Honestly, either would fit your need. The ham kit would very likely work from further away. Cell phones are not ham radios, though. Just because we have one doesn't mean we shouldn't also have the other.
Basically, it plain doesn't matter that *you* don't think it's useful. Most ham operators would disagree with you, and they're the ones that matter. The DoD would also likely disagree with you, all things considered. There's a reason the Army doesn't use cell phones and blackberries, just as there's a reason the helicopter that you mention doesn't do that either.
Also, I've never been somewhere that a ham radio won't work. I'm in places every single day that a cellular phone doesn't work. Cellular isn't comparible to ham radio; they don't do the same things.
So have your cell phone and be happy. And the GP can have his ham radio and be happy. There is *NO* reason we can't continue having both.
Of course, an amateur could build a ham radio from discrete pieces, but certainly not a Blackberry. You also don't need to pay a monthly fee to signal code with amateur radio. Your solution fails on both of those whereas the current solution does not.
While it's possible, and has been done for many years, there is still reason to do Morse code. You propose a technological solution to a non-existent problem. These solutions never work out well...
Part of what makes code useful is that you don't need *anything* aside from your radio to make it work. You can be heard much further away than what voice communications would be possible for. You are still audible over substantial interference. The situations where manual code are most useful are also situations where you *wouldn't* very likely have something like a PDA.
That's an easy one. Radio doesn't require any infrastructure or fees. Also, much of the world, and a good amount of the US, do not have Internet. You could've asked "Why bother, since we have telephones and cellular phones?". The answer would be the same.
If an unfortunate router goes out, parts of the internet go away. If you have a widespread failure (for example, a natural disaster or crippling attack), then you can't trust the infrastructure; it probably doesn't work at all. During the Sept. 11 attacks, and for a while after, telephone and cellular network were unusable. The HAM radio people are what kept communications alive. This was a similar case during that power blackout that covered most of the NorthEast.
It's also a lot of fun to do just as a hobby.
What's the point of broadcast TV or radio, since we have cable? Why bother with regular telephone service, we have VoIP and the internet?
I've been told that they rigged the roads so they can blow mines and cause avalanches. I don't have good authority on that, but it makes sense to me. You would have to invade either over trecherous terrain or by air. That means you can bomb, but to hold the land, you would have to manage group forces somehow. That sounds like a losing proposition to me.
They maintain their sovereignity through the threat of force and retaliation. They have more active military personnel than any other country. I believe it's every male between 18 and 45 that is armed and trained. You're required to do service as part of your citizenship.
Sounds like it makes him very relevant to anyone making search tech. This would be a specialised field which he was highly skilled in. You've decided that since he was successful at bringing a product to market in a given market segment, that he shouldn't be allowed to do what he knows at another company. This is ridiculous to the extreme.
What does MS think he's going to give Google? Perhaps that MS is going to release a desktop search system? Oh wait, they *already* released that and the other things he was working on. They said so in their press release.
I suppose CEOs should never be allowed to run a company in the same market, either?
So what if he does know things inconvenient to MS. As far as I'm concerned, if you can't compete in the market because you have a competitor, then good riddance. I've been hoping for there to be legal precedent or new law that makes non-compete clauses illegal. It's pretty much impossible to get a job without one of these trite pieces of lunacy.
It might be "unethical" to break contract, but I really can't find myself able to care when the contract is one like these are. However, I have worked two jobs that were computer related that did not try to force one of these thing on me. They consist of: a university and a municipal government.
For an anecdote, I worked for one staffing agency that staffed people into IBM. They wanted me to sign a non-compete that I wouldn't work for the company contracted into, or any competitors, for one year after leaving their employ. Due to their wording, had I signed that, I wouldn't have been able to work for another computer hardware/software/services company or another tech staffing company without their consent. Of course, if I had signed it, I also would've completely ignored it.
