Thanks for proving me right about the anti-marketing thing. I knew I could count on/.
Marketing isn't inherently bad. It is in many ways the only way to know about new products. Word of mouth is great, but at some point somebody has to be told of a product's existance or there'll be nobody to spread the word in the first place.
You say if you want to buy something, you'll go out and get it. Fair enough. But I'm not fucking psychic. I don't immediately know when a company releases a new product that I might want. Most of the catalogs I read feature items that aren't reviewed in trade magazines. If I want to buy a cal-look running board for a 1973 Super Beetle, what recourse do I have BESIDES catalogs? Before I started getting VW Trends, I thought I'd have to go to junkyards with my fingers crossed if I wanted to find anything for my restoration! Through catalogs, I've found sources and options that have made the restoration much easier, much cheaper, and much nicer looking.
And I'd much rather read a catalog than visit a store, mostly because the nearest air cooled VW retailer is in Niagara Falls, but partially because I appreciate the luxury of being able to weigh features and price without a salesman breathing down my neck.
Where is.NET for mac or linux? (I mean the ms created version and not mono)
If it existed, would you pay for it? And if not, why should they build it? Microsoft isn't a charity. They're the crux where software meets classic business.
Microsoft pays lipservice to "open standards" to keep the DOJ at bay, but after that it's business as usual.
This is crap. The DOJ doesn't care if Microsoft's standards are open or not. Microsoft opened the CLI for their own reasons, which, quite probably, were a strike at Sun. They may not have any call to produce.NET for Mac or Linux...but they could certainly benefit from other people writing.NET for these operating systems. Millions of new machines that can run your software with no call to support them since you didn't write a "Linux version?" That's a profitable scheme if I ever saw one.
Patience. Some of these slashdot kids, they have a long standing genetic hatred of Microsoft, leading back to high school when gangs of Microsoft employees used to shake them down for their modem money. Even the things Microsoft does right are wrong in their eyes. Only time will heal the intolerance.
(Incidentally, in a company with as many employees as Microsoft, there's bound to be a number of really great ideas that sneak through the layers of paralyzing marketing like background radiation escaping from a black hole. It has been my experience over the past three years that all of the great ideas that have achieved escape velocity have been formed in the belly of the developer's network, and.NET in particular)
I disagree with the parent's tone. Mr. Tejo seems to be acting like Mono is a competetive product that Microsoft is frightened of. I'd like to remind him that Microsoft created an industry standard for the core technologies used in the.NET platform. What the Mono project is doing is exactly what Microsoft wanted somebody to do.
Why? Well, I dunno. Maybe to appease the Monopoly watchdogs. Maybe to bury Sun (I picked C# over Java and haven't been let down yet). And maybe -- just maybe -- to make it easy to use Microsoft products on alternative hardware and alternative Operating Systems without Microsoft having to worry about supporting all the obscure Linux builds of the world.
Incidentally...I too like Sun's stewardship, but it existed despite a big clean room open source intiative to reproduce Java. I remember playing around with it in college to compile somebody else's object code into native code for faster execution (our mainframe was slowwwww and at the time, running Java was like a snail on a turtle's back).
I think a lot of anti-SPAM pundits on/. are actually anti-marketing pundits. Meaning they consider ALL email selling ANYTHING to be SPAM.
I grew up with publications that were, essentially, advertisements. Remember Computer Shopper? You never read the articles, did you? I sure didn't...but I read the ads. Same with RC Hobbiest. Nowadays, I get all sorts of cool publications and catalogues in the mail...VW Trends, Road Runner Sports, JC Whitney for Volkswagens, Crutchfield, Campmor, Victoria's Secret...and you know what, I look through them all. I don't always buy stuff, but I always find interesting things I didn't know existed (especially in that last one). Believe it or not, I enjoy that.
Now, email has opened up the door even further. I get catalogs from teeny tiny agencies that would never be able to offer them offline for the expense. I like that...I like looking through the clearance items at some obscure Bug shop in Tampa Bay that I'd never find out about otherwise. I just wish these mails would make it through my spam filter!
