I understand you all have your panties in a wad over this, but do you know, for certain, that projects like enlightenment were doing theming before Apple? Perhaps apple really was the one to do it first. And if so, they should get the patent.
How do you expect a company like Apple to compete with something like Microsoft without leveraging whatever IP rights it has a right to?
Sure, according to that particular survey only 12% of the polled internet users have broadband access. However, exactly what percentage of people do you think play FPS games that have internet access? It's definitely not near 100%.
So you're making invalid assumptions. Perhaps only 5% of people online actually play first person shooters. Perhaps most of those are in the 12% who have broadband access. I don't have any appliccable statistics but then again, neither do you, so we're really on the same ground here, aren't we?
That is a flawed argument. If someone is dying of cancer, it doesn't make it okay to murder them. If someone is stupid enough to not duplicate their data somewhere, it's not okay to delete it for them. So, this is a cost of the viruses. And it happens to hundreds of users at once across an orginization. That costs money.
Of course you need AV software to do business, but it is still a cost of viruses, which is what the article asked, and I was answering.
If you don't understand how this could cost money, you've obviously never worked in a large corporate environment. An example, a company I worked at got an email vbs "virus" recently. Let's count out where the money comes from.
Thousands of users receive thousands of messages in their email box.
MIS has to go to 'infected' machines and clean each of them.
MIS has less time to address other important issues, blocking other people from completing tasks.
While MIS is fixing a machine, that user is less productive, if not completely unproductive.
Some users have unbacked up important data on their machines. This data can be destroyed. If someone worked on a project for two days, you're talking 16 hours of paid work lost completely. Multiply this across the entire organization.
Prevention costs: Site licenses or per user licenses for virus scanning solutions are expensive and rarely catch new vbs viruses.
Small businesses are also hit hard, because often there is no one at the location who has aclue what to do about the problem, so they have to hire some overpriced consultant to run a virus scan and clean their machines for them.
It's not all that complicated of a concept, why do you need it broken down for you? Some Linux users are so naive about the real world.
The idea of Sega and Nvidia working closely together is a scary thought. They would bring a lot of power in any field they were involved in. I imagine some of you readers are mainly just interested in the technological aspects of the situation, but I find the economical aspects a bit troubling.
Nvidia is a known monopolist. No one can touch them in the graphics field now. They are surprisingly simalar to Microsoft, except there is no equivalent Apple in the graphics field to provide a counterpoint.
Sega almost reached the levels of monopolist in the console industry, but fell short. If they work with Nvidia, it's conceivable the console market would fall to this conglomeration.
Is this really what we want? Even less choice in the console market than we already have? An even stronger assurance of Nvidias monopolistic dominance in the graphics card market?
Are you saying that online communities aren't a feasible way to make money? You might want to tell this to the hundreds of companies that have based their business plans around the idea. Like, say, slashdot.
This is exactly the kind of thing web pages are designed to do, so why are they putting this in a book? It would be much more useful as a searchable database online.
With a huge chunk of information like that, they could create a community around people who are trying to get high scores on video games. Message boards about your favorite games where you can communicate with other people who like the same games.
I realize part of the reason they are publishing this book is to stroke the egos of the people involved, but they could really do so much more. It's disappointing to see the opportunity to create a new online community wasted.
Is it just me, or is this kind of look-at-my-new-shiny toy what most of the effort in the open source community seems to be going for?
I don't use X. I don't use X because I can't stand using X. All of the window managers *suck*.
Now before you mod me down as flamebait, allow me to explain why.
I am not a big fan of microsoft. However, Windows GUI, and applications that run under Windows GUIs all just *work*. When I click a button, it does the same thing everywhere. Once you understand the UI in windnows, it's simple and clean.
Under X, even though people try to make the skins pretty, the actual UI is anything but clean. Can't we work on cleaning things up, and making the UI more reliable instead of making pretty shiny toys?
I'd love to use Linux on my desktop machine, but without a decent GUI that I can stand using, it's staying relegated to my old machine in the other room.
Ugh.
DSL should go away anyway
on
DSL Woes
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· Score: 1
I for one am in favor of DSL going away. People are expecting way too much service, for far too small of a price for the this system to afford to keep up.