MS is one of those companies that I actively try to work against. I do everything that I can to remove their products everywhere I can. It is inconvenient as hell, but I don't want to be responsible for them getting any money at all. Too bad most people are all talk when it comes to these sorts of things. Companies would be listening a lot more if people would actually *do* something.
I've always thought you should use the language that best embodies what you're trying to teach. This would include assembler, C, Java, LISP, or whatever else. The language isn't important.
Then again, I don't think you should actually be programming in your first year of a CS major. Silly me and my thinking that CS was applied math.;-)
Unfortunately most colleges don't offer CS=CompSci anymore; they offer CS=SoftEng. If they want to get into heavily used languages later on, then that's perfectly reasonable. But this way you don't end up with Java programmers or C programmers, you end up with CompSci people that can program in whatever language that is needed and write decent algorithms.
Of course, thinking back on my college days, I remember people in second year classes that still didn't get a handle on zero-base counting.
Going down the list of your things, while there are Java versions of many of these things... Java is only actually used for the first two. Java for mobile devices, and Java for web apps. A few others things you listed often include a web app as part of the solution.
web apps = yes mobile devices = yes databases = C/C++ office apps = C/C++ chat = C/C++ crm = C/C++ image processing = C/C++ GIS = C/C++ (Java webapp frontends) embedded apps = C/C++/Assembler real time ANYTHING = Assembler/C/C++ security = C math = C/C++/Assembler/MATLAB/Fortran banking = C/C++/COBOL/others stocks = C/C++ compiler = C/C++/Assembler interpreters = C/C++
I'd also like to point out there there are orders of magnitude more people that have downloaded C/C++ compilers. I've personally downloaded the JDK around 100 times for my own use over the many releases that have happened. I don't tend to do anything in Java if I have a choice in the matter. I've never been in a situation where it was the right choice.
Also, you might want to look up the word "generally".
I actually never considered C/C++ to be outside of portablility. If you have a consistent API (for example, a JRE) and properly written code (like Java), then you simply convert the code into native instructions from an intermediate step (like bytecode).
Thinking of it that way, it's fairly easy to write highly portable C/C++ code.
Java is only useful for web apps because you load the JRE once, when you load the web server. If you had to load it for each connection, this would be a pretty terrible choice of languages.
Except that wouldn't be true. The vast majority of the software industry is end user applications. The closest end users typically get to web apps is online banking and webmail. Many users don't use either of those.
By corollary this would mean that the vast majority of applications are written in C/C++, sometimes in VB.
Web apps are an extremely specific thing. An application written to run as an extension to a web server platform. The only other two circumstances that I can come up with remotely similar are server software and OS'.
In that situation, then fine, I really wouldn't care what you use regardless.:) That's an app you had developed for your own corporate use. You're spec'ing and running the machines. You need to push things out the door fast, fully functional, and debugged. Use the best tool for the job, which happens to be some kind of managed code in your case.
For general use applications, that approach doesn't cut it. You don't have control over any of the factors, hardware or software. You have no idea what is going to be done with it. You have a longer development cycle and you need to end up with faster and tighter code since people don't want to wait for an application load or a GUI redraw.
Completely different situations. If you're running the code as a web application or other client/server type setup, then you don't have to worry about load time or GUI speed or similar.
(I'm just picking a few factors here; there are certainly a heck of a lot of other ones.)
Oh yes, prefixing the length seems really smart. Then somebody improperly prefixes and things start going to hell. You also have to worry more about converting endianness, char widths, etc. What if there was a transmission error? What will your program do if I say a string will be 1000 chars long, and then only send you 50? By the time you finish with all the checking, you would've been better off not trying to rely on precalculated string lengths at all. Also, how much additional data do you end up using if you start sending everything in multibyte chars and such?
If you didn't generate the data, then you don't trust the data. Hell, even if you did generate the data, you might not want to trust it.
If you want to have Pascal strings, then just calculate the length and hold onto it yourself. Then after the first time, you don't take the performance hit. There are very good libraries that do all this if you don't want to write your own code library.