There are companies from whom I REALLY want to get email. Mostly, companies I have a business relationship with. Then, there are companies from whom I want no mail at all -- mostly, companies that pull my email address out of a hat and say, "send spam to him!"
Now, i have a spam filter -- a Bayesian deal built in to Thunderbird. I am quite religious at training it. And yet, a lot -- a LOT -- of good messages get marked false positives. Messages from eBay, messages from friends, messages from my political party...it's gotten so that I have to go through my trash and pick out emails that are good, which is the same situation as before I had my filter.
It all culminated in email from Apple -- from whom I just bought a computer -- going straight to my trash. Email including a request that I contact them to secure my mailing address (apparently, my phone number at work was entered wrong). I didn't find that one for two days...and it meant my order shipped two days late.
A service that let big name vendors through with the proviso that they have to be responsible -- a service that also had an economic mechanism for enforcing this responsibility -- would be a good thing. Too bad it's hotmail!
Uh, shithead? Just because you can use a VT terminal to type letters and reports and surf the web via Lynx doesn't mean that the VT is the pinnacle of computing. It's a very hard to use system. The promise of computing is that it helps people do things they couldn't otherwise do. They could write shit on a typewriter; what a computer allowed them to do is catalog it and transport it easily. Longhorn hopes to take creation, cataloging and transport to the next level by making each step flow seamlessly into the next.
The reason the new OS will require so much power is that Microsoft is trying to make it smart enough that it can actually help people do things with their data they can't do right now because they require too much knowledge or too much effort. The big additions of longhorn are a more robust and useful GUI toolkit and a metadata file system. These could help people bring data together in new ways. They're trying to give people a DBA-in-an-OS, and that's going to require space, speed and ram.
Do YOU need it? Maybe not. Maybe nobody needs it. But I certainly want to see what they come up with. Naysaying isn't going to make their software any better nor is it going to cause the development team to smack their heads and give up.
Making yesterday's computers do just enough to get by is Linux's job. If I'm gonna pay for a computer OS when I've already got one, and I've got about TEN, it better do something spectacular. That's why I bought OSX. Longhorn's hoping to be something revolutionary, and that could be a good thing (Windows NT) or a bad thing (Windows 1.0). If it's a good thing, it will be a major threat to the open source community, who could be caught with their pants down. If it's a bad thing, MS will eat its failure and give us some kind of shake and bake "Windows Millenium" style rebirth of the NT/XP kernel while they make it even better for Longhorn Mark 2, aka Windows 2007.
.NET *IS* exactly mature -- we've been shipping software written in.NET for over a year. It is pretty snappy, though obviously not as fast as C++ it makes up for it by being infinitely more secure and far easier to write in and to optimize. Using fast execution to run slow algorithms is no help at all. And if in fact the old code is being rewritten, this is very good news. An entire operating system that is invulnerable to stack overflow attacks? Sign me up.
BTW: an entire OS written in.NET and free of P/Invoke calls along with the Mono project would mean native Windows apps would run elsewhere without too much of an issue. Our app already runs well in Mono, minus a couple of major hacks in the image handling department.
So the solution is pretty apparent and pretty simple: find one clever, relatively inconsential guy somewhere in the company. Give him and him alone the patch on day 0. Let him use his machine as normal...if he discovers a problem, you saved your $180,000. If he doesn't, you can roll it out to the others feeling secure.
My point is, there is absolutely no reason why you should have to test the patch yourself. And if you're waiting days, or weeks, to have "time" to test a patch, you're almost inviting viruses. I develop applications full time and also perform virus duty for 40 employees...I don't see why you can't handle 600 if you're doing it full time.
as soon as your baby is born and put in the nursery with the other brand new babies... they would all be infected... where would you suggest we put the new baby right off the bat?
I believe I suggested plugging it into a firewall that was one way, e.g. denied all incoming connections regardless of port or source. Yes, I did suggest that.
have you ever dealt with Ted from Marketing? I've found that if Ted is high enough up and he can't play solitaire then the sh*t is going to hit the fan pretty dang fast!
