Re:Why do folks still use Windows?
on
Trustworthy Computing
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· Score: 2, Insightful
My company has about a dozen computers, including a single domain server with no backup server. We have about $60,000 invested in software (other than OS's) that will only run under Windows.
I rarely get to spend more than two or three hours a week on network maintenance, security monitoring, and research combined.
OK, so you're not a full-time IT guy. That's cool. But if you can't manage 12 machines and only $60K worth of vendor lock-in, then you absolutely, positively need some outside help. It's not an issue of whether you can afford it; at this point, I'd say you have to.
But what possible reason do I have for trusting the claims of Red Hat or Debian more? What research I can do is hardly reassuring. Remember Saturday's story [...]?
I did, but I don't think you did, because it was thoroughly debunked within the first 10 replies.
Let me put that another way. The article you're reading right now is full of stories about people going in on the holidays to patch their Windows systems. How many stories did you hear about Unix admins rushing in this weekend? All of last month? All of last year? So far this millennium? The latest unpatch{ed,able} Windows exploit is set to cause more work for the people who have to manage affected systems than the rest of us have had in the last five years.
But you can choose to believe whomever you want. As for me, I'm enjoying my four-day weekend and relaxing by reading about stuff that doesn't affect me. Hope your new year goes this well!
The console manual quite clearly states that "do not move the console while it's operating a disc". If someone managed to wreck their rented disc, all they can blaim is themselves, and pay the repair fee.
That's BS. First, you cannot expect everyone to RTFM. They would in an ideal world, but we don't live there. "Fixing" engineering flaws by turning them into "don't do this!" fine print won't get you very far.
Second, people use walkmen and laptops with spinning optical drives on a regular basis. Their experience tells them it's perfectly OK to move a running electronic device. I know there are differences, but the average person on the street shouldn't be expected to.
If movement is really the cause of all these problems, then the right ways to handle it would be to 1) fix the defect, or at least 2) put a big orange sticker on the loading tray saying "DO NOT MOVE THIS UNIT WHILE IT IS TURNED ON" so that they can't possible use the machine without physically removing the sticker.
Among questionable business practices and glaringly lacking browser functionality, there are some redeeming qualities.
Like what? Really: name one. I've never seen a single MS product succeed because it was better than the competition. Their sales and marketing departments are second to none - I'll grant you that - but that's about the best I can say for them.
I'll bet they do. For as much as some people hate Wal-Mart, I think they have the best customer service on the planet. They'd have no qualms about telling MS to take their disks back - at MS's expense - and fix the problem before it inconveniences any more of Wal-Mart's customers. It's not like MS is going to pull their products from the largest retail chain (or allow them to be pulled because they can't meet quality demands).
Side note: I just got back from Buffalo, NY, and had to stop in to a Wal-Mart there to buy some odds and ends. If that's what they look like elsewhere, no wonder so many people hate them. The stores in the cities I've lived in have cleaning supply budgets and aren't afraid to use them, and I'd always blindly assumed that was the case everywhere. My bad.
Another possibility is that you don't become one of the biggest companies in America by paying people to dick around with things like blogs. Slashdot and Fark were bad enough already.
Thank you! That's precisely the point I wanted to make, and your analogy with SSH was excellent. It's not that I'm trying to keep some big, scary secret, but that I just don't want my whole life out there for anyone with a packetsniffer to read.
You keep your machine connected to the network? That's just what They want you to do. You didn't even mention the two-layer firewall, with each machine running different OSes on different architectures.
So what emails are you sending to mom that require encryption?
Who cares? Do you write your letters on postcards or do you seal them inside an envelope?
Maybe he has a nosy mailadmin. Maybe he doesn't want his kid sister reading mail meant for his parents. Some of us value our privacy, even though we don't have anything to hide.
If a sizable portion of the population encrypted their email, then it wouldn't stand out, would it? And why do you assume he's wanting to "lay low"? Maybe he just wants to discuss private family business through private channels.
I'll be darned if I'm going to live my life in fear that some TLA will mistake some perfectly innocent activity for terroristic proclivities. I only have control over my own mind - it's beyond my abilities to make someone else interpret my actions in the way I want.
So, I'll keep encrypting the emails I send to my friends. I'll also keep locking my door and sealing my envelopes, even though I don't have any secrets the government would be interested in.
Do the platform costs factor into the decision at all? I went to a iSeries lecture recently (thanks for the free pizza, Big Blue!), and while the hardware seemed pretty nice, I was completely blown away by the prices the rep tossed around. Some people seem to be perfectly comfortable paying by the MFLOP, but I'm spent too much time around horizontally scaling systems to comprehend dropping that much cash per relatively small unit of performance.