You ended up epitomising exactly what the GP was talking about with new programmers.
Most programs today are bloated to hell and incredibly slow. There are many reasons for this, but the abstract language bloat doesn't help at all. Perhaps they shouldn't be written in Java or Python or whatnot so that they could run at a reasonable speed. And no, all the people that will chime about how Java isn't slow, you're simply wrong. You're making it up and anyone that isn't you could prove you wrong. All it takes is starting a Java program.
Most program today *should* be written in C/C++. Those programs simply work better, run faster, and consume less resources. They aren't as dependent on outside code as Java/etc programs are. They have the ability to do GUIs faster than ice crawl in an ice age. They also don't make the computer completely stop while the JRE starts.
There's also huge amounts of things you simply can't do in any of todays toy languages, because they won't let you. You can't do drivers, windowing and GUI, often low-level networking, high-speed I/O (memory or storage), etc. You can do the parts of those things that the current VM provider decided you should be able to do. You can't make it on your own without, gasp, going back to C/C++.
This Joel guy talks about all these string and interation problems in C. That's fine and good, but Java has *ALL* those problems at least twice. It was written in C++ and not assembler, and it uses C operations. He makes his own argument about why we should all be using C/C++, and then says we shouldn't be! He does, however, explain well why you shouldn't store databases in XML formats.
If a competent programmer writes in C, then code is easily maintained and fast. If an incompetent programmer writes in Java or Python, it's still just a pile of junk code. Very goods odds are that the Java/etc programmer doesn't know anything about theory, doesn't know enough math to properly optimize algorithms, and doesn't know how the computer works. Add these together and it comes down to Java/etc lets you program without knowing how to program. This is very obvious with a C program, just by looking at the code and performance profile.
Rather than teaching people the language of the day, perhaps teaching them CompSci first would be a good idea? Or have we forgotten all the essential languages of the last six years? Python, PERL, ASP, VB,.NET/C#, Java, and on and on.
Yes, it is De Beers. They're also guilty of a great many other crimes. They couldn't even directly sell diamonds in the US until last year. For various periods of time their executives would've been arrested the moment they tried to enter the US.
One of the things that gets me really annoying about the braindead user design is basically cosmetic. MS handles desktop/start menu icons in such a stupid way.
Things like Outlook that put magic icons on desktops that the user can't delete and don't exist in "All Users". You have to actually log in as admin and delete the icon off the desktop. Then it disappears from user desktops. It's not in the profiles at all.
Then if they do use "All Users", the user can't move or delete the icons. Of course, you can use "Default User", but that only puts icons on for new accounts. So what to do if the user doesn't want all these icons?
There's so much randomness about how the network profile vs. local profile vs. local machine settings work together. Nothing is consistent at all.
As for permissions, it's not just random DLLs getting copied, or log files in privledged directories. It's also things like messing around in privledges parts of the registry or checking for things based on some arbitrary thing instead of verifying with API calls. (Example: checking Windows version, badly. (ver=4) rather than (ver>=4), or ((ver>=4)&&(type!=server)))
You could do equally annoying/stupid things, like storing the path to a profile as part of the profile. Imagine you have the profile on C: on one system, and D: on another, and you're using roaming profiles. Then, for some reason, Mozilla doesn't work on half your machines.
I'm sure you can extend these things to much greater hights of annoyance.
You forget most of the big things. Firing people to cover for her incompetence. The merger with Compaq being such a foolish decision. Outsourcing and firing thousands of people. Throwing HP money at personal amusements. Selling of parts of the company to the tune of billions in losses. She was yet another CEO talking about "innovation" while eliminating anything slightly resembling it and anyone who might be able to supply it.
HP has gotten out of all the markets they were good at, except for printers. Not exactly like that will keep them afloat. There was the elination of much of the scientific computing, PA-RISC, calculators, and all of their instrumentation products.
