The internet is designed to survive nuclear attack. There ARE no core systems.
That was the original idea... Back when it was a relatively small system. These days there are a lot of core systems. DNS isn't nearly as distributed as it should be. Someone could definitely take out root DNS servers with a few well-placed nukes. The Internet isn't as interconnected as it used to be either. Most traffic passes through a few specific backbone providers, which could also be taken out with some well-placed nukes. I'm not saying the Internet is going to fall over tomorrow, or that it would be easy to shut it all down...but it's become far more centralized than was ever intended.
Surely if everyone else wanted to wrest control away from the US govt., all they would need to do would be setup a new system providing the same facilities, and then route traffic there instead.
You could certainly set up your own DNS servers...but that doesn't really get you very far since the rest of the world is still using ICANN's root servers. You can register anything you want on your own DNS server... I could point google.com to one of my own servers... And it would screw up everyone in my office... But the rest of the world would never notice.
1. Most modern laptops are not fragile, unless you mean throwing a the floor or trying to crush it. In which case it is as fragile as most flat screen monitors.
2. Changing ram/hard drives doesn't happen often but again all modern systems are a simple case of remove 1-2 screws then pull out and slot in the new hardware. Long gone are the days where you had to take the laptop to pieces to add something.
5. How many times are you changing batteries? I've had my current laptop two years and I am still using the same battery. The life on it by the way is max 7 hours.
Sure, laptop/notebook/tablet/mobile technology has improved quite a bit over the years... But some things really haven't changed much.
Most modern laptops are fragile - at least as long as they're actually being picked up and carried around. Desktops generally sit in one place, they don't move much. Laptops get picked up and carried around the office, taken out of the office, brought home, taken on trips... People are not infallible. People drop things, spill things, trip, slip, fall down stairs... Sure, your average laptop may very well be built as well as your average desktop, be just as sturdy...but your average desktop just is not subjected to the same kind of misuse.
Yes, it is relatively simple to change out RAM and HDD on a laptop. However on many (most?) laptops the sound, video, and some networking is built into the motherboard. On the desktop PCs that we support it's downright trivial to replace failed sound/video/networking. On the mobile PCs that we support it often winds up being mailed off to the manufacturer for service, and out of use for a good week or so.
Battery life varies a lot from one model to the next... Some are good, some are not. We support a lot of tablets in a medical office and battery life is a constant issue. After just a year or two of use the batteries are all-but dead. We've got chargers all over the place, spare batteries galore, AC adapters everywhere we can...and folks are constantly plugging, unplugging, and swapping batteries.
So are desktops if you tried carrying them around and throwing them about.
But you don't treat desktops this way - in part because they're too big and bulky. Laptops do get hauled around and mistreated, therefor increasing the chance of hardware failure. Making laptops more fragile than desktops.
2. The internal guts are too hard to work with. Anything more than a RAM upgrade is a nightmare of tiny screws and shielding tape.
So? Very, very few people do upgrades on their computers nowadays. They may build them from parts but aside from the hard drive and ram "upgrade" means getting a whole new system (motherboard, cpu, video card, etc.). Technology changes too quickly and parts are not that backwards compatible. For most people messing with the inside of their computer is simply a waste of time, both techies and non-techies.
Sure, your average home user might not muck about much inside their computer... But IT departments routinely do. I'm constantly swapping out bits of hardware...replacing failed components or upgrading them. Yes, we do this with laptops too, to the extent that it's possible. On a desktop you can routinely swap out a failed video card or sound card...on a laptop, those things are usually integrated into the motherboard - which makes it much more difficult and expensive to repair them.
8. Not much to be done about it, but it's not possible to use one in comfort; the ergonomics inherently suck.
It's called a docking bay with external monitor, keyboard and mouse.
So... Are you advocating hauling around a docking station with external monitor, keyboard, and mouse whenever you take the laptop on the road? Laptop ergonomics suck whether you like it or not. Yes, if you've got the space somewhere you can set up a docking station and make it just as ergonomic as a desktop PC... But that only works when you're at home or in the office, it doesn't do much for folks who are routinely on the road. You can't very well haul all that hardware around with you... And if you could, why not just box up your entire desktop PC and take it with you?
I'd say that your argument enforces that laptops are better for most users because it causes some people to actually think about the relevant security and backup issues.
It may very well make people consciously think about security and backup issues... But you simply cannot claim that desktops are equally vulnerable to the same kind of issues.
Laptops are small and portable. While it is possible to steal a desktop PC, it is harder. Especially if you've got some kind of security on the premises. Not impossible, but harder. Laptops, on the other hand, are routinely toted from one place to another...they could easily be nabbed out of your car, off your shoulder, off a chair at the library/terminal/cafe. Laptops are genuinely easier to physically steal.
A desktop is easier to consistently back up, since it is generally connected to the network at all times. You can easily use a utility of some sort to pull data off that desktop PC whenever it is necessary. A laptop could very easily be off the network for days at a time. Sure, you can use some kind of VPN or web access to anything important...but what if they have no bandwidth at all? Keeping data safe and backed up is more of an issue with a laptop.
