Color screens are subjective I think.. I may just be falling into learned helplessness because good, greyscale palms are no longer available. I do personally like the color Tungsten T screen (apparently the T2 is better), but obviously have never seen a greyscale one.
I read a paper once that said that men in particular are confused by color, advertisers have picked up on this and it is apprently the reason behind a lot of the black and white beer commercials that used to be shown on TV (Miller, I think). I have also noticed that while Apple commercials are not black and white, they tend to use very few colors with extremely simple (usually white) backgrounds. It might be interesting to see them offer that as an option again, I would probably be interested in it too on the modern PDAs.
I agree about simplicity being the most important feature, but if you have ever seen a Tungsten T.. you would know it is one of the more simple PDAs you can buy right now that doesn't look like a cheap toy. In fact, I would say it has better usability than my old Palm IIIxe with its superior display (higher resolution, color, and fonts), collapsable panel to hide the graffiti area, and size.
It does have some features that may seem unnecessary to most people such as bluetooth, voice recording, and a CD filled with third-party apps.. but the important thing is that these features do NOT increase the overall complexity of the interface. Unlike Sony handhelds that have buttons all over the place, Palm has only the necessary, core function buttons (power, address book, to-do list, memo, calendar, maybe a hold button.. can't remember) that have been standard on PalmOS devices for many years.
Of course, all of those features that sit there unused increase the cost of the unit:( I think the design and interface of the Tungsten T is great for people like myself that are confused by lots of extra buttons and features. If only it were not $300.00..
quakeworld physics sucked, netquake was where it was at.. too bad nobody plays that game anymore. I never could get into quakeworld or quake2/quake3 because of the feel of those later games.
Not going to happen in my lifetime I think.. I used to like the application too, and use it currently with about 200 NS4 users. However, the last time that I checked.. there were no plans to bring it back, ever. Netscape 4 is old enough now (and getting worse web-page support every day), that I wouldn't wait for that feature. People would rather have a good web browser than the nsnotify mail checking application.
Basically what I plan to do is just explain that netscape does the same thing, except instead of having the envelope in the system tray, netscape has to be running in the taskbar. People keep netscape open most of the time anyway, either in a browser window or their Messenger application. nsnotify had its own problems (like cancel closing the application, and very inefficient mailbox-checking code), the way mail is handled in NS7 is actually much better, but people just need to be retrained a little bit. I hoped also that the user interface would stay the same, but I would not call this a required feature by any means.
One thing I never understood about these games is that if it is going to be over $10.00 per month, why would they still charge $50.00 for the software? They will cite server maintenance and bandwidth as the reason for the subscription, but I think we all know they will make a huge profit on the subscription alone. There is no way that cost is just to cover one person's bandwidth needs. Normal games cost that much and they don't have subscriptions, most even offer free services that users can connect to to play online (Blizzard's battlenet, for example). If the software is useless without a subscription.. they should just flood the market with CDs like AOL does or offer to mail you one. I guess the market will pay that much, but I would think that you could make more money in the long run by just giving away the software and charging for the service. That might also draw more people in that wouldn't consider buying this because of the subscription requirement.
heh.. I'd expect a Windows game these day to work correctly after about 8 point releases. Some are better than others, but many Windows games (seems like mostly RPGs) out of the box are notoriously unstable and buggy. Granted that linux or Mac games wouldn't be any better, the same fact is true for all platforms: most big games are complex as hell and you don't make any money while your game is in initial development/testing.
Mozilla isn't really intended to be an enduser product.. its primary purpose is for testing. However, because of its stability and major releases, it seems to be appealing to endusers.. but mostly tech-saavy power users IMHO. Netscape is the product for the masses, it will have a more polished interface than mozilla and it has name recognition. It will also undergo more testing (both bug and usability) than an average milestone of mozilla. Then there is the matter of application support, netscape7 will be supported more often than mozilla. Even though anything that works with NS7 should work in mozilla, name recognition and specific quirks with releases make this somewhat important.
Notice how NS7.02 is still based on a very early build of mozilla, the focus of Netscape 7 is on stability (in terms of the interface and functionality) and not on cutting edge features that are typically found in mozilla milestones. Most people do not need the features found in mozilla, which makes netscape 7 very appealing.
well, if the developers/company thought that they should write to the standard and leave it up to the client to render the standard.. then we wouldn't have this problem of hotmail, msn, whatever using the passed user agent to block access to people using client X. That is the point of this thread, those sites have a history of introducing rendering error into Opera/Mozilla (to name a few) to make it appear that the user is using a sub-standard product (IE renders correctly of course). Guess what, spoofing as IE makes the page render correctly in mozilla or opera..
routing and infrastructure and QoS maybe? You wouldn't connect the city of New York into one gigantic hub would you? The only thing your wireless repeater network would do is pass broadcasts around..