This is true enough, but it's also true that if Ted's machine gets a virus and has to be completely rebuilt, he's probably going to blame you for not protecting his machine. And he'd be right to do so, since you didn't do it. Which is why you should get the patch out to one or two underlyings in marketing the instant it's released, see if they have any trouble, and then roll it out to everybody else within the next day or so.
With security, if you're waiting two weeks, you're not doing your job. When the front door needs a new lock, you don't leave it open for 15 days, you don't care if Ted the Marketing Asshole has keys or not, you just fix it, and deal with the consequences later -- because they're nowhere near as bad as leaving the door open!
if a plumber, electrician, and carpenter told you that in the long run it would be a lot cheaper just to buy a new house instead of have them out every other day, wouldn't that make sense?
It would. But I'd probably still ignore them. I like my house and moving is a hassle I don't need, so it is worth the extra effort and expense to keep the current one. I'd pay even less mind to the suggestion if it appeared to me that the plumber, electrician, and carpenter who I was paying anyway wanted me to shell out extra cash and effort just to make their jobs easier.
I get upset by slashdotters who argue "phantom" points -- points that I didn't make or imply in either of my grandpatent posts.
What I said, paraphrased, was: "If you are head of an IT department charged with installing software on a new machine, a good idea is to place it behind a firewall with no open ports, to prevent worms from exploiting the vulnerable operating system while you patch it."
How you got from that I was suggesting that a firewall is the only security you need, or that I was making any suggestiong to home users, I have no idea. My guess is poor reading comprehension skills, as this would also explain why you think the plural of virus is viri when it's goddamn viruses.
<Offtopic-rant> Why do people insist on putting -i at the end of every word that has a singular form ending in s? The plural of iris isn't irii. The plural of axis isn't axi. The whole purpose of the -es plural is that you are supposed to use it when a word ends in s. Why must people emply this queer new form? It just makes them sound like pompous douches -- or is it douchi? </Offtopic-rant>
Firewalls don't protect jack if ports are open client side within your network that shouldn't be.
I was suggesting to put up the box behind a firewall appliance -- a cheap Dlink would do -- as the ONLY thing behind it. Put it on your installation bench sort of like a surge protector for viruses.
Will it look as bad as allowing your entire company to get a virus?
Since exploits come out less than a month after Microsoft releases a patch, you better damn sure get your ass in gear when one's released. And how long does it take to test the basic functionality of a machine after a patch? Less than an hour I'd wager. A day to look for flakiness. Waiting two weeks is surely overkill.
I for one thing it's far superior to break a network trying to fix it than waiting for a virus to take it down. The former you can in earnest blame on the vendor. The latter -- well, since the fix already existed, the blame's on you.
A new computer is like a new baby. You need to inocculate it or it'll get sick. If you're putting out in a wild environment without protection -- and a suitably large organization is almost as bad as the internet itself -- you're just asking for trouble. The best way to prevent this is to patch it up to a useful level behind a one way firewall. An even better way is to update your corporate ghost image once a month so you're never more than 30 days behind in your patches.
Furthermore, the days of agressively testing patches should be over for everything but servers. Let your employees run autoupdates and if one of them does break your machines, roll it back. Servers are a special case, because if you lose the TCP stack on your mail server it's much worse than if Ted from Marketing loses his.
Management doesn't want Linux because they don't want to lose days learning an alien operating system when they already have YOU to do the job of protecting them from viruses. What would you say if your plumber told you that to unclog a leak, you'd have to buy a new house?
Or you could just use Automatic Updates. They've been around since Windows 2000 service pack 3. You can set it to run Windows Update automatically, to download in the background and let you know when it's ready, or to notify you when new updates are available so you can get them yourself.
It's an astoudingly good piece of software. Easily on par, if not better than, Apple's Software Update.
Patent. They tend to patent everything. Patents are for inventions and processes, copyrights are for intellectual property. Drug patents are *KIND* of a good thing, as they encourage drug companies to pump money into R&D. The patents keep other companies from being parasitic and producing drugs based off other people's research.
And drug margins are only high if they appeal to a lot of people or are significantly helpful to justify a high up front cost. If you make a drug which only works some of the time for some of the people, you may not even recoup your R&D budger. It's a crapshoot...but the potential is huge.