Now, I'm not saying the iSeries is bad. Given infinite money, it probably makes a lot of sense for a lot of problem sets. I just can't imagine recommending one for any of the applications I've ever been involved with.
It kills me to say this, but without knowing more of the specifics I'd probably recommend the Windows boxen - or, more likely, a cluster of them. There's more than one way to get the kind of reliability you can squeeze from an AS/400, and most of them are a lot cheaper.
I had a Sirius receiver that I used for work and long road trips. My wife loved it so much that she got a second receiver to leave in her car for the driving she has to do for her job.
It really depends on what you have available over-the-air. I had 5 ClearChannel Pop stations, 2 CC Country stations, NPR, and a few talk channels. I couldn't stand what they played, so I pay a little each month for programming that I actually enjoy.
There was a story last year about an interesting candidate signal turning up in the SETI project. Well, as expected, the site was instantly Slashdotted. Realizing that I had a one-shot chance to take advantage of the fact that 1) the summary was available, but 2) the story itself was not, I invented my own interpretation of the facts.
It's too bad you can't see the moderation history of my post. It instantly spiked at "+5: Beam me up!" where it stayed for a few hours. Then, as the server began to come back online, a few people realized what I'd done and started to mod my post down. The True Believers, though, kept applying upward pressure on the score until someone cracked the "april fools!" code - at which point it bottomed out at "-1: I'm going to kill you". It eventually came back up to "+2: OK, you got me" after a few days, and there it stayed.
I felt kind of bad afterward. Sort of. For a little bit.
Re:Same as last time we discussed it: a CPA
on
Best Tax Programs?
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· Score: 1
I actually don't want my CPA to say this.
That was my attempt to make plausible-sounding CPA jargon, and not anything connected to reality. He always explains his reasoning to me, and it always makes perfect sense, but there's no way I could ever hope to explain it to someone else.
It's probably how non-geeks feel when we try to tell them why HyperThreading might not always be a great thing since it effectively halves the cache, and the P4 was already bandwidth-starved to begin with. They might understand it while you're telling them, but aren't likely to turn around and write a paper about it.
Same as last time we discussed it: a CPA
on
Best Tax Programs?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I've also done some independent contract work this past year, so something that is more friendly in that sense would be nice.
My tax package is named John. The assistant applications are named Steve and Kristi.
Seriously, why would you work your butt off all year long and then cheat yourself by not using the right tool for the job, specifically a human trained in the ways of the tax code?
No tax package will ever tell you stuff like "if you only claim 80% of your home office deduction, then you can use the Druss-Knackwurst Act of 1923 to triple your mileage". A good CPA, however, will geek out on your 1040 like a overclocker with a free supply of liquid nitrogen, with the critical difference that your accountant is legally responsible for keeping you on the good side of the IRS.
Mine says things like "I was laying awake last night trying to figure out how to carry back your dividends from three years ago to count against your liability next year", then will go on to explain it in the same way I tell my coworkers about new CPU developments. Get one like that and keep him or her for the rest of your life: they're worth the price a hundred times over.
Well, there's more to it than that. I'm actually a relatively observant Southern Baptist (see, we're not all as radical as some would have you believe), but I'm mainly trying to figure out where I stand on science issues.
I believe in creation, as per my original post, but I don't think that makes me a creationist (I don't think the Earth is x,000 years old). I also found out that I'm not an intelligent design believer (I used to think it meant something like what I believed, but that fell apart).
It's not that I have this great urge to label myself, but it would be nice if I could say "oh, I believe in $foo" whenever the topic comes up rather than have to explain from scratch each time.
I always thought I was an ID proponent - I believe that God created the universe and all life in it - until I learned exactly what ID really means.
I believe that He made the universe about 13 billion years ago through a process we call "the Big Bang", but that's just my understanding of current cosmology and subject to change as our/my knowledge of the subject grows.
I also believe that he used evolution to create life, as evidenced by all the hints left laying around and the ongoing processes around us.
I know that God exists by various reasons, but they all come down to faith. I know a little about how He created us, but it all comes down to science.
Since there's no way I'm going to say I believe in ID, what is the term for someone who thinks that God made everything through the processes that science is revealing to us?
As you know so much more about marketing than me, how about you find someone to finance my project to write a Linux clone of Mr Do.
I've already found my financier - your own is up to you.
I'll need a budget of about $25 million, and about 10 years to develop it, during which I really don't want to make any progress reports.
So, you're saying that you want to write video games for Linux. That's the first step. The next step is to contact various game houses to see if your skills match their needs, and sell them on the project. Failing that, find a venture capitalist who shares your vision (or at least thinks he could make money off it). If they buy it, yay - you're on your way to your dream! If they don't, then maybe it's time to re-evaluate your dreams, career goals, and professional abilities.
Then you're not very good at it, or you're really bad at marketing yourself.