Then use Netscape 7 instead.. it is designed for UI stability and the average end-user. You can use mozilla (which is a technology test) as your primary browser and email client, but don't cry to the developers when they make some major changes to the user interface. It is their job to hack on mozilla, adding cool new features and trying out new things. Netscape then looks at these and creates and end-user product out of it.. they take the codebase and turn it into a product for the average user. Their focus is not on cool features, but on creating good, usable software that appeals not to hackers.. but to the average user.
I still like Netscape 7 for businesses to use inside of their corporations for email and a web browser. There are still many businesses that are using Netscape 4.. and Netscape 7 looks like the best upgrade path. While I have been using mozilla since the M13 days.. I would never consider mozilla as a replacement for NS4 on our desktops. Netscape 7 will undergo more testing, and has a more stable user interface than mozilla. Netscape 7 is also more likely than mozilla to have vendor support for web-based applications. Name recognition is also a factor in my mind.. from the point of view of the users, they will eventually get Netscape 4 upgrade to 7.. rather than Netscape 4 to mozilla.
As for the bloat and advertising, that was removed one morning with the CCK and some configuration hacking. With java, the minimal version was about 10MB less than Netscape 7.02. The only disadvantage that I can think of is that Netscape 7 will not pick up the latest and greatest features of mozilla, but only power users and care about the latest features of mozilla and so I don't see this as a big problem.
They may not have a choice.. bandwidth usage has increased far beyond what it was in the pre-napster days. Because of the new applications for the Internet, the old model doesn't work as well as it used to. An ISPs survival might depend on them rate-limiting or using metered bandwidth models. Customers won't like it at first, but they will get used to it when there are no more ISPs offering unlimited access plans. By then, you can either stop using the Internet or use your ISPs new plan.
If the problem gets out of control, ISPs will have to either meter bandwidth usage and charge customers per byte (like the electric company currently works), or they will have to create tiers (tier1 might be an email / casual web user, tier2 might be a heavier web user or someone that streams audio files, and tier3 would be an ISP's worst nightmare). Using tiers, they can keep rates the same per month, but there would be a transmitted/received byte cap on each tier. This way, you can have an always-on connection for $30.00 per month with low latency and high bandwidth, but there is a mechanism in place to prevent you from downloading N gigabytes during the billing period.
While the popular unlimited access model is great now, I agree that its days are numbered.. If the big ISPs drop their unlimited access pricing models and smaller ISPs refuse to do so, I would guess that all of the power users will move to the little ISP with the unlimited access plan. This will cause the little ISP to have a customer base of ISO-downloading, matrix-watching users who will eventually either drive the little ISP out of business or force the ISP to adopt a model similar to the big ones.
Well, seeing as how this article is targeted at the average user, doing a clean install should be left out. As someone else has mentioned, a clean install has no place in any kind of regular computer maintenance schedule for the average user. Now for the rest of us, we won't be reading the newspaper to figure out the best ways to do maintenance.
As you mention, separation of OS and data using partitions gives you quite a bit of flexibility when doing repairs (OS mysteriously implodes, scanner software kills machine, etc). But, there is an important difference between repairs and maintenance. Maintenance means you are cleaning/tuning a functioning computer, perhaps backing up files, removing stale desktop shortcuts, reorganizing files, etc. This means that your computer is NOT crashing and slow.. like the article says. Repairs are when something bad is happening, maybe your computer's performance is slow or the machine blue screens twice a day.. then you need to restore the machine's state to one in which it was functioning properly.. possibly using a clean install.
I think they have good ideas for general system maintenance, cleaning the desktop, programs listing, and re-arranging data into one root data folder (after a full data backup). But, they seem to mix two different problems into one story, and giving some irresponsible advice in the process. The article implies that it will be some kind of "spring cleaning" for your computer, to the average reader this means that computer at home they use to check email and surf the web with. Then they go onto mention that the reader should consider a clean install as part of their "spring cleaning" (yes, I know there is a warning, but why even mention it?).