It's true for middle school. I used to get beat up all the time for being geeky, until I beat the shit out of a kid. I was really embarrassed about it...he was half my size...but I was told by everybody else how awesome it was.
Incidentally, the beatings didn't make a lick of difference. I still loved science and math. I still dressed in florescents and wore a fanny pack. At one point, I even started donning pocket protectors in protest of this flagrant anti-intellecturalism.
In high school, mostly everybody just left me alone. And that's how I liked it. In the classes I cared about, what the fuck do I care what people thought of me? I ruled every computer science class that school had, kicked ass in Spanish and Chemisty, Bio and Physics, and did my best in English Literature.
A few times, I'd get offhanded anti-intellectual comments. Like when I was discussing particle physics in the locker room, or the time we were making up dumb haikus at lunch. I always responded with scathing contempt, some very clever insults, and the occasional threat. But I never got any takers. Once a guy muttered "freak" at me under his breath while passing between classes. I followed him to his next class and wouldn't leave until he apologized.
I had a few friends, and that was enough. What's great was, by the time I was a senior, I had flexed my individuality to the point that I had gained the respect of a lot of my class. I was hardly Mr. Popular, but I could get a date if I wanted. And I knew how to calculate the torque at an arbitrary point on a rotating disk.
The majority of songs on the radio are about sex, love, drugs, etc. Yes, there are some violent songs, but there were violent songs in the seventies as well. Ever hear of Black Sabbath? The Rolling Stones?
Nothing has changed in music, man, nor in kids' attitudes. Smart people DO still get respect if they're not smug about it and have other aspects to their personality. Just because TV shows it the other way around doesn't mean it's true...I can't tell you how many times my brother has talked about some new friend in high school and rounded out the conversation with "He's really smart, too. He gets, like, all 90s and stuff."
This is a foolish argument. The American public school system is still better funded than those of a lot of countries that send their college students here. India's a good example...from what I hear, they have some terrible public schools.
It seems obvious that if other countries with worse schools than ours can graduate students capable of a career in science, then the problem isn't the K-12 system per se. I don't know what it is. A lot of people in here will tell you it's an anti-intellectual social structure, which is also bogus. I made it through public school with a class that was loaded with slackers and nerd-haters, and still saw a lot of people -- even popular people -- who did really well in the sciences. Many of these guys were popular as well. You see, just because you say "science is so bogus" doesn't mean you don't do your chem homework, any more than saying "work is bogus" stops you from doing your job.
No, it's far more likely that the "brain drain" was a result of so many smart kids going into business. After all, if you're presented with the option of what to do with your big fat brain and it's "make a ton of money in the private sector" or "work long hours in a small lab for little or money," most people will take the former. There are some who love science enough to become researchers, but not many, and that's what we're seeing.
BTW: the solution isn't appealing to kids or making science more "cool." The solution is paying researchers better. Working 16 hour days and alienating yourself from your friends and family is shitty work for $35k.
Re:Apple looks inexspensive...
on
The FragBook
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· Score: 1
I priced the Sagers, they're a nice laptop. They're also obscenely heavy. If I wanted a thin desktop with an integrated display, I'd buy one. Sager doesn't make a slim laptop...mostly because it's hard to engineer one that doesn't suck. There are only a few PC companies who have...Acer has some nice ones, as do voodoopc, sony, etc.
Anyhow, I already have all the software I need for my new mac, I should have mentioned that as well. There wasn't a lot of it that I needed to replace, just Office X...game wise, the only games I play are Unreal 2k4, Warcraft 3 and NWN, and all three are available for mac (though I had to buy a new copy of NWN).
So far, it's been worth the "extra expense" just to use a computer that didn't run Windows XP! That OS makes me want to chew my own hand off and escape.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for proving me right about the anti-marketing thing. I knew I could count on /.
Marketing isn't inherently bad. It is in many ways the only way to know about new products. Word of mouth is great, but at some point somebody has to be told of a product's existance or there'll be nobody to spread the word in the first place.