Sorry.
No matter how niche your preferences are, somebody somewhere will finance them if you can make a business case for it. Don't extrapolate your own lack of initiative or creativity to everyone else, because many of us make good livings doing exactly what we enjoy.
i think during the last 10 years he's grown a little more sour than he was before all this (GNU) linux "controversy". i certainly sympathize with the GNU project on being underrepresented in the public awareness, but RMS will not change this only by acting sullen!
To the contrary, I think he's gaining the confidence of someone who's winning his struggle. Given that there are perfectly adequate F/OSS streaming video systems (Theora, Dirac), why should he support someone's choice to go with a closed equivalent?
i'd just hope that he'd go for a slightly more pragmatic way of spreading the idea of freedom.
I think RMS is supremely pragmatic. I would be able to watch a video in a F/OSS codec, but a RealPlayer file is nearly worthless to me. Given that pretty much everyone can use one format, and many people can't use the other, I don't see why it was bad to boycott the closed version.
Slashdot Mirror
I rarely get to spend more than two or three hours a week on network maintenance, security monitoring, and research combined.
OK, so you're not a full-time IT guy. That's cool. But if you can't manage 12 machines and only $60K worth of vendor lock-in, then you absolutely, positively need some outside help. It's not an issue of whether you can afford it; at this point, I'd say you have to.
But what possible reason do I have for trusting the claims of Red Hat or Debian more? What research I can do is hardly reassuring. Remember Saturday's story [...]?
I did, but I don't think you did, because it was thoroughly debunked within the first 10 replies.
Let me put that another way. The article you're reading right now is full of stories about people going in on the holidays to patch their Windows systems. How many stories did you hear about Unix admins rushing in this weekend? All of last month? All of last year? So far this millennium? The latest unpatch{ed,able} Windows exploit is set to cause more work for the people who have to manage affected systems than the rest of us have had in the last five years.
But you can choose to believe whomever you want. As for me, I'm enjoying my four-day weekend and relaxing by reading about stuff that doesn't affect me. Hope your new year goes this well!
That's BS. First, you cannot expect everyone to RTFM. They would in an ideal world, but we don't live there. "Fixing" engineering flaws by turning them into "don't do this!" fine print won't get you very far.
Second, people use walkmen and laptops with spinning optical drives on a regular basis. Their experience tells them it's perfectly OK to move a running electronic device. I know there are differences, but the average person on the street shouldn't be expected to.
If movement is really the cause of all these problems, then the right ways to handle it would be to 1) fix the defect, or at least 2) put a big orange sticker on the loading tray saying "DO NOT MOVE THIS UNIT WHILE IT IS TURNED ON" so that they can't possible use the machine without physically removing the sticker.
Like what? Really: name one. I've never seen a single MS product succeed because it was better than the competition. Their sales and marketing departments are second to none - I'll grant you that - but that's about the best I can say for them.
Oh, scratch that. They also make good mice.
Side note: I just got back from Buffalo, NY, and had to stop in to a Wal-Mart there to buy some odds and ends. If that's what they look like elsewhere, no wonder so many people hate them. The stores in the cities I've lived in have cleaning supply budgets and aren't afraid to use them, and I'd always blindly assumed that was the case everywhere. My bad.
Doesn't your IM system support Do Not Disturb as a status?
"Logging of communications" also means you have no privacy.
Bosses who log IM probably also log email, so that's a wash.
The difference between IM and previous forms of communication is that I used to have a choice.
Interesting. I've never had a choice of whether to respond quickly to questions, regardless of how they arrived.
In related news, behavioralists have verified that biting the hand that feeds you continues to be inadvisable.
Another possibility is that you don't become one of the biggest companies in America by paying people to dick around with things like blogs. Slashdot and Fark were bad enough already.
Thank you! That's precisely the point I wanted to make, and your analogy with SSH was excellent. It's not that I'm trying to keep some big, scary secret, but that I just don't want my whole life out there for anyone with a packetsniffer to read.
You're my new hero.
If you're going to be paranoid, do it right.
Who cares? Do you write your letters on postcards or do you seal them inside an envelope?
Maybe he has a nosy mailadmin. Maybe he doesn't want his kid sister reading mail meant for his parents. Some of us value our privacy, even though we don't have anything to hide.
I'll be darned if I'm going to live my life in fear that some TLA will mistake some perfectly innocent activity for terroristic proclivities. I only have control over my own mind - it's beyond my abilities to make someone else interpret my actions in the way I want.
So, I'll keep encrypting the emails I send to my friends. I'll also keep locking my door and sealing my envelopes, even though I don't have any secrets the government would be interested in.
Now, I'm not saying the iSeries is bad. Given infinite money, it probably makes a lot of sense for a lot of problem sets. I just can't imagine recommending one for any of the applications I've ever been involved with.