And while we're on the topic of VPNs and bandwidth... Your average desktop doesn't leave the building - it stays on your network with your security/antivirus/whatever in place at all times. Laptops often wind up on somebody else's network. Maybe they're grabbing free bandwidth at a hotspot somewhere...maybe they're using the hotel's bandwidth...maybe they've got a cellular modem... Regardless, they're no longer behind your firewall, and are now at the mercy of whoever set up the network they're using.
You claim that desktop HDDs fail just as often as those in laptops... I'm not going to debate that, I have no data either way... But I doubt if desktops get knocked off tables, dropped, tripped over, or have crap spilled into them nearly as much as laptops do. Again, laptops are portable, people are carrying them around. People drop things, trip, fall down, slip. By contrast, a desktop is generally stuck under/on your desk and doesn't really go anywhere. Sure, you might have damage to a mouse or keyboard from time to time...but those are just peripherals. You aren't terribly likely to do serious damage to your CPU/motherboard/HDD if you spill coffee into your keyboard on a desktop.
The fact that laptops are portable, routinely leave your building, and connect to other networks makes them uniquely troublesome.
1. Because everyone knows that a firewall is the end all and be all of security.
No, but it is a good place to start.
2. How do they know they don't have a firewall and not just an open port?
Fair enough. There might be a firewall in place that is deliberately configured to allow traffic. Not terribly secure, but could be.
3. Open port != DB server
Your average firewall, by default, blocks almost everything. Generally speaking you need to deliberately open the ports you want to use. If this is the case, why would you deliberately open ports that you don't need/use?
4. Not all DBs are huge corporate DBs. Hell some versions of MS Office install SQL on your computer.
Very true. Microsoft Outlook with the Business Contact Manager installs a SQL server on your PC. Symantec Backup Exec and Panda Antivirus both use a SQL server to store their information. A surprisingly large number of programs use databases these days, even in standalone desktop installs... Though I will again say that you'd have to intentionally configure your firwall to allow traffic to them.
5. Maybe some of them actually need/want to have remote people access them (and they don't know about VPNs(lolz))
Which is still insecure.
6. Yeah some people should get their shit together
Which, I think, is the whole point of the article. If you don't need access to your database from the Internet, those ports should not be open to the Internet. If you do need access to your database from the Internet, access should be configured in as secure a manner as possible - open ports responding to random IP addresses is not secure at all.
This just smacks of "ZOMG!!! Ur ports are open, give me ur monies and I will fix u!" His company is even linked in the fourth paragraph.
Indeed. The article is a bit sensationalist... And the methodology seems a little questionable as well. Why was he only looking for Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases? What about Postgres, MySQL, Sybase, Pervasive...there's tons of other database servers out there - and, again, a surprising amount of software installs a database these days.
Setting up a firewall is expensive and doesn't fit into many budgets of small organizations.
This simply isn't true. It's almost harder not to set up a machine/network with a firewall these days.
Pretty much every PC shipped in the last couple of years has a software firewall of some sort built into it. Any router you buy is going to have at least a basic NAT firewall in it. A number of cable and DSL modems now have built-in routing and firewall capabilities. And if you're actually setting up a publicly visible server of any kind you'll already want a beefier router than those available at Staples/Wal-Mart/Office Max, and I can guarantee it'll have firewall capabilities.
So how is someone not as well-read supposed to setup a firewall on a limited budget? But a pre-built hardware solution? Still that needs to be setup and configured too. And even then, you still have to be knowledgeable enough to *test* whatever solution you're using to actually make sure it works and keeps your system well protected.
Not a trivial or inexpensive task. But people with no training or knowledge are often asked to do this.
If you've got somebody with no training or knowledge setting up a network/server/router/whatever...it's probably going to be low-end stuff. If you're spending 10's of thousands of dollars on hardware you don't have the secretary set it all up. And if you're going with low-end stuff it is, more or less, secure out of the box. I'm not saying that a little Netgear WGR614 is going to hold up to a determined attack, but it isn't going to forward database traffic out of the box. You'll need to intentionally forward the ports to do that...
Which is certainly something your average human being can do. Most low-end routers have very friendly GUIs that make configuration fairly straight-forward. But it still takes conscious effort to make the network insecure.
but that only works at home....doesn't it? What about everywhere else they go?
When they're out of your house you have to trust whoever is in a supervisory position wherever they are - be it the bus driver, a teacher, librarian, or their friend's parent.
When your kid is at home you personally make sure they don't talk to strangers, don't see pornography, don't get stabbed, don't get kidnapped. When your kid goes to school, or over to their friend's house, you can't do that. It's up to their teachers to make sure they don't get stabbed. It's up to their friend's parents to make sure they don't see pornography.
Sure...there are tools to help... Some folks make more use of them than others. And maybe there is more that Facebook can do to help... But you really can't expect Facebook to become child-safe any more than you can expect Wal-Mart or your local park to become child-safe.
I know that there are plenty of machines out there that come with hardware RNG at reasonable prices... But is that even necessary?
I've seen software that tracks mouse movements for a while when generating random numbers, couldn't something similar be done through the OS itself? Couldn't you use mouse movement, keyboard input, sound and video output, etc. as your RNG? Wouldn't that be almost as good as a truly random number generator?
Or is there some obvious flaw in such a scheme which keeps it from being used?
But try to deny that the only people for whom this poses an attractive solution are the exact people who need more direct family involvement, not less.