You say if you want to buy something, you'll go out and get it. Fair enough. But I'm not fucking psychic. I don't immediately know when a company releases a new product that I might want. Most of the catalogs I read feature items that aren't reviewed in trade magazines. If I want to buy a cal-look running board for a 1973 Super Beetle, what recourse do I have BESIDES catalogs? Before I started getting VW Trends, I thought I'd have to go to junkyards with my fingers crossed if I wanted to find anything for my restoration! Through catalogs, I've found sources and options that have made the restoration much easier, much cheaper, and much nicer looking.
And I'd much rather read a catalog than visit a store, mostly because the nearest air cooled VW retailer is in Niagara Falls, but partially because I appreciate the luxury of being able to weigh features and price without a salesman breathing down my neck.
Where is .NET for mac or linux? (I mean the ms created version and not mono)
.NET for Mac or Linux...but they could certainly benefit from other people writing .NET for these operating systems. Millions of new machines that can run your software with no call to support them since you didn't write a "Linux version?" That's a profitable scheme if I ever saw one.
If it existed, would you pay for it? And if not, why should they build it? Microsoft isn't a charity. They're the crux where software meets classic business.
Microsoft pays lipservice to "open standards" to keep the DOJ at bay, but after that it's business as usual.
This is crap. The DOJ doesn't care if Microsoft's standards are open or not. Microsoft opened the CLI for their own reasons, which, quite probably, were a strike at Sun. They may not have any call to produce
Patience. Some of these slashdot kids, they have a long standing genetic hatred of Microsoft, leading back to high school when gangs of Microsoft employees used to shake them down for their modem money. Even the things Microsoft does right are wrong in their eyes. Only time will heal the intolerance.
.NET in particular)
(Incidentally, in a company with as many employees as Microsoft, there's bound to be a number of really great ideas that sneak through the layers of paralyzing marketing like background radiation escaping from a black hole. It has been my experience over the past three years that all of the great ideas that have achieved escape velocity have been formed in the belly of the developer's network, and
I disagree with the parent's tone. Mr. Tejo seems to be acting like Mono is a competetive product that Microsoft is frightened of. I'd like to remind him that Microsoft created an industry standard for the core technologies used in the .NET platform. What the Mono project is doing is exactly what Microsoft wanted somebody to do.
Why? Well, I dunno. Maybe to appease the Monopoly watchdogs. Maybe to bury Sun (I picked C# over Java and haven't been let down yet). And maybe -- just maybe -- to make it easy to use Microsoft products on alternative hardware and alternative Operating Systems without Microsoft having to worry about supporting all the obscure Linux builds of the world.
Incidentally...I too like Sun's stewardship, but it existed despite a big clean room open source intiative to reproduce Java. I remember playing around with it in college to compile somebody else's object code into native code for faster execution (our mainframe was slowwwww and at the time, running Java was like a snail on a turtle's back).
I think a lot of anti-SPAM pundits on /. are actually anti-marketing pundits. Meaning they consider ALL email selling ANYTHING to be SPAM.
I grew up with publications that were, essentially, advertisements. Remember Computer Shopper? You never read the articles, did you? I sure didn't...but I read the ads. Same with RC Hobbiest. Nowadays, I get all sorts of cool publications and catalogues in the mail...VW Trends, Road Runner Sports, JC Whitney for Volkswagens, Crutchfield, Campmor, Victoria's Secret...and you know what, I look through them all. I don't always buy stuff, but I always find interesting things I didn't know existed (especially in that last one). Believe it or not, I enjoy that.
Now, email has opened up the door even further. I get catalogs from teeny tiny agencies that would never be able to offer them offline for the expense. I like that...I like looking through the clearance items at some obscure Bug shop in Tampa Bay that I'd never find out about otherwise. I just wish these mails would make it through my spam filter!
It's not exactly the same, now, is it?
There are companies from whom I REALLY want to get email. Mostly, companies I have a business relationship with. Then, there are companies from whom I want no mail at all -- mostly, companies that pull my email address out of a hat and say, "send spam to him!"
Now, i have a spam filter -- a Bayesian deal built in to Thunderbird. I am quite religious at training it. And yet, a lot -- a LOT -- of good messages get marked false positives. Messages from eBay, messages from friends, messages from my political party...it's gotten so that I have to go through my trash and pick out emails that are good, which is the same situation as before I had my filter.