She had no idea how to do her job and you only have to look at the position she put HP in to see it. People used to consider the company to be made of solid rock. Now they wouldn't buy anything they make.
This is not including the burning hatred so many people have for her politics and personal leanings.
Nope, it doesn't. Look at any documentation at all for it. It will block some types of outgoing ICMP, but it monitors absolutely no outgoing TCP/UDP connections. It is limited to the blocking of incoming connection *only*.
Right from the Microsoft TechNet docs: "With the exception of some Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) messages, Windows Firewall allows all outgoing traffic."
You make a good example for why Windows users need better computer education, though.;-P
It only blocks incoming connections. There's no way to block outgoing connections with Windows Firewall. Other than that, it's very inflexible and doesn't offer any of the nicer advanced features that other products offer. It has no way to scan incoming email or www for viruses and other nastiness.
It OK for something built in, but there is still strong justification for third party solutions. It generally serves the purpose of stopping stuff from compromising you from the network while you are setting up something for real. It *is* very easy to configure, though.
The complaints you have about the NIS and such are perfectly valid. I've had many people use Kerio without trouble, and most ZA users are ok. NIS messes up all the time, though. We've been saying for around ten years that NIS was crap.;-)
Overall, running a software firewall on your workstation isn't going to stop too much. If you end up running anything nasty, it can just modify your firewall config.
The real problem is that most computer owners know nothing about their machines, their network, or the Internet. This leads to huge number of problems. Education would work far better than stop-gaps like Windows Firewall.
The Feds can also step in and force striking labor to go back to work if they deem it a threat to national infrastructure. I bet Michigan has similar laws in place.
If you work for a public school, you work for the government. You really shouldn't be surprised that such rules are in place in that circumstance.
I have little love for teachers unions, but a strike should always be an option in the worst case scenario.
This is a very common thing for the Federal to do. They pull this on the states, and the states pass it along to local governments. You don't want to follow some expensive Federal mandate? Fine, you lose all grants and other funding.
When the Federal forced the speed limit to 55mph, they didn't do it by passing a law. The basically said that the state in question would lose all highway funding should they not lower the speed limit. The same was true for drinking ages and many other things.
If the airlines didn't follow what the Federal asked for, they would not only lose the business from Federal employees, but they would funding, certain access, and a lot of fringe things. It becomes harder to operate at various airports, and many other things.
Worse yet, the Fed could just force you to turn over that data anyway. It was a better business decision for them to turn it over when asked than bearing all the consequences of making the Feds get a court order.
I get the impression that you were trying to be funny... but what did these people actually ever do that was so bad? It's a joke to you, but quite a few people have been killed and arrested for being those people in Montana and similar.
Go read up some primary source material and you probably won't think it's funny.
Just as an example: owning a gun used to be a common and normal thing. Now many people get scared of you just because you have one. It's something that many gun owners won't mention because it makes people uneasy just knowing that you have one.
I agree that as a private company, Disney isn't doing anything illegal, though I'd say it is not the most ethical of things. I won't patronize their parks because of it, and I wouldn't spend my money anywhere else that requires such things. To me, the problem is that I'm in enough of a minority that these companies can pull such things off.
As far as the police state goes, just because you don't always get prosecuted doesn't mean that you can't be. There are many laws that are in force that amount to the government being *able* to run a police state. They aren't applying them across the board, but that doesn't really make it much better. I'd like to think that if the government enforced all the laws to the fullest extent that the populace would force change, but given recent events... I'm not so sure.
No, you don't license anything to use GPS. GPS is a clear transmitted signal from a large number of satellites in a known constellation. You listen for the signal, do the calculations, and end up with your position.
You don't even need specialized hardware to do this. I've seen it done with an antenna, a radio, and a 486 running a pile of custom assembly code.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, either would fit your need. The ham kit would very likely work from further away. Cell phones are not ham radios, though. Just because we have one doesn't mean we shouldn't also have the other.