I disagree completely. In my experience, the only folks who will make use of this feature are the ones who would be somehow limiting their kids playtime anyway.
Video games have age ratings on them already...but negligent parents still buy their toddlers Grand Theft Auto, despite the big ol' M on the box. The ones who refuse to buy the game for their little kids are the ones who actually care what their kid plays.
Most televisions have V-chips or some other kind of parental controls on them these days...but negligent parents still let their kids watch anything and everything. The ones who go to the trouble of setting the parental controls are the ones who actually care what their kid watches.
These controls are a tool, nothing more. As you said, the technology is neutral. But the only folks who actually make use of the tool are the ones who've already decided they ought to limit their kids playtime. If it wasn't a timer built-in to the Xbox they'd be using something else to monitor playtime...a regular clock, or watch, or alarm clock, or an egg timer.
This is what conservatives are talking about when we say that all these little influences, each one seemingly innocuous, are corroding the family.
Tools like this aren't corroding anything. Tools simply sit there waiting to be used. Parents who already care about their kids will use the tools, parents who are negligent will not. What is corroding the family is parents who've decided that the best way to raise their kids is to keep them sedated with TV, video games, food, or medication - with as little personal involvement as possible. They aren't going to use a tool like this because it would mean that they'll have to deal with their kid when the timer goes off, and they don't want that.
My mother would love to have something like this on my father's computer. She calls Diablo II 'the divorce game'.
What she needs to do is, in the guise of being a loving wife, give him the gift of WoW. If he likes Diablo II he'll likely enjoy WoW. And WoW features parental controls which can limit the amount of time he plays.
That's the problem with -all- measures to help out parents or to improve the life of kids.
Put recommended age on video-games, and the parents who actually take the time to know what their kids are playing and evaluate if it's apropriate for them or not, perhaps with help from the recommended age (but hopefully not by trusting it blindly) are precisely the same that'd probably make a reasonable decision even in the absence of recommended minimum age.
I remember working at Electronics Boutique... I had a tiny little kid come up to the counter with a copy of Grand Theft Auto, he couldn't have been more than about 8 or 9 years old. I refused to sell him the game since it was rated M and we were supposed to check ID. About half an hour later he returned with his mother who was very angry at me for not selling the game to her son. I started to launch into the usual spiel about M rated games, explain the content, explain our policy, etc... She didn't want to hear it. Didn't care if it had an M rating, didn't care what M meant, didn't care what was in the game... Just wanted to buy it and get back to whatever vitally important task she'd been dragged away from because I wouldn't sell the game to her kid.
Obviously, tools are out there for parents who care.
Personally, I don't trust the ratings very much... I've found that the ratings groups have very different ideas of what is appropriate than I do. For example, Medal of Honor has routinely earned a T rating because the bad guys don't bleed when you shoot them - you get a little puff of dust instead. You're still shooting other human beings in a relatively realistic WWII game, they just don't bleed. And that makes it OK for teens... But if they bleed red blood, it instantly earns the game an M. Exact same gameplay, just slightly different color palette.
I always insist on watching a movie or playing a game myself before I'll let my son play/watch it. This has resulted in several T/PG things he was not allowed to watch/play, and several M/R things which he was allowed to watch/play.
In my experience, the parents who would be responsible enough to use such a feature don't need it anyways.
I don't completely agree, this feature can help enforce a rule, or give more legitimacy to a decision, for example, instead of trying to estimate how long your offspring has spent on the console and going "Mmmh I think you've played enough of it for today. -But Dad?!?", you can agree with them on a weekly amount and when the time runs out, there's no "but I didn't even play it while you were at work" arguments or anything of the sort, the time you agreed on has unambiguously ran out, and there's nothing to argue about.
Sure, this feature can help you track your kids time on the Xbox...or help enforce your rules for you... It's a handy tool for any parent... But any parent who is going to make use of this feature has already decided that they ought to be limiting their kids playtime. If this feature wasn't available they'd likely be using something else. We used to use an egg timer.
It's not only good for parents. It's also good for those of us who have busy schedules and short attention spans...set the timer to 1 hour, play away, and no risk of losing track of the clock. I learned this with WoW.
Very true. I don't like to use the in-game controls because I don't want to get kicked offline at an inconvenient time... Instead, I've got an alarm clock on my desk. If I've got things I need to get done I'll set the alarm before I fire up WoW or whatever else I'm playing. Without a reminder like that I could easily lose track of time and play for hours without even noticing.
One of iTunes's strengths, on the Mac, is that it's quite scriptable.
One of the things that I've always liked about the MacOS is how useful Apple Script is. It's amazing just how much you can do with it... Seems like just about every program released under MacOS has hooks for Apple Script.
Compared to the limited things you can accomplish with batch files and VB script under Windows...
They cannot hold a candle to the iPhone when it comes to the software interface. I am not an Apple fan boy, and I would GLADLY give up my Razr right now if the iPhone were available to Verizon customers. Do you know clunky its software is, compared to Apple's?
I've always felt this was really Apple's strong suit... Not the trendy white plastic, or the nifty eye candy, or catchy commercials... The reason Apple's products are popular is because the interface is so well done. Features may be missing, it may not do absolutely everything the competition's product does, there may be bugs...but in general, Apple products are easy to interact with.