Through my own experience as a user and computer tech, it is my conclusion that Windows NT-based systems do not need to be rebuilt annually like 9x used to under average use. People who simply use their computers as a means to an end (who are actually a good target for the article), do not install a lot of third-party software. They simply sit in front of their pre-configured machines at home and use the thing. The other types of users are the ones that usually end up doing clean installs of their operating system, those are the ones that like to tinker with their systems. If you know enough to be dangerous, you will be doing this on a regular basis. If you know what kind of software poses a risk to your computer, then you will be able to tinker with your computer for many years without the need for a re-install, providing you are using a modern operating system.
Mozilla is very hack-friendly, most simple customizations like remapping the keyboard are found here. The deeper you get, the more technical the documentation becomes, but that is what is so great about open software like mozilla IMHO. If you ever have a need for that kind of information, it's there.. use software like IE and you're stuck with what your vendor provides.
I think that type-ahead-find in mozilla is a great feature as well, but it does kill off keyboard mappings in its current state. Hopefully when it becomes more mature it will require a leader for all searches or at least leave it as a preference to the user. I had remapped mozilla with a vi-like keyboard interface that worked out well until type-ahead-find came along. The only thing better than using hjkl for navigation is type-ahead-find in mozilla:P
This is a good ethical question, I'm not sure whether or not it is right or wrong either. My personal opinion is that it is wrong because the party responsible for altering the webpage knows that the contents of that webpage will be read and executed by computers that do not belong to them. The owners of the infected machines are responsible for securing their machines, but their inability to do so does not give the average user the right to do anything about it. The problem could instead be reported to the user's ISP, who can take appropriate actions based on their TOS agreement with the individual who's computer is infected.
However if I remember my ethics class correctly, their is also the argument that greatest good for the population is the best thing to do. In this case, shutting down these machines is the greater good vs. leaving them running, wasting bandwidth, sending email, or whatever this thing does. Having said that, I still can't get over the first point.. IMHO the problem is best handled by the individual's ISP, and everybody else should only report the problem instead of running arbitrary code on other people's machines (and yes, technically they are not actually running the code as others have pointed out.. but you know what I mean).
That is a good interview.. an interesting find about the virus protection too. I think this goes to show that the average computer user and the media just do not understand the basics about computer viruses. I see this quite a bit, where users are deleting jdbgmgr.exe and wondering how somebody got access to their email and sent bulk messages (klez). I wouldn't expect the average email-sending, web-browsing,.doc-writing user to understand technical details about viruses, but maybe there is a problem here?
The media doesn't help much either, by making announcements without consulting someone before warning their viewers/listeners about the latest virus threat. Also, ignorant or uninformed techs can be quick to blame every problem on a "virus" when they do not know the answer to something.. And then there is the word of mouth method that Robertson mentions.. I had not thought of that one but it makes a lot of sense.. uninformed users telling each other of how their computer was destroyed by a virus when in fact the computer may have stopped working for other reasons.
So as a result, virus scanners seem to be required now to operate a Windows computer.. even inside of corporations where email is scanned at the mail-server level. I would say that scanners for other systems are probably not required yet, but they will be if the platform ever becomes popular. Linux-based systems have a lot going for them though to make viruses less of a threat right now though, fragmentation of communications software and better security histories for some of the more common ones (mozilla, netscape 7) come to mind.
My opinion on scanners for the corporate desktop is that the users should not know that the scanner is there. Any modern scanner can do automatic updates in the background.. nobody is going to see it or messages from it unless some virus manages to sneak passed the email server which scans for viruses and is updated even more frequently than the workstations. The only kind that have been bypassing the servers that I have heard about are the social, hoax viruses.. jdbgmgr.exe and such.
Re:"Stacks" in Longhorn like "Piles" in Panther?
on
Looking at Longhorn
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Why would they call it "piles".. am I the only person that always associates that word with this?
I was thinking about this too, if they target the teenage market (maybe they are already) and offer some kind of pre-paid account that parents can put $20.00 into or so.. they might be onto something big. That age group puts a LOT of money into the music and movie industries.. this service looks like something they would use. I don't think this will be as popular among adults or college students, they will probably either buy CDs or download music via p2p applications.
