Actually, LTSB verification involves being asked for (three, I think) letters from your password / passphrase. I believe that the operator has no access to the letters involved --- they are prompted to ask for three and eight, type them in, and now know what they are. If you don't know, they don't either: the letters aren't displayed to the operator. In this case, the system seems to have a hole somewhere: Somehow the operator was able to substitute another password. His choice of new password indicates that he could read the entire old password.
Unless there are some other safeguards in the system that were not mentioned in TFA, I would be seriously concerned about criminal operators abusing my account (hypothetically speaking, I'm not a customer at LTSB).
There have been such products before: see http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,54458,00.asp The funny thing is that this technology has not hit the mainstream PC market yet. Maybe it was not quite as successful as expected?
1) Clueless managemement wants quick results on complex projects. Not so rare, you just got unlucky in picking a bunch that has a bit more exaggerated expectations than usual. 2) Planless shifting around of "human resources". Again, it happens. 3) On top of that, it seems cooperation with some of your colleagues did not go that well.
All of those things have happened at one time or another to me. Fortunately not all at the same time, but it still led to "unplanned carreer changes". So I guess you'll have to accept that it could happen again.
It seems there are lots of people who consider themselves better because they work ridiculous hours. Here's news for you:
It works only in the short term, like the last few days before a deadline. Over longer periods, exhaustion will drive your productivity below that of someone working 40 hrs/week. For a nice summary see http://www.igda.org/articles/erobinson_crunch.php.
But many managers and employees still seem to believe in 50-70 hour weeks.
There is at least one larger MMO that has people lose: EvE Online. While they don't go as far as imposing permadeath (1), you can lose your current ship with all its equipment. Which can be the equivalent of a few weeks' grinding NPCs.
With roughly 250k subscribers, EvE is not one of the largest MMORPGs but certainly economically viable.
Personally, I think drastic item losses have advantages and disadvantages: -pro: it makes the feeling of danger more intense -con: when you lose, you have to do some annoying grinding to get your stuff back. Unless the game design makes grinding NPCs fun, but I don't think anyone has managed to do that yet;-)
(1) If you don't have an up to date medical clone, you can lose most of your skillpoints. But that is easily avoided with a bit of thinking, so it does not count as serious risk.
Actually, Eric Flint (who is an author himself), makes a good case for a copyright term of 40 years, possibly with a provision that it does not expire during the life of the author: http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos3
And he argues mostly from the "encouraging to write" point of view, so when you take society's interest in reusing published works into consideration, the best balance might be even shorter.
The house prices are the result of people taking on excessive debts to finance their own homes, thus creating a big demand that drives up prices.
You are correct in saying that this is not an indicator of the economy's ability to support those prices. More exactly, many of the new houseowners cannot really afford their digs. They got away with it as long as the economy was strong, but now many of them are no longer able to pay their mortgages.
The result is lots of foreclosures, dropping prices and the mortgaging industry comes down like a house of cards. Which is partly deserved because those mortgage brokers did not apply much due diligence either.
Most people know "natural" sand from holiday at the beach, where it is washed too: The surf will take away the finer particles and deposit them somewhere else as silt. So it should not come as a surprise that most people know sand as harmless.
The funny thing is that AMD had pretty good chipsets several years ago. Around the year 2000 or so, their demonstration boards with the "Irongate" Chipset ruled. But they chose not to manufacture those in serious numbers and left the field to VIA and NVidia. Seems they reconsidered that attitude.
Otherwise, I think their strategy with regard to graphics stuff is pretty smart. As I posted elsewhere in this thread, "Fusion" seems a viable way to get a bit more performance/$ out of integrated graphics. And the Open Source drivers should bring them a good position in the Linux market.
It is an interesting business strategy. If it is sound will depend on how good the final product is: The mass market will not care about the technical details, it will care about performance/price. So if Larrabee cannot keep up with similarly priced ATI or NVidia GPU, they won't get large sales numbers. But if it is competitive as a graphics card, the "Trojan horse" turns into a genuine source of income. At that point, Larrabee would be worthwhile to continue even without ulterior motives.
Funny, I see it the other way round: Trying something innovative has become rare, most executives prefer to go for the next iteration of "$ProvenProduct". What you call a wild goose chase, I call a refreshing attempt to do something new and better. Of course there is a risk of failure, but Intel can afford taking some risks.
I think Fusion is an alternative to current integrated graphics, not to separate high-performance GPUs. After all it shares the drawback of having to steal bandwidth from the regular RAM, where discrete graphics cards have their own memory.