Basically, it plain doesn't matter that *you* don't think it's useful. Most ham operators would disagree with you, and they're the ones that matter. The DoD would also likely disagree with you, all things considered. There's a reason the Army doesn't use cell phones and blackberries, just as there's a reason the helicopter that you mention doesn't do that either.
Also, I've never been somewhere that a ham radio won't work. I'm in places every single day that a cellular phone doesn't work. Cellular isn't comparible to ham radio; they don't do the same things.
So have your cell phone and be happy. And the GP can have his ham radio and be happy. There is *NO* reason we can't continue having both.
Of course, an amateur could build a ham radio from discrete pieces, but certainly not a Blackberry. You also don't need to pay a monthly fee to signal code with amateur radio. Your solution fails on both of those whereas the current solution does not.
While it's possible, and has been done for many years, there is still reason to do Morse code. You propose a technological solution to a non-existent problem. These solutions never work out well...
Part of what makes code useful is that you don't need *anything* aside from your radio to make it work. You can be heard much further away than what voice communications would be possible for. You are still audible over substantial interference. The situations where manual code are most useful are also situations where you *wouldn't* very likely have something like a PDA.
That's an easy one. Radio doesn't require any infrastructure or fees. Also, much of the world, and a good amount of the US, do not have Internet. You could've asked "Why bother, since we have telephones and cellular phones?". The answer would be the same.
If an unfortunate router goes out, parts of the internet go away. If you have a widespread failure (for example, a natural disaster or crippling attack), then you can't trust the infrastructure; it probably doesn't work at all. During the Sept. 11 attacks, and for a while after, telephone and cellular network were unusable. The HAM radio people are what kept communications alive. This was a similar case during that power blackout that covered most of the NorthEast.
It's also a lot of fun to do just as a hobby.
What's the point of broadcast TV or radio, since we have cable? Why bother with regular telephone service, we have VoIP and the internet?
I've been told that they rigged the roads so they can blow mines and cause avalanches. I don't have good authority on that, but it makes sense to me. You would have to invade either over trecherous terrain or by air. That means you can bomb, but to hold the land, you would have to manage group forces somehow. That sounds like a losing proposition to me.
They maintain their sovereignity through the threat of force and retaliation. They have more active military personnel than any other country. I believe it's every male between 18 and 45 that is armed and trained. You're required to do service as part of your citizenship.
;-)
Also, they have much of the world's money.
Sounds like it makes him very relevant to anyone making search tech. This would be a specialised field which he was highly skilled in. You've decided that since he was successful at bringing a product to market in a given market segment, that he shouldn't be allowed to do what he knows at another company. This is ridiculous to the extreme.
What does MS think he's going to give Google? Perhaps that MS is going to release a desktop search system? Oh wait, they *already* released that and the other things he was working on. They said so in their press release.
I suppose CEOs should never be allowed to run a company in the same market, either?
So what if he does know things inconvenient to MS. As far as I'm concerned, if you can't compete in the market because you have a competitor, then good riddance. I've been hoping for there to be legal precedent or new law that makes non-compete clauses illegal. It's pretty much impossible to get a job without one of these trite pieces of lunacy.
It might be "unethical" to break contract, but I really can't find myself able to care when the contract is one like these are. However, I have worked two jobs that were computer related that did not try to force one of these thing on me. They consist of: a university and a municipal government.
For an anecdote, I worked for one staffing agency that staffed people into IBM. They wanted me to sign a non-compete that I wouldn't work for the company contracted into, or any competitors, for one year after leaving their employ. Due to their wording, had I signed that, I wouldn't have been able to work for another computer hardware/software/services company or another tech staffing company without their consent. Of course, if I had signed it, I also would've completely ignored it.
MS is one of those companies that I actively try to work against. I do everything that I can to remove their products everywhere I can. It is inconvenient as hell, but I don't want to be responsible for them getting any money at all. Too bad most people are all talk when it comes to these sorts of things. Companies would be listening a lot more if people would actually *do* something.
