I've never been infected by any email viruses. Why? I use Outlook. But I'm always on the most recent version with the latest patches.
The reality is that older software is always going to have known bugs. We can't make it a criminal offense to still be running Outlook 97... but how do we, or rather Microsoft, convince people to be on the latest version with the latest patches?
You can't hold Microsoft liable because they already fixed the problem. I suppose you could say that they have to provide free upgrades. But what will that do to the initial price of the product?
I think you are confused. As an analogy, I come from a family of farmers so I'm familiar with stories of people helping to pull cars out of ditches. That is, someone would be driving down the road in winter, put their car in a ditch and stop by the door of a nearby farm to ask for helping pulling car out of ditch.
Farmer would take tractor and chains, go attach them to car and pull car out.
Ok, but about 20-30 years ago a new trend developed. If the car was damaged in the process of pulling it out of the ditch, the car owner would end up filing a lawsuit against the farmer for breaking his car.
So farmers stopped pulling cars out of ditches.
As another counter point, if the law exempts software which is given away for free, this will simply result in market force changes. All software will be given away for free, but you have to pay $50 for the box it comes in. Or the software will be free, but it'll suck so bad you need to hire consultants to install it at $200/hour.
If the goal is high quality software everywhere, and you think you can achieve this goal through liability lawsuits... then you can't have massive loopholes.
"In a way, these petty vandals are doing us all a favor by forcing us to harden our systems."
There is a great deal of evidence that suggests the Anthrax letter attacks on US citizens last fall were instigated by a scientist in the US who is part of the research projects on biological weapons. They suspect that his motivation was to prove just how weak and defenseless our nations infrastructure for defense against such attacks, and to help motivate Congress to spend additional money on improving it.
Now my question to you is, if this is the case and they catch the perp... should Congress issue him a Medal of Honor and thank him for pointing out our flaws?
Yeah, the two attacks are not directly comparable. But I don't consider the motivations of the script kiddies any less pure. Until people start understanding this and instituting harsh sentences, kiddies will still continue to waste our time and money.
The whole site seems to redirect to this page: http://case.1be.be
I'm not quite clear what he is doing. I think it might be trying to send back a permanent page redirect, and IE does not like it.
Although at one point I turned off friendly http error display on IE and then the site came right up. Next time I tried that, it said it was redirecting to 216.74.64.37/casemod which doesn't seem to respond.
To use Occam's Razor, "Never attribute to malice what can be adequatedly explained by stupidity." I don't think this was intentional, the whole configuration of that web server is just whacked.
That being said, that case is cool! I wouldn't mind something like that at home.:)
Agreed. I'm not a graphic designer either, but I'm willing to admit I lack that talent and go looking for help.
I would recommend spending some time over at alistapart.com reading articles to get some ideas. zeldman.com often has links to other articles or other websites which provide interesting information.
While my website is out of date, I guess I felt that using CSS as suggested in alistapart article made it relatively easy to place content in a format that looked somewhat appealing. It also made it a lot easier to maintain, if I'd take the time to touch it.
As far as some of the other comments here. I would think that the design of a site has everything to do with what content you are trying to provide. Using Flash probably doesn't make sense on an e-commerce site like buy.com, but for a company selling automobiles having Flash and multimedia presentations makes a lot of sense.
As in all things, I think first step is to sit back and identify what you wish to accomplish, what the goals are, and so forth. Then find the technique which best works for those goals.
The web server marketshare is important, but not a leading indicator of the total server market share.
As far as the reports showing tremendous growth of Linux in the server market, these only come from IDC. Both Gartner and Goldman Sachs have published numbers which dramatically dispute the IDC figures.
In the case of both Gartner and Goldman Sachs, they established their numbers by random surveys of corporate purchases. The IDC numbers are apparently "estimated" from Linksys CD shipments, ftp downloads and a variety of other questionable sources.
It's also interesting to note that all reporting of IDC numbers are from 1999 and 2000, whereas the Gartner and Goldman Sachs surveys were done in 2001. If nothing else this indicates that Linux is not a growing market.
As far as the embedded market, Wind River's VxWorks is still the dominant player, with Linux having only a small niche in comparison.
I think you ought to double check your numbers. Linux is nowhere near #2 on servers, or #1 on embedded systems... unless you severely limit your definition of those markets.
Do you really think schools want a 486 computer today? Much less even a 100Mhz Pentium?
How much time and effort would they have to waste configuring such a system?
If the computer is more than 2-3 years old, please don't waste a schools time by donating it unless you intend to donate the time involved to make it work for them.
"and Linux is looking like it will be popular in future;"
I hate to deflate your bubble, but Linux is looking less and less likely to be popular in the future as every day goes by. As the Microsoft juggernaut moves forward, they leave Linux further and further in the dust.
"Also, it's a bad idea because Sun is a competitor of Microsoft, and Linux is challenging Microsoft for the desktop, and your enemies enemy is your friend."
This is also a funny statement, as Sun isn't losing business to Microsoft. They are losing business to Linux. So who is their real competitor?