For a moderately power-hungry graphics chip (think 20 watt) the advantage is that Fusion can share the CPU cooler with a moderately power-hungry CPU, while integrating the GPU elsewhere on the board will require a separate cooler. That takes extra board area and money. So I think Fusion might be able to perform somewhat better for the same price than other integrated graphics. Which means it threatens the widely used Intel boards with integrated graphics rather than NVidia.
To mention something else (but still mostly on topic): In the Linux market, AMD is currently building a lot of goodwill by providing documentation and Open Source driver code. That might become an advantage over NVidia too.
There are several games that have it, and in a really large-scale style too. See EvE Online where players can conquer star systems and put up permanent bases.
It is more a question of "how do I offer the same series of quests to thousands of players?". The easiest way is to reset the objective after a while, so the next player can do the mission. It is also the most unimaginative and immersion-breaking way (among other things, the player who just killed Oog The Apeman might meet him again an hour later). Most MMOs use it.
Of course a smarter way to do that would be nice, but that sort of innovation is rare in the MMO genre.
IT is a service organization - it exists to support the users of the technology.
That means helping fix problems - even if they are user generated.
There is a point where cleaning up after inept people becomes an unreasonable drain on an organization. If that is a problem for you depends on your position. If you are paid by incident and more user stupidity means more money for you, fine. And I concede that telling the user in question he is a waste of IT resources may be difficult.
I've actually been in a similar position, on the software development side: Several years ago, I worked on a software project that had barely reached a stage that could be described as "beta" after 5 years. The main reason was that it was a moving target, the customer changed requirements almost as fast as we could implement them. But they paid by the hour, at 170 Swiss Francs per hour (1 Swiss Franc (CHF) = 0.91593 US Dollar (USD)). So I guess our management was quite happy with the situation;-)
That sounds like you were not one of those people who regularly cry for help because they have inadvertently installed viruses and other malware. Assuming you were halfway polite in wording your warnings, the IT department should thank you for helping with their job instead of complaining.
Developers who know what they are doing and clean up their own messes were not meant in my post.
There needs to be better priority allocation such that those who abuse IT services stop getting a free ride.
There are those who would argue that the _purpose_ of an IT team is to help users who have installed a malicious toolbar or need to print a specific font.
And then there is me who says they should ask up front if they don't have a clue. As in "Organizing my files with Windows Explorer is troublesome, can you recommend an alternative file manager?" instead of installing some random software from the internet.
Now I would not crucify someone for a one-time slip in that department, but a user who crashes his machine every two months needs to have his admin rights revoked.
Printing a certain font, however, can be a legitimate need. As in "you have already published stuff in that font and you want more of the same for consistency".
Subsidiary of a larger company that deals in medical technology. Size around 100 people, mostly development, production and user training. Sales is done by a division of the larger company.
We have 5 permanent employees that do exclusively IT, two of those infrastructure, three software development for new products. Additionally, consultants in varying numbers. At the moment, a new product with more than the usual software development need is going on, and I estimate the total number of IT related consultants (including offsite) at 15-20
ReactOS will never mimic Windows perfectly, so why the hell should anyone bother dual-booting ReactOS and Linux? What benefit do you get that you don't get without Windows and Linux?
Maybe no need to buy or steal Windows, but still run Windows games and applications? That is certainly a legitimate goal. And the people you consider important can kiss my ass.
A better question is: What can ReactOS do that WINE on Linux won't do? WINE is an equally free alternative that provides similar benefits. Here one could claim that redundant work is done.
This said, nobody is forced to contribute to ReactOS and the proverb about not looking a gift horse into the mouth applies.
The 15% Apple marketshare claim came out for new, retail sales only for a quarter, in the US. This stat didn't including online retail sales, so it pretty much knocked Dell and most HP machines out of their numbers, along with most all other major PC sellers. Again, complete 'Apple-washing' of statistics to make them sound better.
A partially valid objection. Omitting Dell and HP is certainly distorting the results. On the other hand, the end of sales for XP in most sales channels (30th June 2008) is new and a statistic over several quarters would underrate that effect. Assuming that there are at least some people who got an Apple because they could not get a PC with XP anymore.
I think statistics for the 3rd quarter of 2008 (and including online retail please) will be a lot more relevant.
But Microsoft management would think this is blasphemy, because Windows sales are still one of the big revenue sources for the company. Open source it and there will be *at least* a much cheaper redistribution called "Doors" or "Skylights" (to avoid trademark issues;-). That might cut quite deeply into the revenue stream.
