Nah, the proper reaction is to get more articles steering people to better products like Mozilla and Opera. My dad found and installed Mozilla on his own and, from the sounds of it, won't even look at MSIE again.
Too few articles mention all three and articles mostly fall into one of two categories: Usually the articles praise Mozilla and Opera for features, usability, flexibility, support of standards, stability, security and multi-plaform support. Or they go on about the problems specific to MSIE, while implying that MSIE is the alpha and omega of web browsers, and finish by giving the bad advice to sit still and obediently wait to buy the next upgrade, service pack, bug fix for MSIE. At the same time, users and administrators tied to MSIE are prevented from learning unresolved problems. There are also further costs if company data, such as customer lists, are compromised as a result.
Clearly censorship is not the optimal long term nor even short term solution. IT staff can save time and money now by migrating their users to Mozilla and Opera.
Usenet is currently the most significant "born digital" internation collection of documents. No I don't mean all those binary groups, but the ones that are conveniently already in ASCII, ISO-8859-*, or Unicode. Amidst the noise, there is a lot of knowledge there.
A significant amount of early Internet history is there as well: Stuff you don't/won't see in AOL or MSN and stuff you certainly won't see in newspapers or books anymore because it doesn't validate today's corporate dogma.
The Usenet archives need to find some independent mirrors before Google gets torn to shreds and its remains sold of to appease shareholder pressure. It's not hard to imaging the new group of MBA overlords deciding that maintenance of the archive is not profitable enough to warrant the active effort it takes to keep it from entropy.
The best thing Oracle could do if the acquisition is successful would be to close down PeopleSoft as a project. That would save millions for its users in development fees and free up staff (i.e. secretary) time to do other work. All of the end users that I have contact with at my alma mater have had anything but a good experience with it in regards to usefulness, ease of use, and effectiveness. So far my alma mater has pumped many millions over many years into trying to get it off the ground. That university has done many things right, but occasionaly you get a mistake like PeopleSoft or trying to cover up overbilling the government for computing services and firing the whistleblower.
I just haven't had time to fuck around getting it to work...
My sentiments exactly. That's why I gave Windows the heave. I've been using Linux and Solaris at work for 6 and 9 years respectively and RedHat Linux at home for 2 years. With all the trouble I had getting modems and other devices to work under Windows, I wish I had switched years earlier. Too bad RedHat is throwing away the brand.
The truth of the matter is a well designed OS shouldn't even be noticable, it should just work behind the scenes and let you do what you need to do.
Releasing only a fraction of what they could just makes it that much easier and cheaper for one person/group/entity to become a major shareholder. Maybe going fully public would be out of some key company's price class.
System Requirements
PC only, Windows XP/2000, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 or higher, Windows Media Player 7.1 or higher, Internet connectivity
It's not worth it to go out and buy and maintain a Windows machine just for this. The cost (0.99 USD per song, subject to change at any time. See EULA.) is about the same as a CD, but you lost pretty much all the advantages of having control of the physical medium.
If there were something for OS X (beyond iTunes) or for GNU + Linux then this would be news. It looks to me like just another drive to get the gullible to install DRM.
I'd look for parallels with the attacks against Quicken. The borg has encountered this kind of resistance before. Going IPO would allow hostile take over and reduce the ability to resist. Not such a clever idea unless they really are interested in throwing in the towel.
...for example, in smithing, you WILL break the item, or create something entirely useless on your first, oh, 20 tries. While 20 may not seem like much, when the process takes maybe 5 minutes each time, and costs you (fake) money every time, it gets very annoying quickly. On the other hand, if I had figured out what was going wrong on the 3rd try...
Something in the game needs to facilitate apprenticeship since most geeks will not think of it on their own. Their online persona if the intelligence is high enough, after the first few failures, the thought should occur "I oughta seek out the blacksmith and be his student". From real life experience, you can often learn as much in two days or weeks from an experienced master as you would on your own in many months or even a few years depending on the activity.
[rkabir] supposedly the US growth is around 7% of GDB
[wheriswaldo] Interesting, because my company just had its ass kicked in Q3. How do you explain that?
Cutting the exchange rate for the dollar would give the illusion of growth, at least in regards to foreign trade, without actually changing the bad situation. A lot of wasted money could be spent on growth by dropping low-availability, high-maintenance servers (MS). If MS-Virus and every other MSTD costs truly does cost billions, then such a poorly implemented and designed platform is just a hinderance to true economic recovery, not just a "jobless recovery"
Yes, but that would be a good thing for MS if they are trying to get rid of those embarassing Usenet archives. even now, a lot of newbies never learn about Usenet. Blocking them altogether will even hide those old discussions about anti-competitive behaviour or history of abyssmal security problems.
Since when will a firewall help against trojan horses, ms-outlook viruses, ms-office viruses or worms that attach generally accessible ports? Code Red was one of many that hit a port you need open.
Yes, security must be layered, but the "Crunchy on the outside" / "soft on the inside" model advocated by His Billness does nothing to help. All this barking about firewalls sounds like more trying to distract from the real problems which for the technical side of MS-Windows center on fundamental design flaws. On the financial side, fines, penalties, cancelled/delayed products, cancelled services and shrinking markets are becoming mainstrean knowledge.