Personally, I hate iTunes and the iPod. I don't like how everything is stored in a weird database. I want to be able to simply drag & drop files onto the device... I want to have my media player watch a folder and automatically add/remove songs that show up in it... I use iTunes as little as possible, and immediately convert all my purchases to plain MP3s for use in other software, and I'll never own an iPod... But even I have to admit that the interface is very simple, clean, and straightforward.
There you go, now it's fixed. It isn't just in consumer matters... Folks in the US can't seem to see beyond the end of their nose. Politics, economics, financial planning, consumer spending, world affairs, basic science...they've got no clue. I'm constantly amazed at how oblivious most people are. Everyone seems to just stumble blindly through their day...
I hope it's just a US thing... But I can't actually say with any certainty that anybody anywhere else is any less oblivious. Maybe the whole world is asleep at the wheel. What a scary thought...
Programmers get lazy. If you don't have to optimize, you don't. So if you're told to make it run on a 1GHz machine with 1GB of RAM, that's going to be pretty close to the minimum requirements.
This, I think, is the real reason why system requirements have skyrocketed and software is so bloated these days. If you've got gigs and gigs of RAM/HDD, with CPU cycles to spare...why bother optimizing your code?
I don't know if I'd even attribute it to laziness... Optimizing code takes time and effort, and beyond a certain point it probably isn't worthwhile. You've got better things to do with your time, like fixing actual bugs or implementing new features.
again, it's features. Your copy of Office 2007 can do a lot more then your original word processor.
I will readily accept that a modern word processor will do more than, say, EDIT under DOS. But that's not what I'm talking about. Let's ignore the OS for a moment and just look at Microsoft Word.
According to Microsoft the requirements for Word 2000 are:
PC with a Pentium 75-megahertz (MHz) or higher processor 32 MB of RAM for the operating system, plus an additional 4 MB of RAM for Word 147 MB of available hard-disk space
500 megahertz (MHz) processor or higher 256 megabyte (MB) RAM or higher (Grammar and contextual spelling in Word is not turned on unless the machine has 1 GB memory.) 1.5 gigabyte (GB) HDD
Now, I know 2007 has that fancy new ribbon thing... And it's got the nifty new XMLish file format... I would assume there's some bug fixes in there somewhere... I'm sure there are plenty of other new features in there that I don't know about... But, honestly, does it really do all that much that 2000 doesn't? They're both WYSYWIG, both have spelling and grammer checkers, both let you add graphics into your documents, both do all sorts of stuff with margins and tabs and columns and fonts and stuff.
So why does 2007 require 6 times as much processing power? Why does 2007 need 64 times more RAM? Why does 2007 take up 10 times as much drive space? Does it really have that many new features? Because, honestly, it seems to do almost exactly the same thing that 2000 did.
And that's just Word. Throw a shiny new copy of Vista on your computer and you're going to need even more CPU/RAM/HDD - all to accomplish the same task.
I'm not talking about doing something new... I'm not talking about running some piece of software that didn't exist back in 2000. I'm not suggesting that Half-Life 2 should be able to run on a 2000-era PC. I am asking what exactly it is that justifies making Word 2007 literally 10-times more resource intensive. Because it looks very similar to Word 2000 to me.
I feel like the bloat argument has been being over-used lately. Yes, computers are more powerful and doing similar tasks. But they also tend to be more user friendly and over all the user experience is much nicer. They also have to cater to a much broader audience then they used to.
I realize that our modern-day computers do all sorts of things that the old machines didn't... You didn't see a whole lot of streaming video playback, or MP3s on those old machines. But, really, those are specific applications - specific tasks. The OS itself really isn't being asked to do much more than it had to do 10 or 20 years ago.
And when it comes down to simple tasks that we've been doing for years - something like word processing - there really isn't a good reason why my computer has to be 20 times more powerful than it used to be just to accomplish the same goals.
Look at an old machine running an old version of Word, and then look at something shiny and new running Vista and Word 2007. The new machine requires gobs more RAM, faster CPU, tons more drive space, and a fairly beefy GPU...all to do exactly the same thing the old one did. Why?
Sure, I'd expect to need a nicer machine for 3D games, MP3s, streaming video... But why are the system requirements for a simple word processor so much higher than they used to be? Bloat. Yes, there are new features in there...some of them are genuinely useful... But a lot of it is simply overhead - new GUI, new graphics, different animated things, a pile of new templates, some clip art... Stuff that really has almost nothing to do with actually processing words.
There's a reason the bloat argument seems overused lately - it's because bloat is showing up everywhere and people are complaining about it.
The assertion in this case is that electronic mail has no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Horrible as it may be to say so... This has always been my assumption. Email, unless you go to the trouble of encrypting it in some way, is sent as cleartext. The sending email address, the recipient, the servers it bounces through, the message itself...it's all plainly readable by anyone with a text editor. Worse, servers along the way may very well save a copy of your email in case delivery is delayed or fails. Worse still, there's really no way to ensure that nobody along the way has retained a copy of your email, or printed it out, or forwarded it along to dozens of other people, or even edited its content.
I was taught early on that email is no better than sending a postcard.
