After the second read I still couldn't decide if he was trying to be tongue in cheek or if he actually meant all that crap about good will and social deviants.
What a load of shit, and what a way to lose one's credibility.
Here in Switzerland/Germany on TV tonight, a channel, SAT1, broadcast as one of it's subjects in the Planetopia current issues, a bit about the difficulty people have keepiing their Windows machines up to date with patches. One guy, who had a DSL line at his house complained that it took him almost the entire day to update his entire collection of MS software, from Windows through Explorer to Office. He wondered out loud how people with modems or ISDN connections (still popular in Germany) would be able to cope.
Another guy, who had just bought a Windows box, was caught by blaster as soon as he switched the thing on and took it back to the store (the German equivalent of CompUSA) where they were too dumb to help him. The piece also demonstrated how this could happen because the firewall wasn't turned on by default.
What was interesting is that when they asked some so called MS expert on how to get the patches all at once, he mentioned that MS only released 80 000 CD's with the latest patches all in one on it, and the interviewer immediately asked how all the millions of MS customers were supposed to be satisfied with only that amount of CDs.
I read somewhere that one of the arguments (back in the 80's) against Lisp machines was their slowness (a similar problem with smalltalk machines IIRC). IIRC the whole LISP machine was implemented in hardware and I think that today a Lisp machine could probabaly be an amazing tool given that even Java, the mother of all slow languages runs ok on any PIII from about 600MHz upwards. With a set of hardware encoded security permission sets, it would be fantastic to use, wouldn't it?
In Rob Enerle's latest column countering the latest anti-monoculture reports, (http://www.internetwk.com/breakingNews/showArticl e.jhtml?articleID=15202192) he makes a few factual erros, one of which id his claim, and I quote, "This is the big problem with the diversity recommendations I've seen. If they had been implemented as recommended they would have had little impact on the MSBlast virus, which spread via common e-mail, and would likely increase the exposure for other types of threat. ".
This is clearly wrong, as the MSBlast virus was NOT propagated via e-mail, but by systems being vulnerable to an unpatched RPC service vulnerability that was open on port 135 (changed from the earlier port 80 in your article). There is ironically another error in that same, incorrect statement, and that is that of all the e-mail viruses and worm out there, they are all propagated by Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express, as no other e-mail software allows automatic scripting that can access the system.
To be fair, one should be fairly secure if one remains up to date with patches from Microsoft and followed good security practices such as closing the port and switching on the integrated firewall and turning off scripting macros in Outlook, and that is the answer I would have expected from a so called security consultant. His credibility might suffer a little bit for this article, and I think you owe it to your readers to make corrections, as you did with the port 80 statement.
Western Europe has the same problem to a certain extent but not as badly as the USA. The reason not so many European IT jobs have gone to India and China is partly because of the language barrier. There are tens of millions of Indians and Chinese who can speak English but almost none who speak German, French, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch etc. (I assume some Spanish and Portuguese IT has gone to South America) This doesn't prevent IT companies trying to outsource call centres to Germany from Switzerland for example (although the language spoken in Switzerland is a dialect of German that Germans don't understand).
Apart from this a fair amount of manufacturing, production (and coding) has been flowing towards Eastern Europe as those countries join the EU. The EU hopes that it will somehow balance itself out in that very large companies in Western Europe will have branches in Eastern Europe and that that way cash will flow backwards as well.
I think one thing that can really stay local in the IT world (and this applies to the US as well) is for people to start their own small companies specialising in other small companies in other sectors in the local economy. Programmes such as Tax or local business oriented stuff as well as doing consulting and support on a small scale are a good answer.
Another answer is to start a local company that adresses the problems that the people's previous companies cause by outsourcing coding to people who have low QA and communication skills in the local language.
As an example, let's take, for example a certain Desktop publishing layout software from a company in Denver Colorado. This company's product has had a virtual monopoly in DTP for more than 13 years. About three or four years ago, IIRC, that company (use your brains as to who that is) outsourced the entire software development to India. About six months to a year later, Indian developers from this company started popping up in developer mailing lists asking really basic C/C++ questions and acting very arrogant when they didn't get immediate answers. Aparently those Indian developers were so bad (relatively speaking, probably more a management problem) that it took them almost three years to port that DTP programme to Mac OSX, where it finally turned up a few months ago.
