I have to say that they are quite the arrogant bunch. The company I worked at was Insurance.com. I was there from almost the start back in 2001. QuinStreet acquired them in 2010. I was one of the six folks that were kept on to keep the lights on.
I have no respect for QS. They look at people as chits to cashed in. People are their currency. If you can't monetize someone right now, then the source is ipso facto useless. Mind you, Insurance.com sent out its share of emails (er, spam), but at the same time we had some pretty good voices of the consumer at the table as well -- myself included. QS had none of that.
Beyond the consumer angle, they are a meat grinder for the employees. I met very few folks in my year there that had more than a year or two of tenure. There are a couple people I worked with that were there for years that were waiting to cash out and leave (some have left since then), but they were few and far between.
If anyone wants to know anything, feel free to ask.
I would imagine you're on the right track. The game-plan to make the green PC is , basically, do what laptop makers do. Laptops are limited by the amount of power you can carry, so they have incentive to make someting efficient.
Your incentive is you want to be good for the environment.
In the end, regardless of what the motivation is, the results are very similar.
I have to agree -- and I'll try to extend your arguments even further.
In my current job, which involves quite a bit of C#, I had the opportunity to port large chunks of our legacy application from C++ to Managed C++. We didn't gain security benefits, nor did we gain speed; we didn't loose any either. However we gained a lot of maintainability since we now have a single stack-trace to deal with that bridges all of the languages that we have (now reduced to C# and C++ -- down significantly from when we relied heavily on COM)
The fact that MS gave us that choice is wonderful. If we wanted to be using JNI (which I had the unlucky opportunity to use), we'd not have made much progress at all.
I did notice that when I was importing -- hanging on the m3u. When I deleted it and tried importing again it crashed. And this was importing on the machine that had all the files locally. When I tried to import over a network share it died even more spectacularly.
A friend of mine with a mac noticed the same type of thing with iPhoto: when you have too much stuff it isn't very happy. I'm guessing Apple wants things to look good in the store, but once you have it at home, all bets are off.
Oh well.
MusicMatch seems to deal with it better for the most part, though with a big library modifying its database seems to take long. WinAmp has no organization tools with it.
As much as I hate to admit it, Windows Media Player seems to do the best job with organizing and playing all my music.
I downloaded iTunes and started to play with it. However, when I tried to import my 50GB collection of MP3s it consistantly crashed or hung. It doesn't seem to have to balls to handle that many files.
That and the UI seemed slow. Apply has this thing about looking good over functionality -- no, don't make things slide open if all I'm going to do is bitch that your going to do it slowly.
Oh well, it was interesting while I was trying it, but I'm going to be uninstalling it soon.
Amen brother!
There's beena number of times that an ethernet cable has wiggled itself a bit too loose where I work. Yes, it was still "clicked" into place, but it wasn't making proper contact with the socket.
Ethernet is a cable that was meant to be plugged in repeatedly, unlike SCSI or IDE or whatnot where you generally plug it in annd leave it -- or maybe even screw into place.
Re:Depends on the current settings
on
Hijacking .NET
·
· Score: 1
Well, it depends on the current set of security settings that in in force when you run whatever program. The settings can vary based on where the program came from, signitures on the program, web site it was downloaded from, etc.
So, for instance, the local settings are really loose, much like what you'd expect with any old program that you already have living on your own local storage. However, if you get the executable from an internal file server, you could enforce a stricter set of controls, perhaps no access to the local filesystem, yet allowing access to the printer. For code downloaded from a web site, it could go into lock-down mode where anything that even remotely could be bad is automatically prohibited.
The scenario that I just described is pretty much the defaults as they ship, and generally require a bit of skill to modify. (As a side-note, in a NT domain environment, you can have a policy that the admins hand down be the default, so you can enforce site-wide policies)
The security framework that's in.net really is rather flexible... it's just very different from what most people are used to. There's even the concept of SUIDish libraries, that can be called by an unpriviledeged caller, but can then turn around and do trusted stuff -- as long as it's set up that way, and no, it's not easy to do it by accident.
I'm generally not religious for or against MS, but I really don't like lies to be spread. It hurts everyone. In this case though, MS did its job well.