Actually I was thinking of pre-.NET VB (I don't know VB.NET). But then again, the old versions are AFAIK the more widespread ones. I found the syntax not nearly as clear as in Object Pascal (Delphi), and the object orientation is just weak. The only saving grace of VB was the good interaction with MS Office, which made it useful for automating stuff in documents.
Sometimes it is a matter of not being able to deliver due to lack of architecture. Read, the side effects in the non-architectured spaghetti code finally reached the point of overwhelming the programmers.
If you managed to avoid this situation with sufficient foresight, it is not always obvious. After all, maybe a simpler system would have done the job too? Besides, the point of not being able to deliver due to lack of architecture usually comes later in the lifecycle, and the first versions may be quite successful. So in some cases, the badly designed terrible little programs win by being first and becoming the "industry standard".
Now the obligatory dig at Microsoft... As far as I can tell from the user perspective, Windows seems to fall in this category. For the second time: -First time, Windows 9x was quite successful for a while but ended in disgrace with Windows Millennium. Fortunately for Microsoft, they had developed the much more solid Windows NT line in parallel, on which they then built Windows 2000 and XP. -Now, it seems Microsoft has managed to overextend its architecture again with Vista. This time I don't see a better product line in the background that could take over. Let's see what happens over the next five years;-)
In this case (I'm neither an employee nor a stockholder of the company in question) I certainly don't have a dog in the fight. So it is more of a general observation on what might work and what might not.
If you dislike this sort of discussion, maybe Slashdot is not the right place for you.
Sure, you can argue that it makes "better" code, but that "better" code has NO MORE EXTRA FEATURES. It only allows retards to work on it. And really, is that a feature?
From a manager's point of view, yes. Because it makes it easier for the company to find someone who is capable of maintaining it once the 133t haX0r has moved on to another job.
Besides, don't underestimate the importance of clarity and modularity in architecture. Which is not the same as "coding standards" that enforce things like naming schemes for variables. The latter is rather low-level and understandable to a PHB, the former is still more of an art and not easily measurable.
The need to revamp a system is often more a question of when. So, you get to that point, and the question becomes: do we keep this funky old perl, or start from scratch with something relatively tidy and popular from a staffing perspective?
I don't doubt that a system might reach the point where it can only be replaced.
What I suspect is that the management in question has come to the false conclusion that the old system is bad because it is written in Perl. Not because project planning or the developers sucked.
So they might try to have it reprogrammed in something popular (Visual Basic? *evil grin*) only to find out that a change of programming language will not magically cure their woes.
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Actually, LTSB verification involves being asked for (three, I think) letters from your password / passphrase. I believe that the operator has no access to the letters involved --- they are prompted to ask for three and eight, type them in, and now know what they are. If you don't know, they don't either: the letters aren't displayed to the operator.
In this case, the system seems to have a hole somewhere:
Somehow the operator was able to substitute another password. His choice of new password indicates that he could read the entire old password.
Unless there are some other safeguards in the system that were not mentioned in TFA, I would be seriously concerned about criminal operators abusing my account (hypothetically speaking, I'm not a customer at LTSB).
There have been such products before:
see http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,54458,00.asp
The funny thing is that this technology has not hit the mainstream PC market yet. Maybe it was not quite as successful as expected?
1) Clueless managemement wants quick results on complex projects. Not so rare, you just got unlucky in picking a bunch that has a bit more exaggerated expectations than usual.
2) Planless shifting around of "human resources". Again, it happens.
3) On top of that, it seems cooperation with some of your colleagues did not go that well.
All of those things have happened at one time or another to me. Fortunately not all at the same time, but it still led to "unplanned carreer changes". So I guess you'll have to accept that it could happen again.
It seems there are lots of people who consider themselves better because they work ridiculous hours. Here's news for you:
It works only in the short term, like the last few days before a deadline. Over longer periods, exhaustion will drive your productivity below that of someone working 40 hrs/week. For a nice summary see http://www.igda.org/articles/erobinson_crunch.php.
But many managers and employees still seem to believe in 50-70 hour weeks.
There is at least one larger MMO that has people lose: EvE Online.
While they don't go as far as imposing permadeath (1), you can lose your current ship with all its equipment. Which can be the equivalent of a few weeks' grinding NPCs.
With roughly 250k subscribers, EvE is not one of the largest MMORPGs but certainly economically viable.