That would have been and was an opportunity for competitors to step in and develop alternatives.
Think about it. Tarifs and high import taxes will not solve anything in the long run, as the USA is no longer in the position to be able to simply dictate economic terms to the EU, India or China (or SE Asia to an extent), and if such measures are taken, sonner or later they'll reply in kind, and then you truly will be f**ked.
I didn't see much which actually addressed actual problems in Enderle's "solutions". Closing port 135 will not address Sobig type mail worms, neither will putting all the users machines in a server room. His point about MSOffice on the Mac avoids the source of most viruses as well, Outlook.
Not only this, but he contradicts himself when he talks about saving money with a single platform in one sentence but then talks about buying more AV products in another.
Mr. Enderle, what was your point again and can I get a job like yours where I make money by praising some company willing to pay for it.
I don't know whether Roblimo wrote in that style on purpose or if he truly doesn't know how Windows functions. However, my take on his article is that he is emulating the writing style of dozens of so called IT-journalists, such as those on trash-raqs like CNet/ZDNet who, every now and again when nothing else big is happening, try out a Linux distro. Usually they get manage to a certain extent to install the distro, can start Star/OpenOffice well enough, are happy with Mozilla and evolution's basic functionality, but will almost always complain about the lack of Exchange server functionality in Evolution, Office compatibility in OOo and some or other technicalities, very much in the same style as Roblimo did.
And he's right to a certain extent. WindowsXP has certainly improved a lot over the Win98 days, but the automatic update functionaility, while perhaps simple and obvious to a longtime Windows user (I personally find that putting it in System is questionable) can be anything but obvious to a computer or Windows newbie.
Added to that, Outlook, while also better than it used to be, is anything but simple to configure, and Explorer is plainly getting old in not having the ability to block pop-ups or use tabbed browsing.
Finally, I really wonder why so many Windows-users get so upset when they read an article like this? Is it the same phenomenon that Mac users are always accused of i.e. Zealotry? Criticism of one's platform of choice should be welcomed, because that would enable a truly innovative company and one that listens to its customers to improve things, would it not?
Is there that much of a difference? How far ahead was ray Bradbury in his thinking, or was it that obvious already? You think this is far fetched? How long do you think it will take before corporations can send little kids off to jail because they listened to a song or watched a movie without paying for it? Why is it that this DMCA can provide more draconian sentences than killing someone would? How long will it be until some frustrated nut flips and kills some DMCA corporate type because of all this abuse of ordinary people?
I was wondering how it would be possible to automatically combat this. It would need some form of tracroute combined with a DNS lookup that logs the DNS server when the end point in the trace is a cable or dsl user. The cable or dsl user should be fairly easy to identify as such in that their names usualy include in some form that refers to their ISP.
Last night I considerd that Eolas' suite was endangering others rather than MS. Today I really hope he manages to kill MS' IE monopoly for a while. An injunction against MS would really hurt MS because IE is part of the OS and so much depends on it these days.
If this goes through, the immediate losers will be Microsoft, Apple and Macromedia. The former because of the impossible act of having to send new versions of IE to everyone on the planet (especially to all the OEMs), Macromedia because Flash would take a huge hit in poularity and Apple because Quicktime would suffer from the lack of web exposure.
Microsoft's response might be to offer "selected partners" the ability to get their particular piece of tech included in the browser as part of the new code, and to offer specialised proprietry tags for the content, such as the IMG tag right now. You don't have to be a genius to see who will not be selected to be "selected partners". Apple would lose out to MS multimedia tags and Real could close shop.
A standards based workaround could be an implementation of special tags in XHTML that reference whatever "standards based" tech the browser offers.
Microsoft can go to hell, for all I care, but this Eolas guy's suit is more likely to damage MS' competitors that MS in the long run.