The internet wasn't designed with the expectation of every single end user having a 1.5mbit connection. In addition, few ISPs actually have the bandwidth necessary to fully support all the bandwidth their customers are paying for.
It's a big mess, and the fact that it hasn't failed completely already shows that the dot com bubble hasn't completely burst yet. The reason why most regional ISPs haven't been paying their covad bills is that it's nearly impossible to make a profit with dsl service.
Additionally, it's not very conceivable that a startup can offer dsl service. The startup costs are far too high, and with the digital economy on a downturn, venture capitalists want to see profit very quickly. A DSL service provider just cannot offer that.
So, I wish DSL would just go away completely, it's making an already shaky industry look even worse than it already is.
In case you're confused by the horrible writeup, the film they're talking about is the original Star Trek: The Motion Picture. A director's cut version is being released that is supposed to be much closer to the original version of what the cast and crew wanted the film to be.
Definitely, experience should be the most important thing in deciding exactly how much someone's opinion is worth. The reason a boss would tend to discount your opinion is because age generally implies the experience level you have, within a year or two.
However, if you can prove that you known what you're talking about, the only thing age will matter to is your jealous coworkers. A good employer will quickly see your performance and experience as you do your work.
So my question is - are you really as experienced as you think you are? I notice a lot of Linux users tend to think they are much more experienced than they really are. They seem to have the naive belief that if they've run a Linux box at home, they're completely ready to manage a high availability production environment.
Generally they aren't. So are you really all that experienced, or do you just think you are?
I'm tired of hearing about this secret mailing list thing, but I will explain to all of you why it is a good thing. BIND runs the dns for the entire internet. The root nameservers run bind. These are the nameservers that all the other nameservers use to figure out where they need to go. Your ISP most likely runs bind. Everyone runs bind.
Now, if a bug is found in BIND, do you really want every script kitty trying to make a name for himself to HACK ROOT on the ROOT NAMESERVERS for the ENTIRE INTERNET? Does this sound like a good plan to you? Wouldn't you rather, since the entire internet depends on them, that they get a chance to be patched up first?
I realize we're all in favor of open processes, but I think if anything this proves that in some situations they aren't appropriate.
As an example, have you ever left your front door unlocked? Would you prefer if someone told you personally, so you could fix it? Or would you rather they sent this information to the doorunlockedtraq mailing list to let you and everyone else know of the mistake you made, before you get a chance to fix it?
I'm glad that someone is investigating this. It seems like in the hurry to adopt new technology, we've never given any real thoughts to the negative effects of these new technologies.
From sitting in front of a monitor all day at work, to the tv at evenings in the home, to the cell phones we carry with us at all times, we are constantly surrounded by new bleeding edge technology. Most of the information we have on how techonlogy negatively effects our lives in anecdotal at best.
And even worse, any damning evidence that comes out is largely ignored by the media and the press, when it's not actively suppressed by the companies that make the techonology.
At a company I was consulting for, everyone was using instant messaging to talk with each other and their friends. At the direction of my employer, I started capturing and analyzing all the traffic.
The results were in one way startling, and in others exactly what you'd expect. 90% of the messages were not work related. Several people actually lost their jobs based on some of the things they were talking about.
Additionally, we realized that people were losing touch with their coworkers, because they can just instant message them a question instead of talking to them in person. This kind of distancing is not good in a work place, when you should really rely on your other coworkers.
I'm happy to say that instant messaging is now banned at that particular company. I like to feel like I made a positive difference. But that's just one damaging technology -- what about all the others?
People really seemed to get quite upset about the possibility of someone cracking RSA. I can imagine people were probably quite scared. I think this highlights a problem in our security infrastructure.
Right now, there are so many systems that are 100% reliant on encryption to provide their security. What's going to happen to our security infrastructure once someone *does* find a way to break these systems?
Don't we need some kind of "Plan B?" Whether it comes from a mathematical breakthrough on factoring, or quantum computing, these methods will eventually be broken. Nothing is unbreakable.
We're just lucky that this time someone was just a bit confused.
I agree. Definitely not IDE raid. Why would they put some low-end Raid-0 or Raid-1 on board for a SERVER motherboard? If they want raid, they'll get a dedicated controller and do it right. They don't need some half-assed raid solution on board.