It all culminated in email from Apple -- from whom I just bought a computer -- going straight to my trash. Email including a request that I contact them to secure my mailing address (apparently, my phone number at work was entered wrong). I didn't find that one for two days...and it meant my order shipped two days late.
A service that let big name vendors through with the proviso that they have to be responsible -- a service that also had an economic mechanism for enforcing this responsibility -- would be a good thing. Too bad it's hotmail!
Uh, shithead? Just because you can use a VT terminal to type letters and reports and surf the web via Lynx doesn't mean that the VT is the pinnacle of computing. It's a very hard to use system. The promise of computing is that it helps people do things they couldn't otherwise do. They could write shit on a typewriter; what a computer allowed them to do is catalog it and transport it easily. Longhorn hopes to take creation, cataloging and transport to the next level by making each step flow seamlessly into the next.
The reason the new OS will require so much power is that Microsoft is trying to make it smart enough that it can actually help people do things with their data they can't do right now because they require too much knowledge or too much effort. The big additions of longhorn are a more robust and useful GUI toolkit and a metadata file system. These could help people bring data together in new ways. They're trying to give people a DBA-in-an-OS, and that's going to require space, speed and ram.
Do YOU need it? Maybe not. Maybe nobody needs it. But I certainly want to see what they come up with. Naysaying isn't going to make their software any better nor is it going to cause the development team to smack their heads and give up.
Making yesterday's computers do just enough to get by is Linux's job. If I'm gonna pay for a computer OS when I've already got one, and I've got about TEN, it better do something spectacular. That's why I bought OSX. Longhorn's hoping to be something revolutionary, and that could be a good thing (Windows NT) or a bad thing (Windows 1.0). If it's a good thing, it will be a major threat to the open source community, who could be caught with their pants down. If it's a bad thing, MS will eat its failure and give us some kind of shake and bake "Windows Millenium" style rebirth of the NT/XP kernel while they make it even better for Longhorn Mark 2, aka Windows 2007.
.NET *IS* exactly mature -- we've been shipping software written in .NET for over a year. It is pretty snappy, though obviously not as fast as C++ it makes up for it by being infinitely more secure and far easier to write in and to optimize. Using fast execution to run slow algorithms is no help at all. And if in fact the old code is being rewritten, this is very good news. An entire operating system that is invulnerable to stack overflow attacks? Sign me up.
.NET and free of P/Invoke calls along with the Mono project would mean native Windows apps would run elsewhere without too much of an issue. Our app already runs well in Mono, minus a couple of major hacks in the image handling department.
BTW: an entire OS written in
Hey, I like Coors Lite, but in my belly after a long hot day, not in my ass. Now Miller Lite, there's a beer that belongs in an ass!
Computers are not self-healing and they don't have an immune system.
Well, one could argue that virus software is your PC's immune system. But i didn't want to overthink the analogy, because that's butt.
And yet, Led Zepplin still rocks. Harleys are still pretty cool. The fact that your dad's a goof doesn't change these.
Same with the Java Desktop. Java is AWESOME. A Java Desktop is a Cool Thing. Whether it helps Sun or not is meaningless.
So the solution is pretty apparent and pretty simple: find one clever, relatively inconsential guy somewhere in the company. Give him and him alone the patch on day 0. Let him use his machine as normal...if he discovers a problem, you saved your $180,000. If he doesn't, you can roll it out to the others feeling secure.
My point is, there is absolutely no reason why you should have to test the patch yourself. And if you're waiting days, or weeks, to have "time" to test a patch, you're almost inviting viruses. I develop applications full time and also perform virus duty for 40 employees...I don't see why you can't handle 600 if you're doing it full time.
as soon as your baby is born and put in the nursery with the other brand new babies... they would all be infected... where would you suggest we put the new baby right off the bat?
I believe I suggested plugging it into a firewall that was one way, e.g. denied all incoming connections regardless of port or source. Yes, I did suggest that.
have you ever dealt with Ted from Marketing? I've found that if Ted is high enough up and he can't play solitaire then the sh*t is going to hit the fan pretty dang fast!
