Windows is a relatively secure OS if you know how to run it. Unfortunately, most people who run it are dumbasses who install all programs they find and click YES to every prompt they see.
Unfortunately, Windows is designed so that any dumbass can run it. Any OS which demands any kind of technical comprehension is labels 'elitist' and stays relatively obscure.
The only reason Linux is gaining ground is that the latest desktop environments and installers allow you to be a total eejit and still get a halfway working system...
I love how we don't class human influence as natural. Since when did 'man made' become the opposite of natural, rather than just a specialisation of it?
Netscape of old did one thing right... it spawned Mozilla. That's about it.
I remember having a special button in my FVWM menu marked 'Kill Netscape' for those 'special' moments it had when it decided to sit and contemplate the universe for a while. Ah, happy days.
Sadly, this is the way language is. People soon start using proper nouns as nouns, as is the case with Hoover, Biro.
The one that really irritates me is when people take a 'powerpoint' in to a meeting. IT'S A PRESENTATION! The bizarre thing in the last company I worked for is that they were never referred to as presentations, always as powerpoints, even though the presentation software was OpenOffice Impress!
I am sure that Microsoft, Linux, Apache and whatnot other programmers know the theory too. Too bad that buffer overflows still happen.
Unfortunately, old code seems to live the longest. I know, that sounds daft, but think about it; which is easier to rip out and replace: the nice new code that you understand, or the evil, nasty, hacky arcane nonsense that was there before you even knew what 'compile' meant?
The GDI+ problem mentioned in other replies just points to the fact that, no matter how spiffy your new code is, if you rely on old nasty code in the background you're in for a world of pain. Unfortunately, as found in most businesses, a ground up rewrite is just not economically viable.
Each has valid and useful points. None is magic. Nothing can replace experience, motivation, and doing work you're proud to put under your name.
Under your name...one of the unsung strengths of open-source development! Nobody outside the company knows who put the bugs in closed source software. Open source developers sign their work for the world to see.
That's what I said. He said it must be because I am a lazy idiot (not paraphrased). I quit. You can't work with managers like that, and much less work for them. I put up with it for a VERY long time before an opportunity came up, but when it did I was out of there. They can't understand why employee loyalty is so bad.
Our company then passed an internal policy that we would insource (bring programmers in to work on a project) but that outsourcing was out of the question.
But this is also a problem. I've had so many managers who took the approach 'well, it didn't work once so it is now policy that we never, ever do it again' that it ends up biting you in the ass.
My last manager (I quit 2 weeks ago, yay me!) decided that software unit testing was fundamentally bad, because he'd tried to manage a project using XP (eXtreme Programming, not.. oh you know) and that uses unit testing and it didn't work very well. It became policy that we should never do unit testing. I kid you not.
Creating a policy to never do something that didn't work the first time is as bad as not trying it in the first place.
I might request the NOC to block this site at work, for fear of my manager finding it.
Last week he wanted to show us a graph. Just one. He spent the better part of Thursday hand crafting a 45 slide presentation with 1 second automatic progression so that it would 'animate'. Since he figured that one out every single presentation (or 'preso' as he calls them) has one in, and time taken to create them has rocketed.
Of course, it could be worse. He could be doing something evil to use plebeians.
a film with no plot, no characters and no apparent acting. the only reason I didn't fall asleep is due to the suspense of assuming that something was going to happen. At all. Anything would have done.
"Are there any countries with NO patent or copyright laws in place, and minimal trade with the US?"
This is not the right question. Copyright laws and (when used properly) patent laws are a Good Thing. However, the question here is not that they have no patent or copyright laws, but that the US has no jurisdiction over the laws they do have.
Germany sounds good to me, TBH. Sure, they're in Europe and Europe *heart* America (seriously, I don't know why) but overall they seem to have this technology thing sussed.
I had (have, somewhere) a FreeBSD 4.3 ina DVD box with two disks - a double sided CD, and a combination DVD-CD. I have never had read issues with this.
The Tunsten has something of a reptutation for destroying memory cards. Check out this list of problems encountered using different cards in different machines.
Note that in the Tungsten T3 only 1 out of 7 tested cards actually survived the ordeal! Of course, this particular test isn't scientific, but it is based on real user feedback really using them for real things, so it's probably worth a read.