Personally, I think drastic item losses have advantages and disadvantages: ;-)
-pro: it makes the feeling of danger more intense
-con: when you lose, you have to do some annoying grinding to get your stuff back. Unless the game design makes grinding NPCs fun, but I don't think anyone has managed to do that yet
(1) If you don't have an up to date medical clone, you can lose most of your skillpoints. But that is easily avoided with a bit of thinking, so it does not count as serious risk.
Hell yes.
Actually, Eric Flint (who is an author himself), makes a good case for a copyright term of 40 years, possibly with a provision that it does not expire during the life of the author: http://baens-universe.com/articles/salvos3
And he argues mostly from the "encouraging to write" point of view, so when you take society's interest in reusing published works into consideration, the best balance might be even shorter.
The house prices are the result of people taking on excessive debts to finance their own homes, thus creating a big demand that drives up prices.
You are correct in saying that this is not an indicator of the economy's ability to support those prices. More exactly, many of the new houseowners cannot really afford their digs. They got away with it as long as the economy was strong, but now many of them are no longer able to pay their mortgages.
The result is lots of foreclosures, dropping prices and the mortgaging industry comes down like a house of cards. Which is partly deserved because those mortgage brokers did not apply much due diligence either.
Most people know "natural" sand from holiday at the beach, where it is washed too:
The surf will take away the finer particles and deposit them somewhere else as silt. So it should not come as a surprise that most people know sand as harmless.
A Google search for [sand cancer bedouins], however, turns up http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1694965. It seems you are right about unwashed sand...
The funny thing is that AMD had pretty good chipsets several years ago. Around the year 2000 or so, their demonstration boards with the "Irongate" Chipset ruled. But they chose not to manufacture those in serious numbers and left the field to VIA and NVidia. Seems they reconsidered that attitude.
Otherwise, I think their strategy with regard to graphics stuff is pretty smart. As I posted elsewhere in this thread, "Fusion" seems a viable way to get a bit more performance/$ out of integrated graphics. And the Open Source drivers should bring them a good position in the Linux market.
It is an interesting business strategy. If it is sound will depend on how good the final product is:
The mass market will not care about the technical details, it will care about performance/price. So if Larrabee cannot keep up with similarly priced ATI or NVidia GPU, they won't get large sales numbers. But if it is competitive as a graphics card, the "Trojan horse" turns into a genuine source of income. At that point, Larrabee would be worthwhile to continue even without ulterior motives.
Funny, I see it the other way round:
Trying something innovative has become rare, most executives prefer to go for the next iteration of "$ProvenProduct". What you call a wild goose chase, I call a refreshing attempt to do something new and better. Of course there is a risk of failure, but Intel can afford taking some risks.
I think Fusion is an alternative to current integrated graphics, not to separate high-performance GPUs. After all it shares the drawback of having to steal bandwidth from the regular RAM, where discrete graphics cards have their own memory.
For a moderately power-hungry graphics chip (think 20 watt) the advantage is that Fusion can share the CPU cooler with a moderately power-hungry CPU, while integrating the GPU elsewhere on the board will require a separate cooler. That takes extra board area and money.
So I think Fusion might be able to perform somewhat better for the same price than other integrated graphics. Which means it threatens the widely used Intel boards with integrated graphics rather than NVidia.
To mention something else (but still mostly on topic):
In the Linux market, AMD is currently building a lot of goodwill by providing documentation and Open Source driver code. That might become an advantage over NVidia too.
There are several games that have it, and in a really large-scale style too. See EvE Online where players can conquer star systems and put up permanent bases.
It is more a question of "how do I offer the same series of quests to thousands of players?". The easiest way is to reset the objective after a while, so the next player can do the mission. It is also the most unimaginative and immersion-breaking way (among other things, the player who just killed Oog The Apeman might meet him again an hour later). Most MMOs use it.
Of course a smarter way to do that would be nice, but that sort of innovation is rare in the MMO genre.
There is a point where cleaning up after inept people becomes an unreasonable drain on an organization. If that is a problem for you depends on your position. If you are paid by incident and more user stupidity means more money for you, fine. And I concede that telling the user in question he is a waste of IT resources may be difficult.
I've actually been in a similar position, on the software development side: ;-)
Several years ago, I worked on a software project that had barely reached a stage that could be described as "beta" after 5 years. The main reason was that it was a moving target, the customer changed requirements almost as fast as we could implement them. But they paid by the hour, at 170 Swiss Francs per hour (1 Swiss Franc (CHF) = 0.91593 US Dollar (USD)). So I guess our management was quite happy with the situation
That sounds like you were not one of those people who regularly cry for help because they have inadvertently installed viruses and other malware. Assuming you were halfway polite in wording your warnings, the IT department should thank you for helping with their job instead of complaining.
