. With Netflix (streaming + discs), Hulu+ and recording shows over the air, it's difficult to keep up with all the content choices afforded to me. You might consider also using PlayOn which allows you to view Hulu content on your HDTV by way of the gaming consoles which can act as DLNA clients.
The irony is that if open source people didn't have a target to emulate, there's tons of things that would have never been written since a baseline and mindshare in the overall tech market wouldn't have existed:
lex = flex
yacc = bison
sh = bash
UNIX = LINUX
vi = vim
To name just a few.
So your complaint about "proprietary" falls on deaf ears. If nothing else, what you call proprietary seeds things.
Some projects are worthwhile, this smells of things like "ReactOS", i.e. something I would never use. I would suggest to the people on this project to go contribute to open source projects that would get people to even have an inclination of using a LINUX desktop.
Take the 7 year old boy that was executed by the Taliban in Afghanistan some weeks ago for being a "spy". The mere fact that we're in America lulls us into thinking of "entitlement". We wind up taking for granted the things we do have vs. the things we don't.
As Cheryl Crow sang, "It's wanting what you've got." What you are eluding to is social engineering by the government ("forced" - your word not mine) which doesn't work. Go join the Taliban.
This isn't shocking. IT is not a career based on soft skills. When you're early in your IT career you don't think about it much but the day will come where it can become a problem if your career isn't switched to "soft skills" (aka management). IT is about what you've done in the last year and/or whether your chosen skills continue to be pertinent in the IT marketplace. When was the last time you saw a posting for say Microsoft's COM? Was all the rage in say 1996. As individuals get married and have kids their ability to keep up with what's "vogue" goes south. It's just a fact of life. All you 25 somethings might say "It will never happen to me, I'll keep up with 'X' forever!" but to quote the late John Lennon of "The Beatles" fame, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."
That's what they sound like, i.e., leaf blowers, when watching Flash video. It's welcome but Adobe/Macromedia should have done this *years* ago.
I live.
When they say they want to get involved in the games industry.
Actually, you do get the source code to DropMyRights.
My code is just 100 lines including lots of boiler plate statements.
Not that big of a deal codewise. The big deal is using any of these to remove admin rights.
As I said, use whatever you want.
-M
To my knowledge Microsoft doesn't provide the source to psexec & DropMyRights either. The only reason I'm proselytizing what I've written is because it has a user friendly installer.
psexec & DropMyRights assume you're familiar with the command line.
Use the command line tools if you prefer.
Other than that, the end result of what you get from MS' tools and mine do not defer.
-M
PS: FYI, it's not a plugin.
They're command line tools... your average user knows squat about the command line.
Allso, as I pointed out in my original post, many an IT professional that I've pointed them out to "doesn't get it".
The crux of what I've done is the installer. It creates shortcuts and labels them "SecureIE" & "SecureFirefox". As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. A turnkey solution increases user adoption by a very wide margin. I remember when I tried via IM to get a friend to use the command line tools and create shortcuts, I realized as I struggled to get them working that he wasn't putting a space between the .EXE being executed and the first argument, in the shortcut. What's obvious to me isn't obvious to others. Again, this is why the installer is a big deal.
Lastly, the command line tools have a dependency on the Win32 console runtime. If you create shortcuts and use them, there's a momentary flash. If you use these with average users (I'm not /. people) it changes what they're used to seeing and may cause them to reject what you've done since their experience changes. "What's that flash? What's that mean? Is something bad happening? You sure this won't do something bad?"
Again, I was motivated to do this based on my own personal experiences with evangelizing the command line tools.
-M
PS: As for the command line tools, psexec & DropMyRights -- Google them.
You are talking nonsense. When it comes to running an application such as a browser, there is no reason for it to be modifying the registry, the program files directory, etc., etc., etc.
Another /. troller.
-M
Mark Russinovich's tool, psexec, allows you to do it with the "-l" switch and DropMyRights:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb456992.aspx
The issue is that Microsoft never exposed a tool for *average* (note emphasis on AVERAGE) end users to leverage the power CreateRestrictedToken affords.
Currently, when creating a shortcut you can through its Advanced properties have Windows prompt you to change your user credentials but when SP2 came out Microsoft should have added a way to strip admin rights. A no brainer imho and *trivial* to implement.
-M
There are many factors at play, including among them in house politics at Microsoft. In particular the fact that they don't have a central figure with the ability to dictate security policy among their product groups. A security czar if you will. Imagine if there was the equivalent of a Steve Jobs inside of Microsoft but the only thing he was worried about was security *THEN* shyt would get done.
Otherwise you have one too many individuals with "security" in their title with no ability to dictate policy in products. Developers inside of Microsoft are pressured by managers to make product deadlines so MS can show growth to the stockholders (hint: none of them are thinking about security) and the end result is nothing progressive, creative and user friendly on the security front gets done. This Dilbert strip eludes to what I'm talking about:
http://flickr.com/photos/fucuyama/3002208273/
What's more you have individuals like the guys on ZDNet's Security blog who love to post about the latest flaws in applications, whether they be QuickTime or Microsoft Office but never point out that many of these issues can be severely mitigated by not running with administrative credentials.
The "principle of least privilege" gives you the most bang for the buck when it comes to security yet Microsoft has been woefully bad at empowering Windows XP desktop users which lead to Windows' reputation of being insecure. Many security issues that are specific to an application, whether it's IE, Office, QuickTime, Adobe's PDF reader, etc., etc. become way less interesting when you remove administrative rights.
That's why there's 300,000 viruses in the Windows universe and like 7 on Mac OS X. Because Mac OS X has never had people running with administrative rights.
Vista with UAC is a big step in the right direction. Windows 7 presumably will cache the fact that you've approved an installer to do something and let it run its course up until the process (associated with the installer) terminates. This would eliminate prompting users multiple times and annoying the hell out of them.
-M