I was given the task of upgrading a Win3.1 machine to Win95 OSR2.5, and was given a nice new CD-ROM drive to install in the machine for the purpose. The machine belonged to the MD of the company I worked for. As an apprentice.
Anyways, I backed up the ENTIRE HDD onto a spare using an (early) tomsrtbt and then booted of the floppy. FDISK and FORMAT later I'm ready for the Win95 CD. In it goes.
As it was copying it's files to the HDD, a strange plasticky burning smell arose and I noticed curls of smoke coming out of the back of the CD drive. I quickly powered down, and was treated to a lovely cross between a screech, a grind and a crunch. On powering the drive up, the door wouldn't open. I tried using a paper clip, but no joy. So, off with the power and in with the screwdriver.
What greeted me was quite... thorough. The drive electronics were burned out, the laser caddy was fused in one position, and there was (how I don't know) a 1mm deep groove all the way round the data side of the disk. I had to break the laser caddy to get the disk out to find this out. I restored the machine from the backup and returned it, citing 'compatibility issues'.
1) I had an original 3DFX card in a machine and, little known to me, the ground lead in the monitor cable was broken. When I opened up the case, one of the transistors on the output of the 3DFX was glowing so bright you could see it through the back of the PCB. Replaced the monitor cable and AFAIK it's still working today (donated it to a friend)
2) 2 dead harddrives; one with controller failure, one with crashed heads. Classic case of PCB swappage made it all work nice. Drives were both Seagate, but different models!?!
3) Bad grounding on PSU caused motherboard to catch fire and electricity to arc across the case. Although technically the machine still worked, I stripped it for parts and disposed of the PSU and case.
I used to work for a firm who built IBM compatible PC parts into industrialised computer units. The conditions of some of those was astounding. e.g. one had a blowtorch dropped in it - charred the graphics card a bit but it still worked. Another had a full 2 inches of black soot-like powder in it but never stopped working. They only returned it to be upgraded!
not emotional ones. If I look in my rear view mirror and see a car really close, yeah I want to get out of that situation. It makes no difference whether the guy is just an ignorant jerk who thinks his breaks are better than the laws of physics, or a psycho who's trying to run me off the road.
If I look in the mirror, it's to assess the presence and activities of vehicles around me. I don't care if they aren't pleased to see me, or if the lass over in the other lane is winking at the guy behind me (fellow geeks will know THAT feeling).
On the other hand, if I look behind me and see a guy really close, and his car has an 'angry smiley' look about it (red lights, lowered ride height, etc.) then I know he's a psycho, and it'll really piss me off. I will then most likely (although subconsiously) drive worse than before.
How many have had some guy acting a jerk at the lights and then found themselves tearing away from the lights, possibly trying to cut the guy up or at least show him up to all around? It's a primal thing, and it has no place on a safe road system. Adding these features will just take peoples minds further away from the prime reason for having mirrors in the first place. Self preservation!
all the machines at our local Uni have WinNT or 2K on them, but each is equiped with a copy of Hummingbird Exceed, and everyone gets an account on one of the Solaris boxes.
Essentially, I just used WinNT as the container for a dumb terminal, and it works great. The only thing I had trouble doing was watching MPEGs; remote X sessions just don't update at 25fps.
but a firewall is a piece of software which allows or denies packets based on their properties; it cares not in which direction they are flowing.
A reverse firewall, then, is just a firewall. It's like the difference between a slash and a forward slash (pet peeve). In fact, if you use an iptables or ipchains firewall, you only need a few extra rules to implement this on your gateway machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows is a relatively secure OS if you know how to run it. Unfortunately, most people who run it are dumbasses who install all programs they find and click YES to every prompt they see.
Unfortunately, Windows is designed so that any dumbass can run it. Any OS which demands any kind of technical comprehension is labels 'elitist' and stays relatively obscure.
The only reason Linux is gaining ground is that the latest desktop environments and installers allow you to be a total eejit and still get a halfway working system...
I love how we don't class human influence as natural. Since when did 'man made' become the opposite of natural, rather than just a specialisation of it?
Netscape of old did one thing right... it spawned Mozilla. That's about it.