Apple's including a full featured IDE with OSX has been one of the major factors in motivating so many people to switch to Mac OSX and Apple machines. There isn't really any other proprietry OS (I'm not talking about the OSS Darwin subsystem, but the Aqua GUI here) that does this. In almost all operating systems you pay a hefty price for even crippled beginner versions of coding tools (Microsoft's Visual C#.Net, VB.Net and VC++.Net all cost almost as much as Apple's OS upgrade itself, yet are crippled in that they don't support the whole feature set such as networking and custom forms etc).
IN Windows there is no real coding tools built into the OS, unless you consider WSH scripting in a text editor coding. Given that this is so, I wonder what it will take for MS to start trying to compete with Apple by releasing some stripped down version of the VisualStudio toolset free with the OS? MS is known to fear ANY ceompetition, no matter how small, which is why they included Luna in WinXP to combat OSX, and why they are doing the compositing graphical model in Longhorn. Even though Linux is really not there yet on the Desktop, MS is frightened of fractions of minor percentage points in marketshare being lost to Linux.
On the other hand, what is to stop Apple doing what MS has done and include useful and popular features of Windows in OSX, some of which already happened in jaguar with Cmd-c and Cmd-v copying and pasting of files in the finder.
For those who complain about older non USB machines not being supported I have this comment.
Firstly, someone will provide a hack sooner or later such as X PostFacto which will enable it to run, so relax, and
Secondly, although I have a (supposedly now ageing, ha ha) 667MHZ G4 TiPowerbook, I also have a 333MHz Lombard G3, which I often use... with the OS that came with it, Mac OS 8.6. This is for a number of reasons, which include the fact that, a. OSX wasn't really made for machines like this b. I have a load of software for that OS c. I have some peripherals that don't work on OSX that still work there, like my old Wacom Artpad d. With that OS and those versions of the software, I can still get a lot of practical use out of it. e. It's very responsive and stable with all those progs on it.
I will get Jaguar, but for my TiBook, which will see use for a number of years yet.
The 1.3.2.1 release is going to address most of the things that have been irritating amateur (and some professional) graphics users, the terrible user interface. This application will go on to be a true competitor to Photoshop, and I'm willing to bet some money on that. Photoshop has become very bloated in the last couple of iterations and is overkill for some of the things it was originally meant to do.
Given that you can get someone offed for some far more trivial than the the sum Microsoft paid to this Eolas guy, I think he would be wise to invest some cash in an object suite of bodyguards. Microsoft is like an elephant, it has a long memory and I assume they're going to watch him to try and make a slip up somewhere.
There are times when I deride myself for my lack of ability to think in an abstract manner, then along comes a post like yours and I can console myself that there are people out there who cannot understand an anaology even if it a barn full of VB.Net code standing right in front of them.
I have a collection of the classic Bic Cristal ballpoint pens. They've been around for 50 years, are almost indestructable, work on almost any surface, and cost just about nothing. Come in four fancy colours as well.
In any applications menu in OSX, in the application name's menu, choose the services item. Any application can make part of its functionality available to any other through the OS, even when it's not running.
If you're having problems like 100+K memory objects for a single user (have you got their whole family history in there?), then I suspect you're going to have a whole lot more problems when you try to do the same things in PHP.
Something sound awfully skewed in that application. I suspect that your site does the dotcom era idea of "MyNewsite" and stores loads of info on the specific users layout etc. While this is fine and dandy, one does ask oneself why all this is sitting in memory all the time. It sounds very much like an architecturural problem. There are surely 100 other ways of having that specific user have his own layout (seperating the content and templating logic out into the database or another server for instance) where that info doesn't have to overload the memory of the actual application server.
Redoing it in PHP would work only if you changed the architecture. If you used the same ideas in PHP your problems will only get worse as PHP's session management is defintely not at the same level of Java's.
Slashdot Mirror
After the second read I still couldn't decide if he was trying to be tongue in cheek or if he actually meant all that crap about good will and social deviants.
What a load of shit, and what a way to lose one's credibility.