I'm not saying that the government should have the right/ability to snoop on our communications without warrant... They certainly ought to get a warrant for any wiretapping or surveillance... And I'd expect them to need a warrant to read any email I'm encrypting... But plain ol' email is completely and totally insecure. I can't believe anyone would actually expect privacy when it comes to email... That's like expecting privacy while having a conversation on a busy street in the middle of New York City.
do Westerners stand further apart than Asians when chatting in a virtual world? I would guess so. For some reason I occasionally find myself backing up my avatar a step or two and facing it towards the avatar I'm talking to, without even thinking about it really.
It's interesting to see how many real-world behaviors show up on-line, even though there's no real physical reason for it.
In the real world, I don't like people much. I can't stand crowds. I avoid Wal-Mart and shopping malls as much as possible. In social situations I usually stay towards the edge of the crowd.
On-line you don't have the same pressures... People aren't rubbing up against you, the air doesn't actually get hot and stale with other people's breath... But I still find myself avoiding the big cities, and staying on the edges of crowds.
I would assume, from my own limited anecdotal evidence, that folks would replicate their real-world behaviors on-line - all the way down to how far apart Westerners and Asians stand.
While I don't normally understand why you'd play an online game to just be alone
It really depends on the context and how my day has been...
Sometimes I will log in to WoW with the intent of playing alone. I'll go run through a dungeon, or do some quests, or kill some critters by myself. It's a game, it's fun, it's a nice way to unwind after a long day. And if the day has been annoying enough I may not want to deal with other people at all.
Sometimes my wife and I will go off adventuring together... Explore the countryside, do quests, whatever. It's a family outing, we don't want random people showing up and harassing us.
Other times it's a guild event... Again, a selected group of people that we know doing something socially. You don't want random strangers showing up and harassing you.
Even if it's a group of random people in a crowded city it can still be irritating to have someone invade your personal space. In WoW, like most MMOGs, you need a certain amount of room simply to interact with the world around you. You need to be able to click on items, characters, and NPCs in order to interact with them. You need to be able to see what you're doing. If you've got someone crowding you it can get very annoying, very quickly.
Things like a firewall and anti-virus. Quite necessary if Phoenix are suggesting you might run an email client on this thing.
Actually... If I understand what this thing is doing correctly... I don't think you'd really need a firewall. The idea is that it would run just the email client, nothing else. Not even the OS. There would be literally nothing listening for incoming connections. Just the occasional outgoing connection on 110 or 25 to send/receive mail. This could actually dramatically increase the security and stability of some people's home computers.
Similarly I don't think there's ever a time when I want to run just a word processor. I want an MP3 player for some tunes. I want a web browser for fact checking. I want Freecell because I'm lazy and rarely do any actual word processing.
And there's the real problem with the whole thing. We've had simplified devices like this before... I remember WebTV, and an assortment of "email machines" that just plugged into bandwidth and let you send/receive email. They aren't around now, or at least aren't in widespread use - because folks need a machine that does more than that. Sure, it'd be nice to have a simple device that only checks email, that's as reliable as a toaster, that doesn't crash or get viruses or anything like that. It sounds wonderful. But then you'd need a similar device that only does web... And another device that only does MP3s... And another device that only does word processing... And another device that only does PhotoShop... And before too long you've filled up your house with dozens of these simple devices that only do one thing.
It works in the kitchen, more or less. You've got different tools that do basically one thing. But those tools are all very simple, intuitive, and small. We aren't there yet with computer technology. We can't simplify all our tools down to that level, so we need an all-in-one device.
Yes, they do. It's not just superficial... It's fairly obvious that the knock-off was intentionally designed to look like a Wii-mote.
the changes are significant enough that I wouldn't be fooled.
You aren't the target here.
I used to work at Electronics Boutique over the holidays, and I can guarantee that there are plenty of parents out there who would purchase this thing without a moment's hesitation - believing the whole time that they were purchasing a Wii-mote, or even the entire Wii system.
Parents used to show up with the most vague descriptions of what their child wanted... Or pictures clipped from catalogs, sales fliers, and magazines... Folks wouldn't know whether they needed a game for the PS2, Xbox, Game Cube, or computer. All they knew is that their kid said this, or it looked like that, or it had some guy with wings in it.
We had plenty of returns after Christmas because of this confusion. Folks who bought the game for entirely the wrong system...or the wrong kind of memory card...or bought some part of the system instead of the whole thing... And that was all without overly deceiving advertising or product design like this thing.
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Sure, laptop/notebook/tablet/mobile technology has improved quite a bit over the years... But some things really haven't changed much.
Most modern laptops are fragile - at least as long as they're actually being picked up and carried around. Desktops generally sit in one place, they don't move much. Laptops get picked up and carried around the office, taken out of the office, brought home, taken on trips... People are not infallible. People drop things, spill things, trip, slip, fall down stairs... Sure, your average laptop may very well be built as well as your average desktop, be just as sturdy...but your average desktop just is not subjected to the same kind of misuse.
Yes, it is relatively simple to change out RAM and HDD on a laptop. However on many (most?) laptops the sound, video, and some networking is built into the motherboard. On the desktop PCs that we support it's downright trivial to replace failed sound/video/networking. On the mobile PCs that we support it often winds up being mailed off to the manufacturer for service, and out of use for a good week or so.