This is true enough, but it's also true that if Ted's machine gets a virus and has to be completely rebuilt, he's probably going to blame you for not protecting his machine. And he'd be right to do so, since you didn't do it. Which is why you should get the patch out to one or two underlyings in marketing the instant it's released, see if they have any trouble, and then roll it out to everybody else within the next day or so.
With security, if you're waiting two weeks, you're not doing your job. When the front door needs a new lock, you don't leave it open for 15 days, you don't care if Ted the Marketing Asshole has keys or not, you just fix it, and deal with the consequences later -- because they're nowhere near as bad as leaving the door open!
if a plumber, electrician, and carpenter told you that in the long run it would be a lot cheaper just to buy a new house instead of have them out every other day, wouldn't that make sense?
It would. But I'd probably still ignore them. I like my house and moving is a hassle I don't need, so it is worth the extra effort and expense to keep the current one. I'd pay even less mind to the suggestion if it appeared to me that the plumber, electrician, and carpenter who I was paying anyway wanted me to shell out extra cash and effort just to make their jobs easier.
I get upset by slashdotters who argue "phantom" points -- points that I didn't make or imply in either of my grandpatent posts.
What I said, paraphrased, was: "If you are head of an IT department charged with installing software on a new machine, a good idea is to place it behind a firewall with no open ports, to prevent worms from exploiting the vulnerable operating system while you patch it."
How you got from that I was suggesting that a firewall is the only security you need, or that I was making any suggestiong to home users, I have no idea. My guess is poor reading comprehension skills, as this would also explain why you think the plural of virus is viri when it's goddamn viruses.
<Offtopic-rant>
Why do people insist on putting -i at the end of every word that has a singular form ending in s? The plural of iris isn't irii. The plural of axis isn't axi. The whole purpose of the -es plural is that you are supposed to use it when a word ends in s. Why must people emply this queer new form? It just makes them sound like pompous douches -- or is it douchi?
</Offtopic-rant>
Firewalls don't protect jack if ports are open client side within your network that shouldn't be.
I was suggesting to put up the box behind a firewall appliance -- a cheap Dlink would do -- as the ONLY thing behind it. Put it on your installation bench sort of like a surge protector for viruses.
Will it look as bad as allowing your entire company to get a virus?
Since exploits come out less than a month after Microsoft releases a patch, you better damn sure get your ass in gear when one's released. And how long does it take to test the basic functionality of a machine after a patch? Less than an hour I'd wager. A day to look for flakiness. Waiting two weeks is surely overkill.
I for one thing it's far superior to break a network trying to fix it than waiting for a virus to take it down. The former you can in earnest blame on the vendor. The latter -- well, since the fix already existed, the blame's on you.
Their ignorance? What about yours?
A new computer is like a new baby. You need to inocculate it or it'll get sick. If you're putting out in a wild environment without protection -- and a suitably large organization is almost as bad as the internet itself -- you're just asking for trouble. The best way to prevent this is to patch it up to a useful level behind a one way firewall. An even better way is to update your corporate ghost image once a month so you're never more than 30 days behind in your patches.
Furthermore, the days of agressively testing patches should be over for everything but servers. Let your employees run autoupdates and if one of them does break your machines, roll it back. Servers are a special case, because if you lose the TCP stack on your mail server it's much worse than if Ted from Marketing loses his.
Management doesn't want Linux because they don't want to lose days learning an alien operating system when they already have YOU to do the job of protecting them from viruses. What would you say if your plumber told you that to unclog a leak, you'd have to buy a new house?
Or you could just use Automatic Updates. They've been around since Windows 2000 service pack 3. You can set it to run Windows Update automatically, to download in the background and let you know when it's ready, or to notify you when new updates are available so you can get them yourself.
It's an astoudingly good piece of software. Easily on par, if not better than, Apple's Software Update.
My bad. I corrected an inaccurate post with more innaccuracy. Thanks for being gentle with the clue stick!