Here in Switzerland/Germany on TV tonight, a channel, SAT1, broadcast as one of it's subjects in the Planetopia current issues, a bit about the difficulty people have keepiing their Windows machines up to date with patches. One guy, who had a DSL line at his house complained that it took him almost the entire day to update his entire collection of MS software, from Windows through Explorer to Office. He wondered out loud how people with modems or ISDN connections (still popular in Germany) would be able to cope.
Another guy, who had just bought a Windows box, was caught by blaster as soon as he switched the thing on and took it back to the store (the German equivalent of CompUSA) where they were too dumb to help him. The piece also demonstrated how this could happen because the firewall wasn't turned on by default.
What was interesting is that when they asked some so called MS expert on how to get the patches all at once, he mentioned that MS only released 80 000 CD's with the latest patches all in one on it, and the interviewer immediately asked how all the millions of MS customers were supposed to be satisfied with only that amount of CDs.
Interesting.
I read somewhere that one of the arguments (back in the 80's) against Lisp machines was their slowness (a similar problem with smalltalk machines IIRC). IIRC the whole LISP machine was implemented in hardware and I think that today a Lisp machine could probabaly be an amazing tool given that even Java, the mother of all slow languages runs ok on any PIII from about 600MHz upwards. With a set of hardware encoded security permission sets, it would be fantastic to use, wouldn't it?
I'm in Switzerland. Isn't English one of the problems that I mentioned, perhaps?
In Rob Enerle's latest column countering the latest anti-monoculture reports, (http://www.internetwk.com/breakingNews/showArticl e.jhtml?articleID=15202192) he makes a few factual erros, one of which id his claim, and I quote, "This is the big problem with the diversity recommendations I've seen. If they had been implemented as recommended they would have had little impact on the MSBlast virus, which spread via common e-mail, and would likely increase the exposure for other types of threat. ".
This is clearly wrong, as the MSBlast virus was NOT propagated via e-mail, but by systems being vulnerable to an unpatched RPC service vulnerability that was open on port 135 (changed from the earlier port 80 in your article). There is ironically another error in that same, incorrect statement, and that is that of all the e-mail viruses and worm out there, they are all propagated by Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express, as no other e-mail software allows automatic scripting that can access the system.
To be fair, one should be fairly secure if one remains up to date with patches from Microsoft and followed good security practices such as closing the port and switching on the integrated firewall and turning off scripting macros in Outlook, and that is the answer I would have expected from a so called security consultant. His credibility might suffer a little bit for this article, and I think you owe it to your readers to make corrections, as you did with the port 80 statement.
Western Europe has the same problem to a certain extent but not as badly as the USA. The reason not so many European IT jobs have gone to India and China is partly because of the language barrier. There are tens of millions of Indians and Chinese who can speak English but almost none who speak German, French, Italian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch etc. (I assume some Spanish and Portuguese IT has gone to South America) This doesn't prevent IT companies trying to outsource call centres to Germany from Switzerland for example (although the language spoken in Switzerland is a dialect of German that Germans don't understand).
Apart from this a fair amount of manufacturing, production (and coding) has been flowing towards Eastern Europe as those countries join the EU. The EU hopes that it will somehow balance itself out in that very large companies in Western Europe will have branches in Eastern Europe and that that way cash will flow backwards as well.
I think one thing that can really stay local in the IT world (and this applies to the US as well) is for people to start their own small companies specialising in other small companies in other sectors in the local economy. Programmes such as Tax or local business oriented stuff as well as doing consulting and support on a small scale are a good answer.
Another answer is to start a local company that adresses the problems that the people's previous companies cause by outsourcing coding to people who have low QA and communication skills in the local language.
As an example, let's take, for example a certain Desktop publishing layout software from a company in Denver Colorado. This company's product has had a virtual monopoly in DTP for more than 13 years. About three or four years ago, IIRC, that company (use your brains as to who that is) outsourced the entire software development to India. About six months to a year later, Indian developers from this company started popping up in developer mailing lists asking really basic C/C++ questions and acting very arrogant when they didn't get immediate answers. Aparently those Indian developers were so bad (relatively speaking, probably more a management problem) that it took them almost three years to port that DTP programme to Mac OSX, where it finally turned up a few months ago.