I remember having a special button in my FVWM menu marked 'Kill Netscape' for those 'special' moments it had when it decided to sit and contemplate the universe for a while. Ah, happy days.
Or when they use the word Photoshop to refer to any image manipulation software!
"Yeah, I photoshopped that"
"Oh yeah, what did you use?"
"Paintshop Pro"
"Oh"
Sadly, this is the way language is. People soon start using proper nouns as nouns, as is the case with Hoover, Biro.
The one that really irritates me is when people take a 'powerpoint' in to a meeting. IT'S A PRESENTATION! The bizarre thing in the last company I worked for is that they were never referred to as presentations, always as powerpoints, even though the presentation software was OpenOffice Impress!
Still, at least we don't 'send an outlook'...
I'm running Firefox on Gentoo. When I tried to watch the trailer, I got to this URL, which tells me that I need to 'upgrade' to IE or Netscape.
First round running shoes, now upgrading Firefox to IE. It's a world gone topsy-turvy!
It's what we'd get if we printed everything linked to by Google :)
Unfortunately, old code seems to live the longest. I know, that sounds daft, but think about it; which is easier to rip out and replace: the nice new code that you understand, or the evil, nasty, hacky arcane nonsense that was there before you even knew what 'compile' meant?
The GDI+ problem mentioned in other replies just points to the fact that, no matter how spiffy your new code is, if you rely on old nasty code in the background you're in for a world of pain. Unfortunately, as found in most businesses, a ground up rewrite is just not economically viable.
arf, I just noticed that I put '1+1' :)
/slinks away
1+1 is approximately equal to 1 for all practical purposes. There, that fixed it..
0+1 = 1+1 = 1*1 = 1/1 = 1
Other than that, Euler's jobby, or anything involving j (I'm an electronics engineer, so i is current - and no cracks about 'i am current' either!)
Each has valid and useful points. None is magic. Nothing can replace experience, motivation, and doing work you're proud to put under your name.
Under your name...one of the unsung strengths of open-source development! Nobody outside the company knows who put the bugs in closed source software. Open source developers sign their work for the world to see.
That's what I said. He said it must be because I am a lazy idiot (not paraphrased). I quit. You can't work with managers like that, and much less work for them. I put up with it for a VERY long time before an opportunity came up, but when it did I was out of there. They can't understand why employee loyalty is so bad.
Our company then passed an internal policy that we would insource (bring programmers in to work on a project) but that outsourcing was out of the question.
But this is also a problem. I've had so many managers who took the approach 'well, it didn't work once so it is now policy that we never, ever do it again' that it ends up biting you in the ass.
My last manager (I quit 2 weeks ago, yay me!) decided that software unit testing was fundamentally bad, because he'd tried to manage a project using XP (eXtreme Programming, not.. oh you know) and that uses unit testing and it didn't work very well. It became policy that we should never do unit testing. I kid you not.
Creating a policy to never do something that didn't work the first time is as bad as not trying it in the first place.
Surely the order should be:
1) Call 911
2) Yell 'I've called 911 and the police are on their way'
3) Leg it
If you don't even TRY to alert the police then what good is it notifying the intruder that a) you are about and b) you have spotted him?
I might request the NOC to block this site at work, for fear of my manager finding it.
Last week he wanted to show us a graph. Just one. He spent the better part of Thursday hand crafting a 45 slide presentation with 1 second automatic progression so that it would 'animate'. Since he figured that one out every single presentation (or 'preso' as he calls them) has one in, and time taken to create them has rocketed.
Of course, it could be worse. He could be doing something evil to use plebeians.
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0088772/
a film with no plot, no characters and no apparent acting. the only reason I didn't fall asleep is due to the suspense of assuming that something was going to happen. At all. Anything would have done.
I'm in the UK, btw. British born and bred. It's funny how perception of words changes depending on your perception of a person, ain't it.
So "we" didn't invade Iraq at all, but our prime minister did a good job of ass kissing.
"Are there any countries with NO patent or copyright laws in place, and minimal trade with the US?"
This is not the right question. Copyright laws and (when used properly) patent laws are a Good Thing. However, the question here is not that they have no patent or copyright laws, but that the US has no jurisdiction over the laws they do have.