Depends on the current settings
on
Hijacking .NET
·
· Score: 3, Informative
RTFM.
Check the documentation on the ReflectionPermissionFlag Enumeration
to see what's going on. By default, for code that you're running on your own machine, you can do anything that you want. You can modify the settings with the framework configuration applet, or with some command line programs.
I went to anti-leach and was amused by the banner ad on top: "Eliminate Pop-ups and triple your surfing speed."
Well, I guess you can't have your cake and eat it too... the campaign they are trying to start is funded by the ads they are serving up.
Ya know what -- I don't give a damn. I'll still leave the unsolicited pop-up blocker enabled in Mozilla, and if some dipsh!t site wants to use the anti-leech stuff, I'll fire up IE in a sacrificial process that I can kill if things get out of hand.
Couple points, Sun wanted to do the high-volume thing with the network computer that was resoundingly rejected by the industry. Java itself was intended to be high-volume in the form of set-top boxes.
To go with the McDonald's analogy, it's akin to me making some variety of hot dogs that I think are the best. McDonald's test marketing it, then deciding that it doesn't fit with their stratagy, dropping it, then me suing them for not liking it. Doesn't work that way.
Sun really aught to stick to something they understand -- high margin workstations. They don't seem to be able to get the software market. Heck, with fast PCs, they don't seem to understand the hardware market any more either... Come to think of it, what do they get?
Company X has a technology that they think is good. Company Y thinks it isn't good. X whines and sues Y.
Seriously, MS made (while they were supporting it) one of the better implementations of a JVM out there. Sure, they had extensions on it to make it useful to more people, but you didn't have to use them! So Sun starts bitching about how it's not compliant. MS goes and takes their toys and goes home. WTF does Sun do? They sue MS to support it again.
This is all sour grapes. Sun's just ticked cause their stock is sitting at around 3+3/4.
Did it ever occur to anyone that if Sun had their way they would be doing exactly what MS is doing now? They are just a wanna-be monopolist.
How can you say that WinXP is noticably more reliable than Win2k with a straight face? The differences in reliability are invisible at best, and if they are noticable they are in Win2k's favor. This is to be expected when you consider that Win2k is proven code from NT and 9x while XP is a exerimental testbed of new ideas.
Read my comment: Personal experience -- I was evaluating the system for work and purposely installed some crappy drivers that I knew would blow up; the system recovered just fine
Responding to your second point, are you saying that running Office|StarOffice|WordStar (pick your poison) on a 1GHz processor is going to be twice as productive as running it on a 500MHz machine? The first machine (all other things being equal) is going to be roughly 100% faster than the second machine (ignore latency, and such stuff for now, this is a thought experiment here). That would be time too, would it not? I would say a resounding "No" because the user is still the slow part of the system.
Did you ever see a benchmark running anyway? It's hammering a machine faster than any human could possibly do it.
The important thing (in all cases here) is to increase the productivity of the user. As machines have gotten faster they can afford to take on more functions for the user. This slows them down, however it speeds up the user. I remember running on a 1Mhz machine -- I'm not 1000x more productive now -- but I am happier.
How often in the last couple years did you notice "Gee, this word processor can't keep up with my mad typing skillz." So what if an automated benchmark can't make a bazillion documents as fast.
In the end there are lies, damn lies and benchmarks.
As someone who's used XP, the time lost (microseconds per day) are more than made up for with the added reliability of the system and the much easier recovery process. (Personal experience -- I was evaluating the system for work and purposely installed some crappy drivers that I knew would blow up; the system recovered just fine)
I read this in the print version of InfoWorld a few days ago and got pissed off then too. If you're going to beat up on M$, do it better for crying out loud. This is just like the dumb VM debates for Linux.
If MS comes up with some cool new technology, and so does Oracle and GNU, then the developer can make the decision. The only thing I can see people bitching about (and I would bitch too) is if MS would intentionally make their system incompatible with competing systems (like AOL IM does to everyone else). If there would be some consortium formed to allow authentication to flow from system to system, then cool!
Perhaps this is what people should be talking to congress-critters about?