I noticed that these new motherboards appear to be completely missing ISA slots. Why in the world would someone decide to dump ISA completely, and use all PCI?
I used to be somewhat similar to you. Questioning the ethics of those around me. It seemed unebelivable.
However, after doing the same for several years, you begin to realize. The customers are stupid. If you weren't there, they'd be doing something even worse with their money and time.
Your only responsibility as a consultant is to make them just happy enough that they want you to come back, and hopefully keep them from going out of business so they can purchase your services in the future.
If they're not smart enough to check up on your work, they really do deserve what they get. That's what being a BOFH is all about.
What I'm trying to say is that BIND is in a unique place. There isn't one other open source project that is as important to the internet as theirs. It's run on lots of OSes and people EVERYWHERE use it. From Fortune 10 companies to porn sites to vanity domains.
This means they have a unique perspective to the open security process that has been used up to this point.
They think it doesn't work. Or at least, not to the level they need it to work.
The slashdot party line, and the open source party line in general, seems to be that security through obscurity doesn't work. It's better to be open source and have people help you find bugs early, and get rid of them.
Apparently it's not working. I realize that, as the primary unix nameserver, it's very dangerous when a new bug comes out in bind. Millions of sites probably run bind, and they're all vulnerable to the latest bugs. This is obviously bad.
But doesn't going to this private-group model for security information show that the open source security model really doesn't work for important, widely used applications?
As someone who has some experience running a website, and hopefully some entrepreneurial experience in the future, I view UCE in a somewhat different light. People's opinions on advertising in general and UCE in particular has bothered me for some time.
Everyone knows that banner-ads don't work. Targetting of banner-ads is incredibly weak, and unreliable. No one really seems to click them anymore, and quite a few people are starting to filter them out completely.
Text based ads on sites are even less effective than banner ads.
Don't even get me started on popup ads.
Obviously, the advertising I've listed above doesn't work. However, UCE does. You get undiverted customer attention. You send it and forget it, instead of waiting for people to come to you.
How do you expect an internet economy to support itself without some form of advertising to get you to places you haven't been before? Capitalism simply does not work without advertising. If you don't educate people about your products, you won't sell any.
As consumers, we need to pick an acceptable form of advertising, and then we need to support the business that use it. I realize it would be nice if there was a business-free, just-for-fun internet. However, in reality something has to pay the bills for all these big fat pipes.
UCE is the perfect solution to me as a consumer. I'll compare it with banners ads to tell you why.
Banner ads is something you have to download every time you go to an internet site. It slows down my download times. Often the ads are annoying and animated, distracting me from my web browsing. It takes up valuable screen real estate. If I'm looking for valuable information, why do I want something distracting taking up a percentage of my field of view? And finally, banner ads are graphical files. That takes lots of disk space, and bandwidth.
Most email is much smaller than even the smallest banner ad. It's something you only have to look at once, then delete. Once you delete email, it never bothers you again. It doesn't get in the way of real information.
As both a consumer and an aspiring business person, UCE seems like the optimal opportunity.
I hope we get that techonlogy soon here in Virginia! There's nothing that's as annoying as when I'm riding to class on my scooter and someone almost runs me over! There must be some of the worst drivers in the country around here.
Sometimes I wish people could drive cars near campus at all, it would sure make things easier for me. But once I get home during breaks, and the scooter goes into my closet, I definitely like using my car to get around, so it's kind of a tough decision!
I'd have to say we'd be better off with these things than without, though.
Why is this a good thing? Sure, a corporate partnership might make certain that an open source product doesn't die. However, a corporate partnership can also twist a good open source project to the point where it's almost useless.
I for one prefer that the software I use is free of large corporations. That's why my X is now ximian free!
If you want a perfect case study of how large corporations screw up perfectly good open source projects, why don't you take a look at Mozilla?
Slashdot Mirror
doesn't matter, i'm not jsm, and i really doubt jsm uses that account for anything that matters.
How do you expect a company like Apple to compete with something like Microsoft without leveraging whatever IP rights it has a right to?
So you're making invalid assumptions. Perhaps only 5% of people online actually play first person shooters. Perhaps most of those are in the 12% who have broadband access. I don't have any appliccable statistics but then again, neither do you, so we're really on the same ground here, aren't we?