That would have been and was an opportunity for competitors to step in and develop alternatives.
Think about it. Tarifs and high import taxes will not solve anything in the long run, as the USA is no longer in the position to be able to simply dictate economic terms to the EU, India or China (or SE Asia to an extent), and if such measures are taken, sonner or later they'll reply in kind, and then you truly will be f**ked.
I didn't see much which actually addressed actual problems in Enderle's "solutions". Closing port 135 will not address Sobig type mail worms, neither will putting all the users machines in a server room. His point about MSOffice on the Mac avoids the source of most viruses as well, Outlook.
Not only this, but he contradicts himself when he talks about saving money with a single platform in one sentence but then talks about buying more AV products in another.
Mr. Enderle, what was your point again and can I get a job like yours where I make money by praising some company willing to pay for it.
I don't know whether Roblimo wrote in that style on purpose or if he truly doesn't know how Windows functions. However, my take on his article is that he is emulating the writing style of dozens of so called IT-journalists, such as those on trash-raqs like CNet/ZDNet who, every now and again when nothing else big is happening, try out a Linux distro. Usually they get manage to a certain extent to install the distro, can start Star/OpenOffice well enough, are happy with Mozilla and evolution's basic functionality, but will almost always complain about the lack of Exchange server functionality in Evolution, Office compatibility in OOo and some or other technicalities, very much in the same style as Roblimo did.
And he's right to a certain extent. WindowsXP has certainly improved a lot over the Win98 days, but the automatic update functionaility, while perhaps simple and obvious to a longtime Windows user (I personally find that putting it in System is questionable) can be anything but obvious to a computer or Windows newbie.
Added to that, Outlook, while also better than it used to be, is anything but simple to configure, and Explorer is plainly getting old in not having the ability to block pop-ups or use tabbed browsing.
Finally, I really wonder why so many Windows-users get so upset when they read an article like this? Is it the same phenomenon that Mac users are always accused of i.e. Zealotry? Criticism of one's platform of choice should be welcomed, because that would enable a truly innovative company and one that listens to its customers to improve things, would it not?
Is there that much of a difference? How far ahead was ray Bradbury in his thinking, or was it that obvious already? You think this is far fetched? How long do you think it will take before corporations can send little kids off to jail because they listened to a song or watched a movie without paying for it? Why is it that this DMCA can provide more draconian sentences than killing someone would? How long will it be until some frustrated nut flips and kills some DMCA corporate type because of all this abuse of ordinary people?
"All hail the American dream" -- Yeah, sure.
I was wondering how it would be possible to automatically combat this. It would need some form of tracroute combined with a DNS lookup that logs the DNS server when the end point in the trace is a cable or dsl user. The cable or dsl user should be fairly easy to identify as such in that their names usualy include in some form that refers to their ISP.
Last night I considerd that Eolas' suite was endangering others rather than MS. Today I really hope he manages to kill MS' IE monopoly for a while. An injunction against MS would really hurt MS because IE is part of the OS and so much depends on it these days.
If this goes through, the immediate losers will be Microsoft, Apple and Macromedia. The former because of the impossible act of having to send new versions of IE to everyone on the planet (especially to all the OEMs), Macromedia because Flash would take a huge hit in poularity and Apple because Quicktime would suffer from the lack of web exposure.
Microsoft's response might be to offer "selected partners" the ability to get their particular piece of tech included in the browser as part of the new code, and to offer specialised proprietry tags for the content, such as the IMG tag right now. You don't have to be a genius to see who will not be selected to be "selected partners". Apple would lose out to MS multimedia tags and Real could close shop.
A standards based workaround could be an implementation of special tags in XHTML that reference whatever "standards based" tech the browser offers.
Microsoft can go to hell, for all I care, but this Eolas guy's suit is more likely to damage MS' competitors that MS in the long run.