If you are on broadband and they buffer the audio file over to your computer from the Apple high-bandwidth server farm, playback will start after a few seconds when you push the Buy button. As somebody else mentioned, instant gratification is the most important feature of this service that CDs and p2p can not offer. That will make it very attractive to the average teenage computer user over traditional p2p applications that tend to be less reliable and unfriendly. This might be very addicting to those who don't pay the bills.. I can see this generating some monster bills for parents like when AOL was a relatively new service.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that can't be done in windows.. It can not out of the box AFAIK, but with free third party software it certainly can.. unxutils is a good example.
Yep, you are quite right.. I think IT is quick to point the finger back at the "stupid end users" because they are easy to blame. But as you say, IT is partially to blame if these kinds of things happen (users have to juggle ten sets of usernames/passwords just to get their jobs done, employees feeling they have to share their passwords with others, lack of quality training, etc). I think smart cards are a great idea, I know where I work they are being deployed in very small areas because of lack of funding. But, with most employees carrying around IDs now with magnetic stripes, putting in smart card readers all over the place is a great way to reduce the number of PIN numbers, usernames/passwords, and such that employees are forced to remember.
If the company can not do that, at least try for single signon (in software) for as much stuff as you can. It is easy to just put a bunch of little authentication mechanisms in place, but the endusers will appreciate you taking the extra time to invesigate alternative authentication mechanisms in your apps.
Well, I think you answered your own question about mozilla being a technology test. You can't be on the bleeding edge of browser technology and have stable platform I am afraid.. netscape 7 is more polished if that is more important to you. Those things are changed because they actually improve usability.. the old setting was found to be bad, and so they improved it in the next version.
As a windows tech primarily, I carry around a bunch of CDs and a floppy or two as far as software goes:
- CD with commonly used drivers in the environment (currently about 550MB) - CD with commonly used software on enduser machines - CD with utilites used by me, those contain lots of things such as unixutils from sf.net, resource kit support tools from NT and 2000, registry monitor from sysinternals.com - Windows NT and 2000 CD, used mostly for the recovery console - bootable floppy with cd-rom drivers, fdisk, format, edit - bootable disc images w/ imaging software for about three classes of machines in case the above tools fail:O
More and more, however, I have been fixing software problems remotely without leaving the office. Obviously I still have to handle hardware problems, but most software problems I see are corrupted email profiles/mail caches, deleted desktop shortcuts, and hung processes.
Slashdot Mirror
Color screens are subjective I think.. I may just be falling into learned helplessness because good, greyscale palms are no longer available. I do personally like the color Tungsten T screen (apparently the T2 is better), but obviously have never seen a greyscale one.
I read a paper once that said that men in particular are confused by color, advertisers have picked up on this and it is apprently the reason behind a lot of the black and white beer commercials that used to be shown on TV (Miller, I think). I have also noticed that while Apple commercials are not black and white, they tend to use very few colors with extremely simple (usually white) backgrounds. It might be interesting to see them offer that as an option again, I would probably be interested in it too on the modern PDAs.
I agree about simplicity being the most important feature, but if you have ever seen a Tungsten T.. you would know it is one of the more simple PDAs you can buy right now that doesn't look like a cheap toy. In fact, I would say it has better usability than my old Palm IIIxe with its superior display (higher resolution, color, and fonts), collapsable panel to hide the graffiti area, and size.
:( I think the design and interface of the Tungsten T is great for people like myself that are confused by lots of extra buttons and features. If only it were not $300.00..
It does have some features that may seem unnecessary to most people such as bluetooth, voice recording, and a CD filled with third-party apps.. but the important thing is that these features do NOT increase the overall complexity of the interface. Unlike Sony handhelds that have buttons all over the place, Palm has only the necessary, core function buttons (power, address book, to-do list, memo, calendar, maybe a hold button.. can't remember) that have been standard on PalmOS devices for many years.
Of course, all of those features that sit there unused increase the cost of the unit
quakeworld physics sucked, netquake was where it was at.. too bad nobody plays that game anymore. I never could get into quakeworld or quake2/quake3 because of the feel of those later games.
No, he is referring to nsnotify.. not netscape new mail notification. Netscape 4 feature description here. I doubt that nsnotify is in NS7.1 even.
Not going to happen in my lifetime I think.. I used to like the application too, and use it currently with about 200 NS4 users. However, the last time that I checked.. there were no plans to bring it back, ever. Netscape 4 is old enough now (and getting worse web-page support every day), that I wouldn't wait for that feature. People would rather have a good web browser than the nsnotify mail checking application.