The fact that that works needs to be done just proves that viruses cost money. Thank you for playing.
Of course you need AV software to do business, but it is still a cost of viruses, which is what the article asked, and I was answering.
It's not all that complicated of a concept, why do you need it broken down for you? Some Linux users are so naive about the real world.
Nvidia is a known monopolist. No one can touch them in the graphics field now. They are surprisingly simalar to Microsoft, except there is no equivalent Apple in the graphics field to provide a counterpoint.
Sega almost reached the levels of monopolist in the console industry, but fell short. If they work with Nvidia, it's conceivable the console market would fall to this conglomeration.
Is this really what we want? Even less choice in the console market than we already have? An even stronger assurance of Nvidias monopolistic dominance in the graphics card market?
Personally, it scares me.
Are you saying that online communities aren't a feasible way to make money? You might want to tell this to the hundreds of companies that have based their business plans around the idea. Like, say, slashdot.
With a huge chunk of information like that, they could create a community around people who are trying to get high scores on video games. Message boards about your favorite games where you can communicate with other people who like the same games.
I realize part of the reason they are publishing this book is to stroke the egos of the people involved, but they could really do so much more. It's disappointing to see the opportunity to create a new online community wasted.
I don't use X. I don't use X because I can't stand using X. All of the window managers *suck*.
Now before you mod me down as flamebait, allow me to explain why.
I am not a big fan of microsoft. However, Windows GUI, and applications that run under Windows GUIs all just *work*. When I click a button, it does the same thing everywhere. Once you understand the UI in windnows, it's simple and clean.
Under X, even though people try to make the skins pretty, the actual UI is anything but clean. Can't we work on cleaning things up, and making the UI more reliable instead of making pretty shiny toys?
I'd love to use Linux on my desktop machine, but without a decent GUI that I can stand using, it's staying relegated to my old machine in the other room.
Ugh.
The internet wasn't designed with the expectation of every single end user having a 1.5mbit connection. In addition, few ISPs actually have the bandwidth necessary to fully support all the bandwidth their customers are paying for.
It's a big mess, and the fact that it hasn't failed completely already shows that the dot com bubble hasn't completely burst yet. The reason why most regional ISPs haven't been paying their covad bills is that it's nearly impossible to make a profit with dsl service.
Additionally, it's not very conceivable that a startup can offer dsl service. The startup costs are far too high, and with the digital economy on a downturn, venture capitalists want to see profit very quickly. A DSL service provider just cannot offer that.
So, I wish DSL would just go away completely, it's making an already shaky industry look even worse than it already is.
I for one look forward to it.
However, if you can prove that you known what you're talking about, the only thing age will matter to is your jealous coworkers. A good employer will quickly see your performance and experience as you do your work.
So my question is - are you really as experienced as you think you are? I notice a lot of Linux users tend to think they are much more experienced than they really are. They seem to have the naive belief that if they've run a Linux box at home, they're completely ready to manage a high availability production environment.
Generally they aren't. So are you really all that experienced, or do you just think you are?
Now, if a bug is found in BIND, do you really want every script kitty trying to make a name for himself to HACK ROOT on the ROOT NAMESERVERS for the ENTIRE INTERNET? Does this sound like a good plan to you? Wouldn't you rather, since the entire internet depends on them, that they get a chance to be patched up first?
I realize we're all in favor of open processes, but I think if anything this proves that in some situations they aren't appropriate.
As an example, have you ever left your front door unlocked? Would you prefer if someone told you personally, so you could fix it? Or would you rather they sent this information to the doorunlockedtraq mailing list to let you and everyone else know of the mistake you made, before you get a chance to fix it?
I'd appreciate it if you would post a retraction.
From sitting in front of a monitor all day at work, to the tv at evenings in the home, to the cell phones we carry with us at all times, we are constantly surrounded by new bleeding edge technology. Most of the information we have on how techonlogy negatively effects our lives in anecdotal at best.
And even worse, any damning evidence that comes out is largely ignored by the media and the press, when it's not actively suppressed by the companies that make the techonology.
At a company I was consulting for, everyone was using instant messaging to talk with each other and their friends. At the direction of my employer, I started capturing and analyzing all the traffic.