This is going to be better than the SCO circus before it's over. Hit squads and rampant hate PR are likely to fill the air ;)
Apple's including a full featured IDE with OSX has been one of the major factors in motivating so many people to switch to Mac OSX and Apple machines. There isn't really any other proprietry OS (I'm not talking about the OSS Darwin subsystem, but the Aqua GUI here) that does this. In almost all operating systems you pay a hefty price for even crippled beginner versions of coding tools (Microsoft's Visual C#.Net, VB.Net and VC++.Net all cost almost as much as Apple's OS upgrade itself, yet are crippled in that they don't support the whole feature set such as networking and custom forms etc).
IN Windows there is no real coding tools built into the OS, unless you consider WSH scripting in a text editor coding. Given that this is so, I wonder what it will take for MS to start trying to compete with Apple by releasing some stripped down version of the VisualStudio toolset free with the OS? MS is known to fear ANY ceompetition, no matter how small, which is why they included Luna in WinXP to combat OSX, and why they are doing the compositing graphical model in Longhorn. Even though Linux is really not there yet on the Desktop, MS is frightened of fractions of minor percentage points in marketshare being lost to Linux.
On the other hand, what is to stop Apple doing what MS has done and include useful and popular features of Windows in OSX, some of which already happened in jaguar with Cmd-c and Cmd-v copying and pasting of files in the finder.
How about teaching them how to write and spell their own names with a pen and paper first?
For those who complain about older non USB machines not being supported I have this comment.
Firstly, someone will provide a hack sooner or later such as X PostFacto which will enable it to run, so relax, and
Secondly, although I have a (supposedly now ageing, ha ha) 667MHZ G4 TiPowerbook, I also have a 333MHz Lombard G3, which I often use... with the OS that came with it, Mac OS 8.6. This is for a number of reasons, which include the fact that,
a. OSX wasn't really made for machines like this
b. I have a load of software for that OS
c. I have some peripherals that don't work on OSX that still work there, like my old Wacom Artpad
d. With that OS and those versions of the software, I can still get a lot of practical use out of it.
e. It's very responsive and stable with all those progs on it.
I will get Jaguar, but for my TiBook, which will see use for a number of years yet.
Relax, someone will have a hack out sooner or later that will make this possible.
The 1.3.2.1 release is going to address most of the things that have been irritating amateur (and some professional) graphics users, the terrible user interface. This application will go on to be a true competitor to Photoshop, and I'm willing to bet some money on that. Photoshop has become very bloated in the last couple of iterations and is overkill for some of the things it was originally meant to do.
Given that you can get someone offed for some far more trivial than the the sum Microsoft paid to this Eolas guy, I think he would be wise to invest some cash in an object suite of bodyguards. Microsoft is like an elephant, it has a long memory and I assume they're going to watch him to try and make a slip up somewhere.
There are times when I deride myself for my lack of ability to think in an abstract manner, then along comes a post like yours and I can console myself that there are people out there who cannot understand an anaology even if it a barn full of VB.Net code standing right in front of them.
Wonder what Google has to say about this?
Exactly! They're a good help when one is "chewing" on those big mind taxing problems. Great stress reliever.
I have a collection of the classic Bic Cristal ballpoint pens. They've been around for 50 years, are almost indestructable, work on almost any surface, and cost just about nothing. Come in four fancy colours as well.
In any applications menu in OSX, in the application name's menu, choose the services item. Any application can make part of its functionality available to any other through the OS, even when it's not running.
If you're having problems like 100+K memory objects for a single user (have you got their whole family history in there?), then I suspect you're going to have a whole lot more problems when you try to do the same things in PHP.
Something sound awfully skewed in that application. I suspect that your site does the dotcom era idea of "MyNewsite" and stores loads of info on the specific users layout etc. While this is fine and dandy, one does ask oneself why all this is sitting in memory all the time. It sounds very much like an architecturural problem. There are surely 100 other ways of having that specific user have his own layout (seperating the content and templating logic out into the database or another server for instance) where that info doesn't have to overload the memory of the actual application server.
Redoing it in PHP would work only if you changed the architecture. If you used the same ideas in PHP your problems will only get worse as PHP's session management is defintely not at the same level of Java's.