Germany sounds good to me, TBH. Sure, they're in Europe and Europe *heart* America (seriously, I don't know why) but overall they seem to have this technology thing sussed.
I had (have, somewhere) a FreeBSD 4.3 ina DVD box with two disks - a double sided CD, and a combination DVD-CD. I have never had read issues with this.
Re. the story, all I can say is *smirk*.
And just too late, I found a more specific article:
0 86
http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=6
The Tunsten has something of a reptutation for destroying memory cards. Check out this list of problems encountered using different cards in different machines.
Note that in the Tungsten T3 only 1 out of 7 tested cards actually survived the ordeal! Of course, this particular test isn't scientific, but it is based on real user feedback really using them for real things, so it's probably worth a read.
But a quite spectacular transplant rejection :)
I was given the task of upgrading a Win3.1 machine to Win95 OSR2.5, and was given a nice new CD-ROM drive to install in the machine for the purpose. The machine belonged to the MD of the company I worked for. As an apprentice.
Anyways, I backed up the ENTIRE HDD onto a spare using an (early) tomsrtbt and then booted of the floppy. FDISK and FORMAT later I'm ready for the Win95 CD. In it goes.
As it was copying it's files to the HDD, a strange plasticky burning smell arose and I noticed curls of smoke coming out of the back of the CD drive. I quickly powered down, and was treated to a lovely cross between a screech, a grind and a crunch. On powering the drive up, the door wouldn't open. I tried using a paper clip, but no joy. So, off with the power and in with the screwdriver.
What greeted me was quite... thorough. The drive electronics were burned out, the laser caddy was fused in one position, and there was (how I don't know) a 1mm deep groove all the way round the data side of the disk. I had to break the laser caddy to get the disk out to find this out. I restored the machine from the backup and returned it, citing 'compatibility issues'.
1) I had an original 3DFX card in a machine and, little known to me, the ground lead in the monitor cable was broken. When I opened up the case, one of the transistors on the output of the 3DFX was glowing so bright you could see it through the back of the PCB. Replaced the monitor cable and AFAIK it's still working today (donated it to a friend)
2) 2 dead harddrives; one with controller failure, one with crashed heads. Classic case of PCB swappage made it all work nice. Drives were both Seagate, but different models!?!
3) Bad grounding on PSU caused motherboard to catch fire and electricity to arc across the case. Although technically the machine still worked, I stripped it for parts and disposed of the PSU and case.
I used to work for a firm who built IBM compatible PC parts into industrialised computer units. The conditions of some of those was astounding. e.g. one had a blowtorch dropped in it - charred the graphics card a bit but it still worked. Another had a full 2 inches of black soot-like powder in it but never stopped working. They only returned it to be upgraded!
not emotional ones. If I look in my rear view mirror and see a car really close, yeah I want to get out of that situation. It makes no difference whether the guy is just an ignorant jerk who thinks his breaks are better than the laws of physics, or a psycho who's trying to run me off the road.
If I look in the mirror, it's to assess the presence and activities of vehicles around me. I don't care if they aren't pleased to see me, or if the lass over in the other lane is winking at the guy behind me (fellow geeks will know THAT feeling).
On the other hand, if I look behind me and see a guy really close, and his car has an 'angry smiley' look about it (red lights, lowered ride height, etc.) then I know he's a psycho, and it'll really piss me off. I will then most likely (although subconsiously) drive worse than before.
How many have had some guy acting a jerk at the lights and then found themselves tearing away from the lights, possibly trying to cut the guy up or at least show him up to all around? It's a primal thing, and it has no place on a safe road system. Adding these features will just take peoples minds further away from the prime reason for having mirrors in the first place. Self preservation!
all the machines at our local Uni have WinNT or 2K on them, but each is equiped with a copy of Hummingbird Exceed, and everyone gets an account on one of the Solaris boxes.
Essentially, I just used WinNT as the container for a dumb terminal, and it works great. The only thing I had trouble doing was watching MPEGs; remote X sessions just don't update at 25fps.
but a firewall is a piece of software which allows or denies packets based on their properties; it cares not in which direction they are flowing.
A reverse firewall, then, is just a firewall. It's like the difference between a slash and a forward slash (pet peeve). In fact, if you use an iptables or ipchains firewall, you only need a few extra rules to implement this on your gateway machine.