This is not MS trying to inflict a toll on development -- this is MS trying to make money by selling a service. The.NET My Services is a service that interfaces with MSN Messanger to allow instant communication with your users and also authentication. Seriously people, every time MS charges for something it becomes news on slash...
The last company I was working for was going to authenticate financial transactions. Let me tell you that they were not going to do it for free. How is this any different? Or maybe the phone company charging for setting up your phone lines and billing your company monthly?
MS is charging for a service and you can choose to use it or not.
Perhaps the open source community can get together and create a distributed authentication system to compete with it.
I remember when I was 12 in '85 and playing around with my Commodore 64. I borrowed a 300 baud (back when a baud was a bit... time flies) and quickly got my own 1200 bps. A little time went by and I managed to talk my mom into getting a second phone line -- thus Ground Zero BBS was born. Working for all of 1 meg online: a 1541 and 1581 floppy drive. Ran the thing off of CNet BBS software if I still remember. Phone number at the time was 216-381-6550. Don't bother calling 'cause it's long dead though.
Lasted for around 4 years, which was a fairly long time as far as BBSes went. I still remember the first couple of callers. Watching them sign on and leave messages. I got to know everyone on there. It was like a close group of friends -- maybe 30 or so regulars. We had a couple of get-togethers. By Co-sysop started dating one of them too.
Sigh...
Times are changing. Back then I knew almost everyone that was online in the 216 are code. Now most everyone is on. Heck, the code split twice because of all the new phone lines being put in.
It's something that I'm sure to tell my future kids some day. Back when we were on the cusp of something big. Back when computers were as uncommon as rotary phones are now.
Just to clarify, I think that the stuff left over after Metricom pulled out is great that it's there! If it's helping now, then the redundancy was good...
That's one of the inefficiencies of a complex, competitive environment. If everyone wants to set up their own wireless network, for instance, there's going to be a lot of overlap in the low-level stuff. This is not anti-capitalistic, it's just that some bit of standardization is a good thing - take a look at the IBM PC ISA and TCP/IP. While certain amounts are good (a Windows worm hasn't yet also struck Linux for instance) but too much really is a waste.
The same could have been done with the wireless freenets that was mentioned a few articles ago.
The problem with the "OK" button is that people quickly get conditioned to press it whenever it comes up since that's what they meant most of the time. It seems that for newer versions of Outlook MS decided to do the "OK" dialog with a twist -- it makes you wait 5 seconds before it lets you press it and do potentially damaging things. Perhaps we should adopt something similar in the stuff we do?
Scot points out in the article that he believes that you should get a computer that asks "'Which OS do you want to use today?' upon boot." Does he realize the repercussions of that?
How about your email clients and maintaining two different address books and two separate sent-mail files... And your browser favorites... and two sets of PDA syncers... and maintaining what amounts to two different machines. It's somewhat like working in two different cities with two offices. Sure, you can still get stuff done, but you never have a chance to fully move into either one. Unless you have a really good reason why you'd do such a thing (maybe play a game or two in one, then quickly go back to your primary one, or perhaps cross-platform development) why on earth would you want to subject yourself to the insane annoyances of two OSes on the same machine?
Get along, perhaps, but it'll never be too pretty.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no respect for QS. They look at people as chits to cashed in. People are their currency. If you can't monetize someone right now, then the source is ipso facto useless. Mind you, Insurance.com sent out its share of emails (er, spam), but at the same time we had some pretty good voices of the consumer at the table as well -- myself included. QS had none of that.
Beyond the consumer angle, they are a meat grinder for the employees. I met very few folks in my year there that had more than a year or two of tenure. There are a couple people I worked with that were there for years that were waiting to cash out and leave (some have left since then), but they were few and far between.
If anyone wants to know anything, feel free to ask.
Your incentive is you want to be good for the environment.
In the end, regardless of what the motivation is, the results are very similar.
We have 4 of 2kW PSUs in a blade server at work. Granted... they can run 14 maxed out servers, so I guess it's not that bad. Runs off 240V as well...