Patent. They tend to patent everything. Patents are for inventions and processes, copyrights are for intellectual property. Drug patents are *KIND* of a good thing, as they encourage drug companies to pump money into R&D. The patents keep other companies from being parasitic and producing drugs based off other people's research.
And drug margins are only high if they appeal to a lot of people or are significantly helpful to justify a high up front cost. If you make a drug which only works some of the time for some of the people, you may not even recoup your R&D budger. It's a crapshoot...but the potential is huge.
i go RAH-RAH, like a dungeon dragon
Oh no he didn't go and bite Busta!
It's true for middle school. I used to get beat up all the time for being geeky, until I beat the shit out of a kid. I was really embarrassed about it...he was half my size...but I was told by everybody else how awesome it was.
Incidentally, the beatings didn't make a lick of difference. I still loved science and math. I still dressed in florescents and wore a fanny pack. At one point, I even started donning pocket protectors in protest of this flagrant anti-intellecturalism.
In high school, mostly everybody just left me alone. And that's how I liked it. In the classes I cared about, what the fuck do I care what people thought of me? I ruled every computer science class that school had, kicked ass in Spanish and Chemisty, Bio and Physics, and did my best in English Literature.
A few times, I'd get offhanded anti-intellectual comments. Like when I was discussing particle physics in the locker room, or the time we were making up dumb haikus at lunch. I always responded with scathing contempt, some very clever insults, and the occasional threat. But I never got any takers. Once a guy muttered "freak" at me under his breath while passing between classes. I followed him to his next class and wouldn't leave until he apologized.
I had a few friends, and that was enough. What's great was, by the time I was a senior, I had flexed my individuality to the point that I had gained the respect of a lot of my class. I was hardly Mr. Popular, but I could get a date if I wanted. And I knew how to calculate the torque at an arbitrary point on a rotating disk.
The majority of songs on the radio are about sex, love, drugs, etc. Yes, there are some violent songs, but there were violent songs in the seventies as well. Ever hear of Black Sabbath? The Rolling Stones?
Nothing has changed in music, man, nor in kids' attitudes. Smart people DO still get respect if they're not smug about it and have other aspects to their personality. Just because TV shows it the other way around doesn't mean it's true...I can't tell you how many times my brother has talked about some new friend in high school and rounded out the conversation with "He's really smart, too. He gets, like, all 90s and stuff."
This is a foolish argument. The American public school system is still better funded than those of a lot of countries that send their college students here. India's a good example...from what I hear, they have some terrible public schools.
It seems obvious that if other countries with worse schools than ours can graduate students capable of a career in science, then the problem isn't the K-12 system per se. I don't know what it is. A lot of people in here will tell you it's an anti-intellectual social structure, which is also bogus. I made it through public school with a class that was loaded with slackers and nerd-haters, and still saw a lot of people -- even popular people -- who did really well in the sciences. Many of these guys were popular as well. You see, just because you say "science is so bogus" doesn't mean you don't do your chem homework, any more than saying "work is bogus" stops you from doing your job.
No, it's far more likely that the "brain drain" was a result of so many smart kids going into business. After all, if you're presented with the option of what to do with your big fat brain and it's "make a ton of money in the private sector" or "work long hours in a small lab for little or money," most people will take the former. There are some who love science enough to become researchers, but not many, and that's what we're seeing.
BTW: the solution isn't appealing to kids or making science more "cool." The solution is paying researchers better. Working 16 hour days and alienating yourself from your friends and family is shitty work for $35k.
I priced the Sagers, they're a nice laptop. They're also obscenely heavy. If I wanted a thin desktop with an integrated display, I'd buy one. Sager doesn't make a slim laptop...mostly because it's hard to engineer one that doesn't suck. There are only a few PC companies who have...Acer has some nice ones, as do voodoopc, sony, etc.
Anyhow, I already have all the software I need for my new mac, I should have mentioned that as well. There wasn't a lot of it that I needed to replace, just Office X...game wise, the only games I play are Unreal 2k4, Warcraft 3 and NWN, and all three are available for mac (though I had to buy a new copy of NWN).
So far, it's been worth the "extra expense" just to use a computer that didn't run Windows XP! That OS makes me want to chew my own hand off and escape.