The results were in one way startling, and in others exactly what you'd expect. 90% of the messages were not work related. Several people actually lost their jobs based on some of the things they were talking about.
Additionally, we realized that people were losing touch with their coworkers, because they can just instant message them a question instead of talking to them in person. This kind of distancing is not good in a work place, when you should really rely on your other coworkers.
I'm happy to say that instant messaging is now banned at that particular company. I like to feel like I made a positive difference. But that's just one damaging technology -- what about all the others?
Right now, there are so many systems that are 100% reliant on encryption to provide their security. What's going to happen to our security infrastructure once someone *does* find a way to break these systems?
Don't we need some kind of "Plan B?" Whether it comes from a mathematical breakthrough on factoring, or quantum computing, these methods will eventually be broken. Nothing is unbreakable.
We're just lucky that this time someone was just a bit confused.
I agree. Definitely not IDE raid. Why would they put some low-end Raid-0 or Raid-1 on board for a SERVER motherboard? If they want raid, they'll get a dedicated controller and do it right. They don't need some half-assed raid solution on board.
Isn't ISA superior to PCI?
If not, why in the world does it cost more?
I used to be somewhat similar to you. Questioning the ethics of those around me. It seemed unebelivable. However, after doing the same for several years, you begin to realize. The customers are stupid. If you weren't there, they'd be doing something even worse with their money and time. Your only responsibility as a consultant is to make them just happy enough that they want you to come back, and hopefully keep them from going out of business so they can purchase your services in the future. If they're not smart enough to check up on your work, they really do deserve what they get. That's what being a BOFH is all about.
This means they have a unique perspective to the open security process that has been used up to this point.
They think it doesn't work. Or at least, not to the level they need it to work.
Isn't this a little scary?
Apparently it's not working. I realize that, as the primary unix nameserver, it's very dangerous when a new bug comes out in bind. Millions of sites probably run bind, and they're all vulnerable to the latest bugs. This is obviously bad.
But doesn't going to this private-group model for security information show that the open source security model really doesn't work for important, widely used applications?
As someone who has some experience running a website, and hopefully some entrepreneurial experience in the future, I view UCE in a somewhat different light. People's opinions on advertising in general and UCE in particular has bothered me for some time.
Everyone knows that banner-ads don't work. Targetting of banner-ads is incredibly weak, and unreliable. No one really seems to click them anymore, and quite a few people are starting to filter them out completely.
Text based ads on sites are even less effective than banner ads.
Don't even get me started on popup ads.
Obviously, the advertising I've listed above doesn't work. However, UCE does. You get undiverted customer attention. You send it and forget it, instead of waiting for people to come to you.
How do you expect an internet economy to support itself without some form of advertising to get you to places you haven't been before? Capitalism simply does not work without advertising. If you don't educate people about your products, you won't sell any.
As consumers, we need to pick an acceptable form of advertising, and then we need to support the business that use it. I realize it would be nice if there was a business-free, just-for-fun internet. However, in reality something has to pay the bills for all these big fat pipes.
UCE is the perfect solution to me as a consumer. I'll compare it with banners ads to tell you why.
Banner ads is something you have to download every time you go to an internet site. It slows down my download times. Often the ads are annoying and animated, distracting me from my web browsing. It takes up valuable screen real estate. If I'm looking for valuable information, why do I want something distracting taking up a percentage of my field of view? And finally, banner ads are graphical files. That takes lots of disk space, and bandwidth.
Most email is much smaller than even the smallest banner ad. It's something you only have to look at once, then delete. Once you delete email, it never bothers you again. It doesn't get in the way of real information.
As both a consumer and an aspiring business person, UCE seems like the optimal opportunity.
Ben.
Sometimes I wish people could drive cars near campus at all, it would sure make things easier for me. But once I get home during breaks, and the scooter goes into my closet, I definitely like using my car to get around, so it's kind of a tough decision!
I'd have to say we'd be better off with these things than without, though.
ben.
I for one prefer that the software I use is free of large corporations. That's why my X is now ximian free!
If you want a perfect case study of how large corporations screw up perfectly good open source projects, why don't you take a look at Mozilla?
ben.