In my current job, which involves quite a bit of C#, I had the opportunity to port large chunks of our legacy application from C++ to Managed C++. We didn't gain security benefits, nor did we gain speed; we didn't loose any either. However we gained a lot of maintainability since we now have a single stack-trace to deal with that bridges all of the languages that we have (now reduced to C# and C++ -- down significantly from when we relied heavily on COM)
The fact that MS gave us that choice is wonderful. If we wanted to be using JNI (which I had the unlucky opportunity to use), we'd not have made much progress at all.
A friend of mine with a mac noticed the same type of thing with iPhoto: when you have too much stuff it isn't very happy. I'm guessing Apple wants things to look good in the store, but once you have it at home, all bets are off.
Oh well.
MusicMatch seems to deal with it better for the most part, though with a big library modifying its database seems to take long. WinAmp has no organization tools with it.
As much as I hate to admit it, Windows Media Player seems to do the best job with organizing and playing all my music.
That and the UI seemed slow. Apply has this thing about looking good over functionality -- no, don't make things slide open if all I'm going to do is bitch that your going to do it slowly.
Oh well, it was interesting while I was trying it, but I'm going to be uninstalling it soon.
Amen brother! There's beena number of times that an ethernet cable has wiggled itself a bit too loose where I work. Yes, it was still "clicked" into place, but it wasn't making proper contact with the socket. Ethernet is a cable that was meant to be plugged in repeatedly, unlike SCSI or IDE or whatnot where you generally plug it in annd leave it -- or maybe even screw into place.
So, for instance, the local settings are really loose, much like what you'd expect with any old program that you already have living on your own local storage. However, if you get the executable from an internal file server, you could enforce a stricter set of controls, perhaps no access to the local filesystem, yet allowing access to the printer. For code downloaded from a web site, it could go into lock-down mode where anything that even remotely could be bad is automatically prohibited.
The scenario that I just described is pretty much the defaults as they ship, and generally require a bit of skill to modify. (As a side-note, in a NT domain environment, you can have a policy that the admins hand down be the default, so you can enforce site-wide policies)
The security framework that's in .net really is rather flexible... it's just very different from what most people are used to. There's even the concept of SUIDish libraries, that can be called by an unpriviledeged caller, but can then turn around and do trusted stuff -- as long as it's set up that way, and no, it's not easy to do it by accident.
I'm generally not religious for or against MS, but I really don't like lies to be spread. It hurts everyone. In this case though, MS did its job well.
Check the documentation on the ReflectionPermissionFlag Enumeration to see what's going on. By default, for code that you're running on your own machine, you can do anything that you want. You can modify the settings with the framework configuration applet, or with some command line programs.
The end result is, you can turn this feature off.
I'm tired of /. being used to sell sh!t in posts.
Well, I guess you can't have your cake and eat it too... the campaign they are trying to start is funded by the ads they are serving up.
Ya know what -- I don't give a damn. I'll still leave the unsolicited pop-up blocker enabled in Mozilla, and if some dipsh!t site wants to use the anti-leech stuff, I'll fire up IE in a sacrificial process that I can kill if things get out of hand.
To go with the McDonald's analogy, it's akin to me making some variety of hot dogs that I think are the best. McDonald's test marketing it, then deciding that it doesn't fit with their stratagy, dropping it, then me suing them for not liking it. Doesn't work that way.
Sun really aught to stick to something they understand -- high margin workstations. They don't seem to be able to get the software market. Heck, with fast PCs, they don't seem to understand the hardware market any more either... Come to think of it, what do they get?
Seriously, MS made (while they were supporting it) one of the better implementations of a JVM out there. Sure, they had extensions on it to make it useful to more people, but you didn't have to use them! So Sun starts bitching about how it's not compliant. MS goes and takes their toys and goes home. WTF does Sun do? They sue MS to support it again.
This is all sour grapes. Sun's just ticked cause their stock is sitting at around 3+3/4.
Did it ever occur to anyone that if Sun had their way they would be doing exactly what MS is doing now? They are just a wanna-be monopolist.