It kills me to say this, but without knowing more of the specifics I'd probably recommend the Windows boxen - or, more likely, a cluster of them. There's more than one way to get the kind of reliability you can squeeze from an AS/400, and most of them are a lot cheaper.
It really depends on what you have available over-the-air. I had 5 ClearChannel Pop stations, 2 CC Country stations, NPR, and a few talk channels. I couldn't stand what they played, so I pay a little each month for programming that I actually enjoy.
Greatest. Porn site. Ever. That guy rocks!
It's too bad you can't see the moderation history of my post. It instantly spiked at "+5: Beam me up!" where it stayed for a few hours. Then, as the server began to come back online, a few people realized what I'd done and started to mod my post down. The True Believers, though, kept applying upward pressure on the score until someone cracked the "april fools!" code - at which point it bottomed out at "-1: I'm going to kill you". It eventually came back up to "+2: OK, you got me" after a few days, and there it stayed.
I felt kind of bad afterward. Sort of. For a little bit.
That was my attempt to make plausible-sounding CPA jargon, and not anything connected to reality. He always explains his reasoning to me, and it always makes perfect sense, but there's no way I could ever hope to explain it to someone else.
It's probably how non-geeks feel when we try to tell them why HyperThreading might not always be a great thing since it effectively halves the cache, and the P4 was already bandwidth-starved to begin with. They might understand it while you're telling them, but aren't likely to turn around and write a paper about it.
My tax package is named John. The assistant applications are named Steve and Kristi.
Seriously, why would you work your butt off all year long and then cheat yourself by not using the right tool for the job, specifically a human trained in the ways of the tax code?
No tax package will ever tell you stuff like "if you only claim 80% of your home office deduction, then you can use the Druss-Knackwurst Act of 1923 to triple your mileage". A good CPA, however, will geek out on your 1040 like a overclocker with a free supply of liquid nitrogen, with the critical difference that your accountant is legally responsible for keeping you on the good side of the IRS.
Mine says things like "I was laying awake last night trying to figure out how to carry back your dividends from three years ago to count against your liability next year", then will go on to explain it in the same way I tell my coworkers about new CPU developments. Get one like that and keep him or her for the rest of your life: they're worth the price a hundred times over.
I believe in creation, as per my original post, but I don't think that makes me a creationist (I don't think the Earth is x,000 years old). I also found out that I'm not an intelligent design believer (I used to think it meant something like what I believed, but that fell apart).
It's not that I have this great urge to label myself, but it would be nice if I could say "oh, I believe in $foo" whenever the topic comes up rather than have to explain from scratch each time.
I believe that He made the universe about 13 billion years ago through a process we call "the Big Bang", but that's just my understanding of current cosmology and subject to change as our/my knowledge of the subject grows.
I also believe that he used evolution to create life, as evidenced by all the hints left laying around and the ongoing processes around us.
I know that God exists by various reasons, but they all come down to faith. I know a little about how He created us, but it all comes down to science.
Since there's no way I'm going to say I believe in ID, what is the term for someone who thinks that God made everything through the processes that science is revealing to us?
I've already found my financier - your own is up to you.
I'll need a budget of about $25 million, and about 10 years to develop it, during which I really don't want to make any progress reports.
So, you're saying that you want to write video games for Linux. That's the first step. The next step is to contact various game houses to see if your skills match their needs, and sell them on the project. Failing that, find a venture capitalist who shares your vision (or at least thinks he could make money off it). If they buy it, yay - you're on your way to your dream! If they don't, then maybe it's time to re-evaluate your dreams, career goals, and professional abilities.
Then you're not very good at it, or you're really bad at marketing yourself.
Sorry.
No matter how niche your preferences are, somebody somewhere will finance them if you can make a business case for it. Don't extrapolate your own lack of initiative or creativity to everyone else, because many of us make good livings doing exactly what we enjoy.
No, I don't. You might, but very few other people do. "1" in hex doesn't magically become "0x0" - it becomes "0x1".
Offsets? That's a different store (for base 10 and others), but counting starts at 1 for everyone but programmers.
You toggled opcodes into RAM, bootstrapped it into a running system, then self-hosted the rest of the implementation? Very impressive!
To the contrary, I think he's gaining the confidence of someone who's winning his struggle. Given that there are perfectly adequate F/OSS streaming video systems (Theora, Dirac), why should he support someone's choice to go with a closed equivalent?
i'd just hope that he'd go for a slightly more pragmatic way of spreading the idea of freedom.
I think RMS is supremely pragmatic. I would be able to watch a video in a F/OSS codec, but a RealPlayer file is nearly worthless to me. Given that pretty much everyone can use one format, and many people can't use the other, I don't see why it was bad to boycott the closed version.