I've always thought you should use the language that best embodies what you're trying to teach. This would include assembler, C, Java, LISP, or whatever else. The language isn't important.
;-)
Then again, I don't think you should actually be programming in your first year of a CS major. Silly me and my thinking that CS was applied math.
Unfortunately most colleges don't offer CS=CompSci anymore; they offer CS=SoftEng. If they want to get into heavily used languages later on, then that's perfectly reasonable. But this way you don't end up with Java programmers or C programmers, you end up with CompSci people that can program in whatever language that is needed and write decent algorithms.
Of course, thinking back on my college days, I remember people in second year classes that still didn't get a handle on zero-base counting.
Going down the list of your things, while there are Java versions of many of these things... Java is only actually used for the first two. Java for mobile devices, and Java for web apps. A few others things you listed often include a web app as part of the solution.
web apps = yes
mobile devices = yes
databases = C/C++
office apps = C/C++
chat = C/C++
crm = C/C++
image processing = C/C++
GIS = C/C++ (Java webapp frontends)
embedded apps = C/C++/Assembler
real time ANYTHING = Assembler/C/C++
security = C
math = C/C++/Assembler/MATLAB/Fortran
banking = C/C++/COBOL/others
stocks = C/C++
compiler = C/C++/Assembler
interpreters = C/C++
I'd also like to point out there there are orders of magnitude more people that have downloaded C/C++ compilers. I've personally downloaded the JDK around 100 times for my own use over the many releases that have happened. I don't tend to do anything in Java if I have a choice in the matter. I've never been in a situation where it was the right choice.
Also, you might want to look up the word "generally".
You're better off describing C++ an object oriented language that happens to be compatible with C source. That's closer to reality.
You're definitely right that Java is useful in the real world... it's just not appropriate for end user applications.
People should be thinking "The right tool for the job" instead of "The tool I like for every job".
I actually never considered C/C++ to be outside of portablility. If you have a consistent API (for example, a JRE) and properly written code (like Java), then you simply convert the code into native instructions from an intermediate step (like bytecode).
Thinking of it that way, it's fairly easy to write highly portable C/C++ code.
Java is only useful for web apps because you load the JRE once, when you load the web server. If you had to load it for each connection, this would be a pretty terrible choice of languages.
Except that wouldn't be true. The vast majority of the software industry is end user applications. The closest end users typically get to web apps is online banking and webmail. Many users don't use either of those.
By corollary this would mean that the vast majority of applications are written in C/C++, sometimes in VB.
Web apps are an extremely specific thing. An application written to run as an extension to a web server platform. The only other two circumstances that I can come up with remotely similar are server software and OS'.
In that situation, then fine, I really wouldn't care what you use regardless. :) That's an app you had developed for your own corporate use. You're spec'ing and running the machines. You need to push things out the door fast, fully functional, and debugged. Use the best tool for the job, which happens to be some kind of managed code in your case.
For general use applications, that approach doesn't cut it. You don't have control over any of the factors, hardware or software. You have no idea what is going to be done with it. You have a longer development cycle and you need to end up with faster and tighter code since people don't want to wait for an application load or a GUI redraw.
Completely different situations. If you're running the code as a web application or other client/server type setup, then you don't have to worry about load time or GUI speed or similar.
(I'm just picking a few factors here; there are certainly a heck of a lot of other ones.)
Oh yes, prefixing the length seems really smart. Then somebody improperly prefixes and things start going to hell. You also have to worry more about converting endianness, char widths, etc. What if there was a transmission error? What will your program do if I say a string will be 1000 chars long, and then only send you 50? By the time you finish with all the checking, you would've been better off not trying to rely on precalculated string lengths at all. Also, how much additional data do you end up using if you start sending everything in multibyte chars and such?
If you didn't generate the data, then you don't trust the data. Hell, even if you did generate the data, you might not want to trust it.