Read my comment: Personal experience -- I was evaluating the system for work and purposely installed some crappy drivers that I knew would blow up; the system recovered just fine
Responding to your second point, are you saying that running Office|StarOffice|WordStar (pick your poison) on a 1GHz processor is going to be twice as productive as running it on a 500MHz machine? The first machine (all other things being equal) is going to be roughly 100% faster than the second machine (ignore latency, and such stuff for now, this is a thought experiment here). That would be time too, would it not? I would say a resounding "No" because the user is still the slow part of the system.
Did you ever see a benchmark running anyway? It's hammering a machine faster than any human could possibly do it.
The important thing (in all cases here) is to increase the productivity of the user. As machines have gotten faster they can afford to take on more functions for the user. This slows them down, however it speeds up the user. I remember running on a 1Mhz machine -- I'm not 1000x more productive now -- but I am happier.
In the end there are lies, damn lies and benchmarks.
As someone who's used XP, the time lost (microseconds per day) are more than made up for with the added reliability of the system and the much easier recovery process. (Personal experience -- I was evaluating the system for work and purposely installed some crappy drivers that I knew would blow up; the system recovered just fine)
I read this in the print version of InfoWorld a few days ago and got pissed off then too. If you're going to beat up on M$, do it better for crying out loud. This is just like the dumb VM debates for Linux.
No, several million up front and a percentage of transaction amount.
If MS comes up with some cool new technology, and so does Oracle and GNU, then the developer can make the decision. The only thing I can see people bitching about (and I would bitch too) is if MS would intentionally make their system incompatible with competing systems (like AOL IM does to everyone else). If there would be some consortium formed to allow authentication to flow from system to system, then cool!
Perhaps this is what people should be talking to congress-critters about?
The last company I was working for was going to authenticate financial transactions. Let me tell you that they were not going to do it for free. How is this any different? Or maybe the phone company charging for setting up your phone lines and billing your company monthly?
MS is charging for a service and you can choose to use it or not.
Perhaps the open source community can get together and create a distributed authentication system to compete with it.
It doesn't matter that you can't sue, it's all CYA.
I remember when I was 12 in '85 and playing around with my Commodore 64. I borrowed a 300 baud (back when a baud was a bit... time flies) and quickly got my own 1200 bps. A little time went by and I managed to talk my mom into getting a second phone line -- thus Ground Zero BBS was born. Working for all of 1 meg online: a 1541 and 1581 floppy drive. Ran the thing off of CNet BBS software if I still remember. Phone number at the time was 216-381-6550. Don't bother calling 'cause it's long dead though.
Lasted for around 4 years, which was a fairly long time as far as BBSes went. I still remember the first couple of callers. Watching them sign on and leave messages. I got to know everyone on there. It was like a close group of friends -- maybe 30 or so regulars. We had a couple of get-togethers. By Co-sysop started dating one of them too.
Sigh...
Times are changing. Back then I knew almost everyone that was online in the 216 are code. Now most everyone is on. Heck, the code split twice because of all the new phone lines being put in.
It's something that I'm sure to tell my future kids some day. Back when we were on the cusp of something big. Back when computers were as uncommon as rotary phones are now.
vore - eater
It must be carnivore on crack! Run for the hills!
Hindsight is 20/20.
The same could have been done with the wireless freenets that was mentioned a few articles ago.
Redudancy is good. Too much redundancy is bad.
The problem with the "OK" button is that people quickly get conditioned to press it whenever it comes up since that's what they meant most of the time. It seems that for newer versions of Outlook MS decided to do the "OK" dialog with a twist -- it makes you wait 5 seconds before it lets you press it and do potentially damaging things. Perhaps we should adopt something similar in the stuff we do?
I'm just waiting for a class-action suit to pop up over this.
How about your email clients and maintaining two different address books and two separate sent-mail files... And your browser favorites... and two sets of PDA syncers... and maintaining what amounts to two different machines. It's somewhat like working in two different cities with two offices. Sure, you can still get stuff done, but you never have a chance to fully move into either one. Unless you have a really good reason why you'd do such a thing (maybe play a game or two in one, then quickly go back to your primary one, or perhaps cross-platform development) why on earth would you want to subject yourself to the insane annoyances of two OSes on the same machine?
Get along, perhaps, but it'll never be too pretty.