Battery life varies a lot from one model to the next... Some are good, some are not. We support a lot of tablets in a medical office and battery life is a constant issue. After just a year or two of use the batteries are all-but dead. We've got chargers all over the place, spare batteries galore, AC adapters everywhere we can...and folks are constantly plugging, unplugging, and swapping batteries.
Laptops are small and portable. While it is possible to steal a desktop PC, it is harder. Especially if you've got some kind of security on the premises. Not impossible, but harder. Laptops, on the other hand, are routinely toted from one place to another...they could easily be nabbed out of your car, off your shoulder, off a chair at the library/terminal/cafe. Laptops are genuinely easier to physically steal.
A desktop is easier to consistently back up, since it is generally connected to the network at all times. You can easily use a utility of some sort to pull data off that desktop PC whenever it is necessary. A laptop could very easily be off the network for days at a time. Sure, you can use some kind of VPN or web access to anything important...but what if they have no bandwidth at all? Keeping data safe and backed up is more of an issue with a laptop.
And while we're on the topic of VPNs and bandwidth... Your average desktop doesn't leave the building - it stays on your network with your security/antivirus/whatever in place at all times. Laptops often wind up on somebody else's network. Maybe they're grabbing free bandwidth at a hotspot somewhere...maybe they're using the hotel's bandwidth...maybe they've got a cellular modem... Regardless, they're no longer behind your firewall, and are now at the mercy of whoever set up the network they're using.
You claim that desktop HDDs fail just as often as those in laptops... I'm not going to debate that, I have no data either way... But I doubt if desktops get knocked off tables, dropped, tripped over, or have crap spilled into them nearly as much as laptops do. Again, laptops are portable, people are carrying them around. People drop things, trip, fall down, slip. By contrast, a desktop is generally stuck under/on your desk and doesn't really go anywhere. Sure, you might have damage to a mouse or keyboard from time to time...but those are just peripherals. You aren't terribly likely to do serious damage to your CPU/motherboard/HDD if you spill coffee into your keyboard on a desktop.
The fact that laptops are portable, routinely leave your building, and connect to other networks makes them uniquely troublesome.
Pretty much every PC shipped in the last couple of years has a software firewall of some sort built into it. Any router you buy is going to have at least a basic NAT firewall in it. A number of cable and DSL modems now have built-in routing and firewall capabilities. And if you're actually setting up a publicly visible server of any kind you'll already want a beefier router than those available at Staples/Wal-Mart/Office Max, and I can guarantee it'll have firewall capabilities.If you've got somebody with no training or knowledge setting up a network/server/router/whatever...it's probably going to be low-end stuff. If you're spending 10's of thousands of dollars on hardware you don't have the secretary set it all up. And if you're going with low-end stuff it is, more or less, secure out of the box. I'm not saying that a little Netgear WGR614 is going to hold up to a determined attack, but it isn't going to forward database traffic out of the box. You'll need to intentionally forward the ports to do that...
Which is certainly something your average human being can do. Most low-end routers have very friendly GUIs that make configuration fairly straight-forward. But it still takes conscious effort to make the network insecure.
When they're out of your house you have to trust whoever is in a supervisory position wherever they are - be it the bus driver, a teacher, librarian, or their friend's parent.
When your kid is at home you personally make sure they don't talk to strangers, don't see pornography, don't get stabbed, don't get kidnapped. When your kid goes to school, or over to their friend's house, you can't do that. It's up to their teachers to make sure they don't get stabbed. It's up to their friend's parents to make sure they don't see pornography.
Sure...there are tools to help... Some folks make more use of them than others. And maybe there is more that Facebook can do to help... But you really can't expect Facebook to become child-safe any more than you can expect Wal-Mart or your local park to become child-safe.
I know that there are plenty of machines out there that come with hardware RNG at reasonable prices... But is that even necessary?
I've seen software that tracks mouse movements for a while when generating random numbers, couldn't something similar be done through the OS itself? Couldn't you use mouse movement, keyboard input, sound and video output, etc. as your RNG? Wouldn't that be almost as good as a truly random number generator?
Or is there some obvious flaw in such a scheme which keeps it from being used?
Video games have age ratings on them already...but negligent parents still buy their toddlers Grand Theft Auto, despite the big ol' M on the box. The ones who refuse to buy the game for their little kids are the ones who actually care what their kid plays.
Most televisions have V-chips or some other kind of parental controls on them these days...but negligent parents still let their kids watch anything and everything. The ones who go to the trouble of setting the parental controls are the ones who actually care what their kid watches.
These controls are a tool, nothing more. As you said, the technology is neutral. But the only folks who actually make use of the tool are the ones who've already decided they ought to limit their kids playtime. If it wasn't a timer built-in to the Xbox they'd be using something else to monitor playtime...a regular clock, or watch, or alarm clock, or an egg timer.Tools like this aren't corroding anything. Tools simply sit there waiting to be used. Parents who already care about their kids will use the tools, parents who are negligent will not. What is corroding the family is parents who've decided that the best way to raise their kids is to keep them sedated with TV, video games, food, or medication - with as little personal involvement as possible. They aren't going to use a tool like this because it would mean that they'll have to deal with their kid when the timer goes off, and they don't want that.
What she needs to do is, in the guise of being a loving wife, give him the gift of WoW. If he likes Diablo II he'll likely enjoy WoW. And WoW features parental controls which can limit the amount of time he plays.