If you want to have Pascal strings, then just calculate the length and hold onto it yourself. Then after the first time, you don't take the performance hit. There are very good libraries that do all this if you don't want to write your own code library.
You ended up epitomising exactly what the GP was talking about with new programmers.
Most programs today are bloated to hell and incredibly slow. There are many reasons for this, but the abstract language bloat doesn't help at all. Perhaps they shouldn't be written in Java or Python or whatnot so that they could run at a reasonable speed. And no, all the people that will chime about how Java isn't slow, you're simply wrong. You're making it up and anyone that isn't you could prove you wrong. All it takes is starting a Java program.
.NET/C#, Java, and on and on.
Most program today *should* be written in C/C++. Those programs simply work better, run faster, and consume less resources. They aren't as dependent on outside code as Java/etc programs are. They have the ability to do GUIs faster than ice crawl in an ice age. They also don't make the computer completely stop while the JRE starts.
There's also huge amounts of things you simply can't do in any of todays toy languages, because they won't let you. You can't do drivers, windowing and GUI, often low-level networking, high-speed I/O (memory or storage), etc. You can do the parts of those things that the current VM provider decided you should be able to do. You can't make it on your own without, gasp, going back to C/C++.
This Joel guy talks about all these string and interation problems in C. That's fine and good, but Java has *ALL* those problems at least twice. It was written in C++ and not assembler, and it uses C operations. He makes his own argument about why we should all be using C/C++, and then says we shouldn't be! He does, however, explain well why you shouldn't store databases in XML formats.
If a competent programmer writes in C, then code is easily maintained and fast. If an incompetent programmer writes in Java or Python, it's still just a pile of junk code. Very goods odds are that the Java/etc programmer doesn't know anything about theory, doesn't know enough math to properly optimize algorithms, and doesn't know how the computer works. Add these together and it comes down to Java/etc lets you program without knowing how to program. This is very obvious with a C program, just by looking at the code and performance profile.
Rather than teaching people the language of the day, perhaps teaching them CompSci first would be a good idea? Or have we forgotten all the essential languages of the last six years? Python, PERL, ASP, VB,
The Robert Read essay looks pretty good, though.
Yes, it is De Beers. They're also guilty of a great many other crimes. They couldn't even directly sell diamonds in the US until last year. For various periods of time their executives would've been arrested the moment they tried to enter the US.
One of the things that gets me really annoying about the braindead user design is basically cosmetic. MS handles desktop/start menu icons in such a stupid way.
Things like Outlook that put magic icons on desktops that the user can't delete and don't exist in "All Users". You have to actually log in as admin and delete the icon off the desktop. Then it disappears from user desktops. It's not in the profiles at all.
Then if they do use "All Users", the user can't move or delete the icons. Of course, you can use "Default User", but that only puts icons on for new accounts. So what to do if the user doesn't want all these icons?
There's so much randomness about how the network profile vs. local profile vs. local machine settings work together. Nothing is consistent at all.
As for permissions, it's not just random DLLs getting copied, or log files in privledged directories. It's also things like messing around in privledges parts of the registry or checking for things based on some arbitrary thing instead of verifying with API calls. (Example: checking Windows version, badly. (ver=4) rather than (ver>=4), or ((ver>=4)&&(type!=server)))
You could do equally annoying/stupid things, like storing the path to a profile as part of the profile. Imagine you have the profile on C: on one system, and D: on another, and you're using roaming profiles. Then, for some reason, Mozilla doesn't work on half your machines.
I'm sure you can extend these things to much greater hights of annoyance.
You forget most of the big things. Firing people to cover for her incompetence. The merger with Compaq being such a foolish decision. Outsourcing and firing thousands of people. Throwing HP money at personal amusements. Selling of parts of the company to the tune of billions in losses. She was yet another CEO talking about "innovation" while eliminating anything slightly resembling it and anyone who might be able to supply it.