Basically what I plan to do is just explain that netscape does the same thing, except instead of having the envelope in the system tray, netscape has to be running in the taskbar. People keep netscape open most of the time anyway, either in a browser window or their Messenger application. nsnotify had its own problems (like cancel closing the application, and very inefficient mailbox-checking code), the way mail is handled in NS7 is actually much better, but people just need to be retrained a little bit. I hoped also that the user interface would stay the same, but I would not call this a required feature by any means.
One thing I never understood about these games is that if it is going to be over $10.00 per month, why would they still charge $50.00 for the software? They will cite server maintenance and bandwidth as the reason for the subscription, but I think we all know they will make a huge profit on the subscription alone. There is no way that cost is just to cover one person's bandwidth needs. Normal games cost that much and they don't have subscriptions, most even offer free services that users can connect to to play online (Blizzard's battlenet, for example). If the software is useless without a subscription.. they should just flood the market with CDs like AOL does or offer to mail you one. I guess the market will pay that much, but I would think that you could make more money in the long run by just giving away the software and charging for the service. That might also draw more people in that wouldn't consider buying this because of the subscription requirement.
heh.. I'd expect a Windows game these day to work correctly after about 8 point releases. Some are better than others, but many Windows games (seems like mostly RPGs) out of the box are notoriously unstable and buggy. Granted that linux or Mac games wouldn't be any better, the same fact is true for all platforms: most big games are complex as hell and you don't make any money while your game is in initial development/testing.
Mozilla isn't really intended to be an enduser product.. its primary purpose is for testing. However, because of its stability and major releases, it seems to be appealing to endusers.. but mostly tech-saavy power users IMHO. Netscape is the product for the masses, it will have a more polished interface than mozilla and it has name recognition. It will also undergo more testing (both bug and usability) than an average milestone of mozilla. Then there is the matter of application support, netscape7 will be supported more often than mozilla. Even though anything that works with NS7 should work in mozilla, name recognition and specific quirks with releases make this somewhat important.
Notice how NS7.02 is still based on a very early build of mozilla, the focus of Netscape 7 is on stability (in terms of the interface and functionality) and not on cutting edge features that are typically found in mozilla milestones. Most people do not need the features found in mozilla, which makes netscape 7 very appealing.
well, if the developers/company thought that they should write to the standard and leave it up to the client to render the standard.. then we wouldn't have this problem of hotmail, msn, whatever using the passed user agent to block access to people using client X. That is the point of this thread, those sites have a history of introducing rendering error into Opera/Mozilla (to name a few) to make it appear that the user is using a sub-standard product (IE renders correctly of course). Guess what, spoofing as IE makes the page render correctly in mozilla or opera..
routing and infrastructure and QoS maybe? You wouldn't connect the city of New York into one gigantic hub would you? The only thing your wireless repeater network would do is pass broadcasts around..
Then use Netscape 7 instead.. it is designed for UI stability and the average end-user. You can use mozilla (which is a technology test) as your primary browser and email client, but don't cry to the developers when they make some major changes to the user interface. It is their job to hack on mozilla, adding cool new features and trying out new things. Netscape then looks at these and creates and end-user product out of it.. they take the codebase and turn it into a product for the average user. Their focus is not on cool features, but on creating good, usable software that appeals not to hackers.. but to the average user.
I still like Netscape 7 for businesses to use inside of their corporations for email and a web browser. There are still many businesses that are using Netscape 4.. and Netscape 7 looks like the best upgrade path. While I have been using mozilla since the M13 days.. I would never consider mozilla as a replacement for NS4 on our desktops. Netscape 7 will undergo more testing, and has a more stable user interface than mozilla. Netscape 7 is also more likely than mozilla to have vendor support for web-based applications. Name recognition is also a factor in my mind.. from the point of view of the users, they will eventually get Netscape 4 upgrade to 7.. rather than Netscape 4 to mozilla.
As for the bloat and advertising, that was removed one morning with the CCK and some configuration hacking. With java, the minimal version was about 10MB less than Netscape 7.02. The only disadvantage that I can think of is that Netscape 7 will not pick up the latest and greatest features of mozilla, but only power users and care about the latest features of mozilla and so I don't see this as a big problem.
They may not have a choice.. bandwidth usage has increased far beyond what it was in the pre-napster days. Because of the new applications for the Internet, the old model doesn't work as well as it used to. An ISPs survival might depend on them rate-limiting or using metered bandwidth models. Customers won't like it at first, but they will get used to it when there are no more ISPs offering unlimited access plans. By then, you can either stop using the Internet or use your ISPs new plan.