Yes, overall it sounds like a bad idea for Sun. But then I think the worst idea was them buying StarOffice to begin with. It offered absolutely no value to the company and has only been a resource drain.
Wait, I guess you can't really call it a victory since it's no longer free. I'll bet Richard Stallman would be rolling over in his grave right now if he wasn't still alive.
Prediction: Within 2 years Sun will drop StarOffice from their lineup. Most likely by abandoning it to the Open Source world(see Netscape) and then suing Microsoft to try to recover their investment. (see Netscape)
This prediction is entirely dependent upon an assumption that Sun is not bankrupt in two years... Of course it's possible Microsoft will bail them out, too.:)
"but most of the time problems can be fixed by replacing a part (editing a file)."
The correct analogy is replacing the file. That was my point, which you appear to have missed.
Editing a file would be equivalent to modifying a part. While I have seen this done, the results are seldom satisfying to the automobile owner, but they may be the only option if you have a '63 Cutlass with no source for spares.
"The funny thing is that increasingly, especially amongst the more expensive cars, it is becoming impossible to do any real work on them yourself."
You forgot to mention "... and the consumers of these automobiles don't care, because they are stock brokers, insurance salesman, computer programmers... and they don't want to know how to replace an alternator."
Besides, I've already commented in the past on how stupid the welded shut analogy is. People fix cars by replacing parts, it's equivalent to reinstalling some piece of software. Few home auto mechanics know how to design a car from scratch, nor do they care to know so.
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I've never been infected by any email viruses. Why? I use Outlook. But I'm always on the most recent version with the latest patches.
The reality is that older software is always going to have known bugs. We can't make it a criminal offense to still be running Outlook 97... but how do we, or rather Microsoft, convince people to be on the latest version with the latest patches?
You can't hold Microsoft liable because they already fixed the problem. I suppose you could say that they have to provide free upgrades. But what will that do to the initial price of the product?
I think you are confused. As an analogy, I come from a family of farmers so I'm familiar with stories of people helping to pull cars out of ditches. That is, someone would be driving down the road in winter, put their car in a ditch and stop by the door of a nearby farm to ask for helping pulling car out of ditch.
Farmer would take tractor and chains, go attach them to car and pull car out.
Ok, but about 20-30 years ago a new trend developed. If the car was damaged in the process of pulling it out of the ditch, the car owner would end up filing a lawsuit against the farmer for breaking his car.
So farmers stopped pulling cars out of ditches.
As another counter point, if the law exempts software which is given away for free, this will simply result in market force changes. All software will be given away for free, but you have to pay $50 for the box it comes in. Or the software will be free, but it'll suck so bad you need to hire consultants to install it at $200/hour.
If the goal is high quality software everywhere, and you think you can achieve this goal through liability lawsuits... then you can't have massive loopholes.
"In a way, these petty vandals are doing us all a favor by forcing us to harden our systems."
There is a great deal of evidence that suggests the Anthrax letter attacks on US citizens last fall were instigated by a scientist in the US who is part of the research projects on biological weapons. They suspect that his motivation was to prove just how weak and defenseless our nations infrastructure for defense against such attacks, and to help motivate Congress to spend additional money on improving it.
Now my question to you is, if this is the case and they catch the perp... should Congress issue him a Medal of Honor and thank him for pointing out our flaws?
Yeah, the two attacks are not directly comparable. But I don't consider the motivations of the script kiddies any less pure. Until people start understanding this and instituting harsh sentences, kiddies will still continue to waste our time and money.
The whole site seems to redirect to this page:
:)
http://case.1be.be
I'm not quite clear what he is doing. I think it might be trying to send back a permanent page redirect, and IE does not like it.
Although at one point I turned off friendly http error display on IE and then the site came right up. Next time I tried that, it said it was redirecting to 216.74.64.37/casemod which doesn't seem to respond.
To use Occam's Razor, "Never attribute to malice what can be adequatedly explained by stupidity." I don't think this was intentional, the whole configuration of that web server is just whacked.
That being said, that case is cool! I wouldn't mind something like that at home.
Agreed. I'm not a graphic designer either, but I'm willing to admit I lack that talent and go looking for help.
I would recommend spending some time over at alistapart.com reading articles to get some ideas. zeldman.com often has links to other articles or other websites which provide interesting information.
While my website is out of date, I guess I felt that using CSS as suggested in alistapart article made it relatively easy to place content in a format that looked somewhat appealing. It also made it a lot easier to maintain, if I'd take the time to touch it.
As far as some of the other comments here. I would think that the design of a site has everything to do with what content you are trying to provide. Using Flash probably doesn't make sense on an e-commerce site like buy.com, but for a company selling automobiles having Flash and multimedia presentations makes a lot of sense.
As in all things, I think first step is to sit back and identify what you wish to accomplish, what the goals are, and so forth. Then find the technique which best works for those goals.
Intel already supports DDR for the P4.
/. for industry analysis.
"I can see complications brewing... this should test Intel's mettle."