HP has gotten out of all the markets they were good at, except for printers. Not exactly like that will keep them afloat. There was the elination of much of the scientific computing, PA-RISC, calculators, and all of their instrumentation products.
She had no idea how to do her job and you only have to look at the position she put HP in to see it. People used to consider the company to be made of solid rock. Now they wouldn't buy anything they make.
This is not including the burning hatred so many people have for her politics and personal leanings.
Nope, it doesn't. Look at any documentation at all for it. It will block some types of outgoing ICMP, but it monitors absolutely no outgoing TCP/UDP connections. It is limited to the blocking of incoming connection *only*.
;-P
Right from the Microsoft TechNet docs: "With the exception of some Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) messages, Windows Firewall allows all outgoing traffic."
You make a good example for why Windows users need better computer education, though.
It only blocks incoming connections. There's no way to block outgoing connections with Windows Firewall. Other than that, it's very inflexible and doesn't offer any of the nicer advanced features that other products offer. It has no way to scan incoming email or www for viruses and other nastiness.
;-)
It OK for something built in, but there is still strong justification for third party solutions. It generally serves the purpose of stopping stuff from compromising you from the network while you are setting up something for real. It *is* very easy to configure, though.
The complaints you have about the NIS and such are perfectly valid. I've had many people use Kerio without trouble, and most ZA users are ok. NIS messes up all the time, though. We've been saying for around ten years that NIS was crap.
Overall, running a software firewall on your workstation isn't going to stop too much. If you end up running anything nasty, it can just modify your firewall config.
The real problem is that most computer owners know nothing about their machines, their network, or the Internet. This leads to huge number of problems. Education would work far better than stop-gaps like Windows Firewall.
The Feds can also step in and force striking labor to go back to work if they deem it a threat to national infrastructure. I bet Michigan has similar laws in place.
If you work for a public school, you work for the government. You really shouldn't be surprised that such rules are in place in that circumstance.
I have little love for teachers unions, but a strike should always be an option in the worst case scenario.
This is a very common thing for the Federal to do. They pull this on the states, and the states pass it along to local governments. You don't want to follow some expensive Federal mandate? Fine, you lose all grants and other funding.
When the Federal forced the speed limit to 55mph, they didn't do it by passing a law. The basically said that the state in question would lose all highway funding should they not lower the speed limit. The same was true for drinking ages and many other things.
If the airlines didn't follow what the Federal asked for, they would not only lose the business from Federal employees, but they would funding, certain access, and a lot of fringe things. It becomes harder to operate at various airports, and many other things.
Worse yet, the Fed could just force you to turn over that data anyway. It was a better business decision for them to turn it over when asked than bearing all the consequences of making the Feds get a court order.
I get the impression that you were trying to be funny... but what did these people actually ever do that was so bad? It's a joke to you, but quite a few people have been killed and arrested for being those people in Montana and similar.
Go read up some primary source material and you probably won't think it's funny.
Just as an example: owning a gun used to be a common and normal thing. Now many people get scared of you just because you have one. It's something that many gun owners won't mention because it makes people uneasy just knowing that you have one.
I agree that as a private company, Disney isn't doing anything illegal, though I'd say it is not the most ethical of things. I won't patronize their parks because of it, and I wouldn't spend my money anywhere else that requires such things. To me, the problem is that I'm in enough of a minority that these companies can pull such things off.
As far as the police state goes, just because you don't always get prosecuted doesn't mean that you can't be. There are many laws that are in force that amount to the government being *able* to run a police state. They aren't applying them across the board, but that doesn't really make it much better. I'd like to think that if the government enforced all the laws to the fullest extent that the populace would force change, but given recent events... I'm not so sure.
No, you don't license anything to use GPS. GPS is a clear transmitted signal from a large number of satellites in a known constellation. You listen for the signal, do the calculations, and end up with your position.
You don't even need specialized hardware to do this. I've seen it done with an antenna, a radio, and a 486 running a pile of custom assembly code.