If the problem gets out of control, ISPs will have to either meter bandwidth usage and charge customers per byte (like the electric company currently works), or they will have to create tiers (tier1 might be an email / casual web user, tier2 might be a heavier web user or someone that streams audio files, and tier3 would be an ISP's worst nightmare). Using tiers, they can keep rates the same per month, but there would be a transmitted/received byte cap on each tier. This way, you can have an always-on connection for $30.00 per month with low latency and high bandwidth, but there is a mechanism in place to prevent you from downloading N gigabytes during the billing period.
While the popular unlimited access model is great now, I agree that its days are numbered.. If the big ISPs drop their unlimited access pricing models and smaller ISPs refuse to do so, I would guess that all of the power users will move to the little ISP with the unlimited access plan. This will cause the little ISP to have a customer base of ISO-downloading, matrix-watching users who will eventually either drive the little ISP out of business or force the ISP to adopt a model similar to the big ones.
Well, seeing as how this article is targeted at the average user, doing a clean install should be left out. As someone else has mentioned, a clean install has no place in any kind of regular computer maintenance schedule for the average user. Now for the rest of us, we won't be reading the newspaper to figure out the best ways to do maintenance.
As you mention, separation of OS and data using partitions gives you quite a bit of flexibility when doing repairs (OS mysteriously implodes, scanner software kills machine, etc). But, there is an important difference between repairs and maintenance. Maintenance means you are cleaning/tuning a functioning computer, perhaps backing up files, removing stale desktop shortcuts, reorganizing files, etc. This means that your computer is NOT crashing and slow.. like the article says. Repairs are when something bad is happening, maybe your computer's performance is slow or the machine blue screens twice a day.. then you need to restore the machine's state to one in which it was functioning properly.. possibly using a clean install.
I think they have good ideas for general system maintenance, cleaning the desktop, programs listing, and re-arranging data into one root data folder (after a full data backup). But, they seem to mix two different problems into one story, and giving some irresponsible advice in the process. The article implies that it will be some kind of "spring cleaning" for your computer, to the average reader this means that computer at home they use to check email and surf the web with. Then they go onto mention that the reader should consider a clean install as part of their "spring cleaning" (yes, I know there is a warning, but why even mention it?).
Through my own experience as a user and computer tech, it is my conclusion that Windows NT-based systems do not need to be rebuilt annually like 9x used to under average use. People who simply use their computers as a means to an end (who are actually a good target for the article), do not install a lot of third-party software. They simply sit in front of their pre-configured machines at home and use the thing. The other types of users are the ones that usually end up doing clean installs of their operating system, those are the ones that like to tinker with their systems. If you know enough to be dangerous, you will be doing this on a regular basis. If you know what kind of software poses a risk to your computer, then you will be able to tinker with your computer for many years without the need for a re-install, providing you are using a modern operating system.
Mozilla is very hack-friendly, most simple customizations like remapping the keyboard are found here. The deeper you get, the more technical the documentation becomes, but that is what is so great about open software like mozilla IMHO. If you ever have a need for that kind of information, it's there.. use software like IE and you're stuck with what your vendor provides.
:P
I think that type-ahead-find in mozilla is a great feature as well, but it does kill off keyboard mappings in its current state. Hopefully when it becomes more mature it will require a leader for all searches or at least leave it as a preference to the user. I had remapped mozilla with a vi-like keyboard interface that worked out well until type-ahead-find came along. The only thing better than using hjkl for navigation is type-ahead-find in mozilla
This is a good ethical question, I'm not sure whether or not it is right or wrong either. My personal opinion is that it is wrong because the party responsible for altering the webpage knows that the contents of that webpage will be read and executed by computers that do not belong to them. The owners of the infected machines are responsible for securing their machines, but their inability to do so does not give the average user the right to do anything about it. The problem could instead be reported to the user's ISP, who can take appropriate actions based on their TOS agreement with the individual who's computer is infected.
However if I remember my ethics class correctly, their is also the argument that greatest good for the population is the best thing to do. In this case, shutting down these machines is the greater good vs. leaving them running, wasting bandwidth, sending email, or whatever this thing does. Having said that, I still can't get over the first point.. IMHO the problem is best handled by the individual's ISP, and everybody else should only report the problem instead of running arbitrary code on other people's machines (and yes, technically they are not actually running the code as others have pointed out.. but you know what I mean).