Wow, remind me not to read
The guy who says "Linux will win" is now claiming every product that Microsoft creates is a complete failure.
Lordy, lordy, if only I could have some of what this guy is smoking!
The web server marketshare is important, but not a leading indicator of the total server market share.
As far as the reports showing tremendous growth of Linux in the server market, these only come from IDC. Both Gartner and Goldman Sachs have published numbers which dramatically dispute the IDC figures.
In the case of both Gartner and Goldman Sachs, they established their numbers by random surveys of corporate purchases. The IDC numbers are apparently "estimated" from Linksys CD shipments, ftp downloads and a variety of other questionable sources.
It's also interesting to note that all reporting of IDC numbers are from 1999 and 2000, whereas the Gartner and Goldman Sachs surveys were done in 2001. If nothing else this indicates that Linux is not a growing market.
As far as the embedded market, Wind River's VxWorks is still the dominant player, with Linux having only a small niche in comparison.
Oops, that's W. Richard Stevens. Just glanced at my copy of APUE and realize I transposed that. :(
I think you ought to double check your numbers. Linux is nowhere near #2 on servers, or #1 on embedded systems... unless you severely limit your definition of those markets.
"Linux can only win."
I always love this statement. I've been hearing it what? For the past 8 years or so.
But even though I keep hearing it over and over and over again, it still hasn't come any closer to reality.
The way I see it is that you have fell victim to your own big delusion.
I've never heard Don Box described as just a .Net engineer. That'd be like calling Richard W. Stevens just a "C programmer."
/. is with the Windows world.
Thanks for the laugh. It's always good to be reminded just how out of touch
That fee was for disposing of your old tires when you bought the new ones.
Has been in every state I have ever bought tires. I sometimes keep the tires because I know farmers who need tires to put on hay wagons.
Do you really think schools want a 486 computer today? Much less even a 100Mhz Pentium?
How much time and effort would they have to waste configuring such a system?
If the computer is more than 2-3 years old, please don't waste a schools time by donating it unless you intend to donate the time involved to make it work for them.
"and Linux is looking like it will be popular in future;"
I hate to deflate your bubble, but Linux is looking less and less likely to be popular in the future as every day goes by. As the Microsoft juggernaut moves forward, they leave Linux further and further in the dust.
"Also, it's a bad idea because Sun is a competitor of Microsoft, and Linux is challenging Microsoft for the desktop, and your enemies enemy is your friend."
This is also a funny statement, as Sun isn't losing business to Microsoft. They are losing business to Linux. So who is their real competitor?
Yes, overall it sounds like a bad idea for Sun. But then I think the worst idea was them buying StarOffice to begin with. It offered absolutely no value to the company and has only been a resource drain.
Sun is making the same mistakes as Novell.
Wait, I guess you can't really call it a victory since it's no longer free. I'll bet Richard Stallman would be rolling over in his grave right now if he wasn't still alive.
:)
Prediction: Within 2 years Sun will drop StarOffice from their lineup. Most likely by abandoning it to the Open Source world(see Netscape) and then suing Microsoft to try to recover their investment. (see Netscape)
This prediction is entirely dependent upon an assumption that Sun is not bankrupt in two years... Of course it's possible Microsoft will bail them out, too.
How about I just push it out via a Group Policy, so the next time you double click on the icon it installs automatically?
Sounds pretty easy to me.
Time intensive?
Pretty easy, mention Microsoft is evil and you shouldn't buy their product...
instant hits!
Of course since Olds didn't make a Cutlass in '63 that would explain the unavailability of parts. So let's use a '63 Chevy as a better example. :)
"but most of the time problems can be fixed by replacing a part (editing a file)."
The correct analogy is replacing the file. That was my point, which you appear to have missed.
Editing a file would be equivalent to modifying a part. While I have seen this done, the results are seldom satisfying to the automobile owner, but they may be the only option if you have a '63 Cutlass with no source for spares.
Compare hitting the Advanced button and clicking on the Monitor tab...
with
changing one line in your XFree86 configuration file.
If you don't know where the config file is, how do you find it?
But again most people don't care about that much detail on their car. If the alternator doesn't work, you buy a new one.
Same with my PC... if the memory doesn't work I don't disassemble it and try to figure out why. I just buy new parts.
The analogy is just really poor.
"The funny thing is that increasingly, especially amongst the more expensive cars, it is becoming impossible to do any real work on them yourself."
... and they don't want to know how to replace an alternator."
You forgot to mention "... and the consumers of these automobiles don't care, because they are stock brokers, insurance salesman, computer programmers
Besides, I've already commented in the past on how stupid the welded shut analogy is. People fix cars by replacing parts, it's equivalent to reinstalling some piece of software. Few home auto mechanics know how to design a car from scratch, nor do they care to know so.
Yes. Excel will open up as a background process and you can manipulate it however you want via COM interfaces.
Every month there is a new article telling us how Linux will prevail... Been going on since at least 1997.
Who actually cares anymore?