Developers who know what they are doing and clean up their own messes were not meant in my post.
And then there is me who says they should ask up front if they don't have a clue. As in "Organizing my files with Windows Explorer is troublesome, can you recommend an alternative file manager?" instead of installing some random software from the internet.
Now I would not crucify someone for a one-time slip in that department, but a user who crashes his machine every two months needs to have his admin rights revoked.
Printing a certain font, however, can be a legitimate need. As in "you have already published stuff in that font and you want more of the same for consistency".
Subsidiary of a larger company that deals in medical technology. Size around 100 people, mostly development, production and user training. Sales is done by a division of the larger company.
We have 5 permanent employees that do exclusively IT, two of those infrastructure, three software development for new products. Additionally, consultants in varying numbers.
At the moment, a new product with more than the usual software development need is going on, and I estimate the total number of IT related consultants (including offsite) at 15-20
Maybe no need to buy or steal Windows, but still run Windows games and applications? That is certainly a legitimate goal. And the people you consider important can kiss my ass.
A better question is:
What can ReactOS do that WINE on Linux won't do? WINE is an equally free alternative that provides similar benefits. Here one could claim that redundant work is done.
This said, nobody is forced to contribute to ReactOS and the proverb about not looking a gift horse into the mouth applies.
A partially valid objection. Omitting Dell and HP is certainly distorting the results. On the other hand, the end of sales for XP in most sales channels (30th June 2008) is new and a statistic over several quarters would underrate that effect. Assuming that there are at least some people who got an Apple because they could not get a PC with XP anymore.
I think statistics for the 3rd quarter of 2008 (and including online retail please) will be a lot more relevant.
Ooh, I'm sure ./ers would like the idea.
But Microsoft management would think this is blasphemy, because Windows sales are still one of the big revenue sources for the company. Open source it and there will be *at least* a much cheaper redistribution called "Doors" or "Skylights" (to avoid trademark issues ;-). That might cut quite deeply into the revenue stream.
Actually I was thinking of pre-.NET VB (I don't know VB.NET). But then again, the old versions are AFAIK the more widespread ones.
I found the syntax not nearly as clear as in Object Pascal (Delphi), and the object orientation is just weak. The only saving grace of VB was the good interaction with MS Office, which made it useful for automating stuff in documents.
Sometimes it is a matter of not being able to deliver due to lack of architecture. Read, the side effects in the non-architectured spaghetti code finally reached the point of overwhelming the programmers.
If you managed to avoid this situation with sufficient foresight, it is not always obvious. After all, maybe a simpler system would have done the job too?
Besides, the point of not being able to deliver due to lack of architecture usually comes later in the lifecycle, and the first versions may be quite successful. So in some cases, the badly designed terrible little programs win by being first and becoming the "industry standard".
Now the obligatory dig at Microsoft... ;-)
As far as I can tell from the user perspective, Windows seems to fall in this category. For the second time:
-First time, Windows 9x was quite successful for a while but ended in disgrace with Windows Millennium. Fortunately for Microsoft, they had developed the much more solid Windows NT line in parallel, on which they then built Windows 2000 and XP.
-Now, it seems Microsoft has managed to overextend its architecture again with Vista. This time I don't see a better product line in the background that could take over. Let's see what happens over the next five years
In this case (I'm neither an employee nor a stockholder of the company in question) I certainly don't have a dog in the fight. So it is more of a general observation on what might work and what might not.
If you dislike this sort of discussion, maybe Slashdot is not the right place for you.
From a manager's point of view, yes. Because it makes it easier for the company to find someone who is capable of maintaining it once the 133t haX0r has moved on to another job.
Besides, don't underestimate the importance of clarity and modularity in architecture. Which is not the same as "coding standards" that enforce things like naming schemes for variables. The latter is rather low-level and understandable to a PHB, the former is still more of an art and not easily measurable.
I don't doubt that a system might reach the point where it can only be replaced.
What I suspect is that the management in question has come to the false conclusion that the old system is bad because it is written in Perl. Not because project planning or the developers sucked.
So they might try to have it reprogrammed in something popular (Visual Basic? *evil grin*) only to find out that a change of programming language will not magically cure their woes.