I remember working at Electronics Boutique... I had a tiny little kid come up to the counter with a copy of Grand Theft Auto, he couldn't have been more than about 8 or 9 years old. I refused to sell him the game since it was rated M and we were supposed to check ID. About half an hour later he returned with his mother who was very angry at me for not selling the game to her son. I started to launch into the usual spiel about M rated games, explain the content, explain our policy, etc... She didn't want to hear it. Didn't care if it had an M rating, didn't care what M meant, didn't care what was in the game... Just wanted to buy it and get back to whatever vitally important task she'd been dragged away from because I wouldn't sell the game to her kid.
Obviously, tools are out there for parents who care.
Personally, I don't trust the ratings very much... I've found that the ratings groups have very different ideas of what is appropriate than I do. For example, Medal of Honor has routinely earned a T rating because the bad guys don't bleed when you shoot them - you get a little puff of dust instead. You're still shooting other human beings in a relatively realistic WWII game, they just don't bleed. And that makes it OK for teens... But if they bleed red blood, it instantly earns the game an M. Exact same gameplay, just slightly different color palette.
I always insist on watching a movie or playing a game myself before I'll let my son play/watch it. This has resulted in several T/PG things he was not allowed to watch/play, and several M/R things which he was allowed to watch/play.
Sure, this feature can help you track your kids time on the Xbox...or help enforce your rules for you... It's a handy tool for any parent... But any parent who is going to make use of this feature has already decided that they ought to be limiting their kids playtime. If this feature wasn't available they'd likely be using something else. We used to use an egg timer.
Very true. I don't like to use the in-game controls because I don't want to get kicked offline at an inconvenient time... Instead, I've got an alarm clock on my desk. If I've got things I need to get done I'll set the alarm before I fire up WoW or whatever else I'm playing. Without a reminder like that I could easily lose track of time and play for hours without even noticing.
One of the things that I've always liked about the MacOS is how useful Apple Script is. It's amazing just how much you can do with it... Seems like just about every program released under MacOS has hooks for Apple Script.
Compared to the limited things you can accomplish with batch files and VB script under Windows...
I just hope PowerShell proves to be as useful.
I've always felt this was really Apple's strong suit... Not the trendy white plastic, or the nifty eye candy, or catchy commercials... The reason Apple's products are popular is because the interface is so well done. Features may be missing, it may not do absolutely everything the competition's product does, there may be bugs...but in general, Apple products are easy to interact with.
Personally, I hate iTunes and the iPod. I don't like how everything is stored in a weird database. I want to be able to simply drag & drop files onto the device... I want to have my media player watch a folder and automatically add/remove songs that show up in it... I use iTunes as little as possible, and immediately convert all my purchases to plain MP3s for use in other software, and I'll never own an iPod... But even I have to admit that the interface is very simple, clean, and straightforward.
US Clueless
There you go, now it's fixed. It isn't just in consumer matters... Folks in the US can't seem to see beyond the end of their nose. Politics, economics, financial planning, consumer spending, world affairs, basic science...they've got no clue. I'm constantly amazed at how oblivious most people are. Everyone seems to just stumble blindly through their day...
I hope it's just a US thing... But I can't actually say with any certainty that anybody anywhere else is any less oblivious. Maybe the whole world is asleep at the wheel. What a scary thought...
This, I think, is the real reason why system requirements have skyrocketed and software is so bloated these days. If you've got gigs and gigs of RAM/HDD, with CPU cycles to spare...why bother optimizing your code?
I don't know if I'd even attribute it to laziness... Optimizing code takes time and effort, and beyond a certain point it probably isn't worthwhile. You've got better things to do with your time, like fixing actual bugs or implementing new features.
I will readily accept that a modern word processor will do more than, say, EDIT under DOS. But that's not what I'm talking about. Let's ignore the OS for a moment and just look at Microsoft Word.
According to Microsoft the requirements for Word 2000 are:
And the requirements for Word 2007 are:
Now, I know 2007 has that fancy new ribbon thing... And it's got the nifty new XMLish file format... I would assume there's some bug fixes in there somewhere... I'm sure there are plenty of other new features in there that I don't know about... But, honestly, does it really do all that much that 2000 doesn't? They're both WYSYWIG, both have spelling and grammer checkers, both let you add graphics into your documents, both do all sorts of stuff with margins and tabs and columns and fonts and stuff.
So why does 2007 require 6 times as much processing power? Why does 2007 need 64 times more RAM? Why does 2007 take up 10 times as much drive space? Does it really have that many new features? Because, honestly, it seems to do almost exactly the same thing that 2000 did.
And that's just Word. Throw a shiny new copy of Vista on your computer and you're going to need even more CPU/RAM/HDD - all to accomplish the same task.
I'm not talking about doing something new... I'm not talking about running some piece of software that didn't exist back in 2000. I'm not suggesting that Half-Life 2 should be able to run on a 2000-era PC. I am asking what exactly it is that justifies making Word 2007 literally 10-times more resource intensive. Because it looks very similar to Word 2000 to me.
I realize that our modern-day computers do all sorts of things that the old machines didn't... You didn't see a whole lot of streaming video playback, or MP3s on those old machines. But, really, those are specific applications - specific tasks. The OS itself really isn't being asked to do much more than it had to do 10 or 20 years ago.