That is a good interview.. an interesting find about the virus protection too. I think this goes to show that the average computer user and the media just do not understand the basics about computer viruses. I see this quite a bit, where users are deleting jdbgmgr.exe and wondering how somebody got access to their email and sent bulk messages (klez). I wouldn't expect the average email-sending, web-browsing, .doc-writing user to understand technical details about viruses, but maybe there is a problem here?
The media doesn't help much either, by making announcements without consulting someone before warning their viewers/listeners about the latest virus threat. Also, ignorant or uninformed techs can be quick to blame every problem on a "virus" when they do not know the answer to something.. And then there is the word of mouth method that Robertson mentions.. I had not thought of that one but it makes a lot of sense.. uninformed users telling each other of how their computer was destroyed by a virus when in fact the computer may have stopped working for other reasons.
So as a result, virus scanners seem to be required now to operate a Windows computer.. even inside of corporations where email is scanned at the mail-server level. I would say that scanners for other systems are probably not required yet, but they will be if the platform ever becomes popular. Linux-based systems have a lot going for them though to make viruses less of a threat right now though, fragmentation of communications software and better security histories for some of the more common ones (mozilla, netscape 7) come to mind.
My opinion on scanners for the corporate desktop is that the users should not know that the scanner is there. Any modern scanner can do automatic updates in the background.. nobody is going to see it or messages from it unless some virus manages to sneak passed the email server which scans for viruses and is updated even more frequently than the workstations. The only kind that have been bypassing the servers that I have heard about are the social, hoax viruses.. jdbgmgr.exe and such.
Why would they call it "piles".. am I the only person that always associates that word with this?
I was thinking about this too, if they target the teenage market (maybe they are already) and offer some kind of pre-paid account that parents can put $20.00 into or so.. they might be onto something big. That age group puts a LOT of money into the music and movie industries.. this service looks like something they would use. I don't think this will be as popular among adults or college students, they will probably either buy CDs or download music via p2p applications.
If you are on broadband and they buffer the audio file over to your computer from the Apple high-bandwidth server farm, playback will start after a few seconds when you push the Buy button. As somebody else mentioned, instant gratification is the most important feature of this service that CDs and p2p can not offer. That will make it very attractive to the average teenage computer user over traditional p2p applications that tend to be less reliable and unfriendly. This might be very addicting to those who don't pay the bills.. I can see this generating some monster bills for parents like when AOL was a relatively new service.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that can't be done in windows.. It can not out of the box AFAIK, but with free third party software it certainly can.. unxutils is a good example.
I'm not sure, but I know which email address I will be using from now on when I register for "free" software downloads.
Yep, you are quite right.. I think IT is quick to point the finger back at the "stupid end users" because they are easy to blame. But as you say, IT is partially to blame if these kinds of things happen (users have to juggle ten sets of usernames/passwords just to get their jobs done, employees feeling they have to share their passwords with others, lack of quality training, etc). I think smart cards are a great idea, I know where I work they are being deployed in very small areas because of lack of funding. But, with most employees carrying around IDs now with magnetic stripes, putting in smart card readers all over the place is a great way to reduce the number of PIN numbers, usernames/passwords, and such that employees are forced to remember.
If the company can not do that, at least try for single signon (in software) for as much stuff as you can. It is easy to just put a bunch of little authentication mechanisms in place, but the endusers will appreciate you taking the extra time to invesigate alternative authentication mechanisms in your apps.
Well, I think you answered your own question about mozilla being a technology test. You can't be on the bleeding edge of browser technology and have stable platform I am afraid.. netscape 7 is more polished if that is more important to you. Those things are changed because they actually improve usability.. the old setting was found to be bad, and so they improved it in the next version.
As a windows tech primarily, I carry around a bunch of CDs and a floppy or two as far as software goes:
:O
- CD with commonly used drivers in the environment (currently about 550MB)
- CD with commonly used software on enduser machines
- CD with utilites used by me, those contain lots of things such as unixutils from sf.net, resource kit support tools from NT and 2000, registry monitor from sysinternals.com
- Windows NT and 2000 CD, used mostly for the recovery console
- bootable floppy with cd-rom drivers, fdisk, format, edit
- bootable disc images w/ imaging software for about three classes of machines in case the above tools fail
More and more, however, I have been fixing software problems remotely without leaving the office. Obviously I still have to handle hardware problems, but most software problems I see are corrupted email profiles/mail caches, deleted desktop shortcuts, and hung processes.