And when it comes down to simple tasks that we've been doing for years - something like word processing - there really isn't a good reason why my computer has to be 20 times more powerful than it used to be just to accomplish the same goals.
Look at an old machine running an old version of Word, and then look at something shiny and new running Vista and Word 2007. The new machine requires gobs more RAM, faster CPU, tons more drive space, and a fairly beefy GPU...all to do exactly the same thing the old one did. Why?
Sure, I'd expect to need a nicer machine for 3D games, MP3s, streaming video... But why are the system requirements for a simple word processor so much higher than they used to be? Bloat. Yes, there are new features in there...some of them are genuinely useful... But a lot of it is simply overhead - new GUI, new graphics, different animated things, a pile of new templates, some clip art... Stuff that really has almost nothing to do with actually processing words.
There's a reason the bloat argument seems overused lately - it's because bloat is showing up everywhere and people are complaining about it.
Horrible as it may be to say so... This has always been my assumption. Email, unless you go to the trouble of encrypting it in some way, is sent as cleartext. The sending email address, the recipient, the servers it bounces through, the message itself...it's all plainly readable by anyone with a text editor. Worse, servers along the way may very well save a copy of your email in case delivery is delayed or fails. Worse still, there's really no way to ensure that nobody along the way has retained a copy of your email, or printed it out, or forwarded it along to dozens of other people, or even edited its content.
I was taught early on that email is no better than sending a postcard.
I'm not saying that the government should have the right/ability to snoop on our communications without warrant... They certainly ought to get a warrant for any wiretapping or surveillance... And I'd expect them to need a warrant to read any email I'm encrypting... But plain ol' email is completely and totally insecure. I can't believe anyone would actually expect privacy when it comes to email... That's like expecting privacy while having a conversation on a busy street in the middle of New York City.
It's interesting to see how many real-world behaviors show up on-line, even though there's no real physical reason for it.
In the real world, I don't like people much. I can't stand crowds. I avoid Wal-Mart and shopping malls as much as possible. In social situations I usually stay towards the edge of the crowd.
On-line you don't have the same pressures... People aren't rubbing up against you, the air doesn't actually get hot and stale with other people's breath... But I still find myself avoiding the big cities, and staying on the edges of crowds.
I would assume, from my own limited anecdotal evidence, that folks would replicate their real-world behaviors on-line - all the way down to how far apart Westerners and Asians stand.
It really depends on the context and how my day has been...
Sometimes I will log in to WoW with the intent of playing alone. I'll go run through a dungeon, or do some quests, or kill some critters by myself. It's a game, it's fun, it's a nice way to unwind after a long day. And if the day has been annoying enough I may not want to deal with other people at all.
Sometimes my wife and I will go off adventuring together... Explore the countryside, do quests, whatever. It's a family outing, we don't want random people showing up and harassing us.
Other times it's a guild event... Again, a selected group of people that we know doing something socially. You don't want random strangers showing up and harassing you.
Even if it's a group of random people in a crowded city it can still be irritating to have someone invade your personal space. In WoW, like most MMOGs, you need a certain amount of room simply to interact with the world around you. You need to be able to click on items, characters, and NPCs in order to interact with them. You need to be able to see what you're doing. If you've got someone crowding you it can get very annoying, very quickly.
Actually... If I understand what this thing is doing correctly... I don't think you'd really need a firewall. The idea is that it would run just the email client, nothing else. Not even the OS. There would be literally nothing listening for incoming connections. Just the occasional outgoing connection on 110 or 25 to send/receive mail. This could actually dramatically increase the security and stability of some people's home computers.
And there's the real problem with the whole thing. We've had simplified devices like this before... I remember WebTV, and an assortment of "email machines" that just plugged into bandwidth and let you send/receive email. They aren't around now, or at least aren't in widespread use - because folks need a machine that does more than that. Sure, it'd be nice to have a simple device that only checks email, that's as reliable as a toaster, that doesn't crash or get viruses or anything like that. It sounds wonderful. But then you'd need a similar device that only does web... And another device that only does MP3s... And another device that only does word processing... And another device that only does PhotoShop... And before too long you've filled up your house with dozens of these simple devices that only do one thing.
It works in the kitchen, more or less. You've got different tools that do basically one thing. But those tools are all very simple, intuitive, and small. We aren't there yet with computer technology. We can't simplify all our tools down to that level, so we need an all-in-one device.
Yes, they do. It's not just superficial... It's fairly obvious that the knock-off was intentionally designed to look like a Wii-mote.
You aren't the target here.
I used to work at Electronics Boutique over the holidays, and I can guarantee that there are plenty of parents out there who would purchase this thing without a moment's hesitation - believing the whole time that they were purchasing a Wii-mote, or even the entire Wii system.
Parents used to show up with the most vague descriptions of what their child wanted... Or pictures clipped from catalogs, sales fliers, and magazines... Folks wouldn't know whether they needed a game for the PS2, Xbox, Game Cube, or computer. All they knew is that their kid said this, or it looked like that, or it had some guy with wings in it.
We had plenty of returns after Christmas because of this confusion. Folks who bought the game for entirely the wrong system...or the wrong kind of memory card...or bought some part of the system instead of the whole thing... And that was all without overly deceiving advertising or product design like this thing.