In junior high school I wrote a paper on the bombing of Nagasaki. Moral issues aside, no one really knew at the tme what radiation did to people in regards to harm and suffering. Remember that many worked then with or even carried around strong radio isotopes.
I have not seen any moral justification for the dropping of a second bomb on Nagasaki even after the effects of the first bomb had been amply demonstrated at Hiroshima. The desire to test a plutonium bomb (the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium device) may have been the motivation.
To over simplify it, it was not certain that either bomb would work and the second one was needed to show that it could be done twice.
The A-bomb was such experimental technology that it was very uncertain that either model would even detonate, thus one of the reasons to do the missions in secret rather than announcing a demo out in the harbor. The second bomb was used to show that the U.S. had the resources/luck/skill to pull off a second detonation. It was of a completely different design and if the first one failed to work, maybe this one would.
Again, at the time, there was no knowledge of what would actually happen, especially in regards to after effects due to radiation exposure. Additionally, mass destruction of urban areas was standard practice at the time. See examples from various fire bombings in Europe.
In hind sight, we now know how nasty radiation poisoning is, but that was not known then. A lot was not known then, carcinogens and mutagens/hormone mimics like asbestos and DDT were considered OK. Even wrist watches and alarm clocks had radium lighted dials.
Given the current state of MS-products and the fact that Longhorn is 3 years away if at all, MS products are pretty much ruled out by the specifications set in eEurope 2005.
eEurope 2005 hits hard by not only requiring a secure infrastructure by 2005 (automatically ruling out the current line of MS tools), but also by ensure that there is competition and interoperability. The latter, interoperability, requires use of open standards, some thing which Microsoft could do but has consistently chosen to corrupt or pervert. See its treatment of HTTP, LDAP or Kerberos for three of many examples. In the former, MS is the subject of numerous anti-trust, anti-competition and anti-freemarket cases.
Of course on a less serious note, the UK could get out of this one by secedng from the EU and joining the U.S. That woud have the side benefit of Tony Bliar becoming a natural born U.S. citizen and thus eligable to replace Bush.
If purchase price comes into play then, OS X is neck and neck with Wintel. The myth that Apple is more expensive has long since been put to rest. If ease of use, ease of maintenance and stability are an issue, then it's a winner by a mile.
Then there's Linux/BSD/QNX + GNU. All of which have Wintel clobbered for ease of maintenance (including stability and security) and at least tied for ease of use.
More interestingly, cities like Turku and Munich got large discounts for even mentioning that they were considering investigating Linux. The mention that Microsoft cannot give discounts anymore implies that they've run out of money to do so. Shrinking revenues as well as accumulated fines and penalties could easily account for this, even when cancelled products and services are acconuted for.
When was the last controlled burn and how many of the houses followed fire code?
I have to appreciate Australian fire management: toss your cig into the brush and if it burns it was ready to.
Like it or not fire is a part of the ecology there in California, too, and the longer you let it go between burns, the worse it will be. Oily bark, twigs and seeds accumulate and would normally burn away at intervals preventing build up to dangerous levels.
Fire code is too important to neglect, even for style. If your house has grass up to the wall and nice juniper bushes against the wall and wood shingles, it's going up in flames if even a small brush fire passes through the neighborhood. It's a shame that "developers" are not held accountable for the houses they build.
Tankers woulnd't have done any good with the wind and amount of flammable material. Nice distraction from the economy though.
Yes, I'm ignorant. What does exchange offer that other MTAs, such as sendmail or postfix, don't?
Lost mail, erroneous error messages, and 100% dependance on Windows severs.
If you only send/receive e-mail to other users on the same MS-exchange server and 100% of your client workstations run the same version of MS-Windows, then it might be usable, especially if it is not connected to the Internet. Otherwise, stick with a traditional MTA like Sendmail, which is highly configurable, or postfix, qmail or exim which are simpler and more focused on security. Sendmail, postfix, exim and qmail have proven track records for reliability.
That strategy is backed up by what Microsoft chief security officer Stuart Okin said recently, "We have developed a relationship with security researchers to avoid public disclosure of security holes."
It is also backed up with the way they fought against full-disclosure and bundling patches / advisories several years ago. A year later, the bundled patches were spun as a reduced number of vulnerabilities/advisories.
Everyone except the average stockholder knows it's over for Microsoft, especially as it's customers are figuring out that, despite bleatings from the marketing teams, Windows is not ready for the Internet. The bad reputation they've worked so hard to earn in the tech community is now starting to spread to the general public.
For right now you weigh the pros and cons of doing an upgrade. That decision becomes less yours the longer you stick with Windows.
Even though you're sticking with Windows 2000, which is what many Windows users are planning to do, you threw away your options on refusing DRM when you installed SP3. Windows 2000 SP3 gives MS admin rights to your box, which has been suggested as a means to force upgrades even if it means breaking your existing applications. MS has worked hard and long enough to earn its shoddy reputation that I don't doubt that if it stays in business, it will eventually force DRM once Palladium (aka NGSCB/BIOS/LaGrande/Office2003) reaches critical market saturation.
Though as a business you have more flexibility as there is less obligation to keep records accessible to the public than would a government agency or service. Plus if vendor lock-in and unreasonable IT costs tip your business over the edge into bankruptcy, no one except you would notice. Every one else just sees a failed company.
I think this is a continuation of the attempt to squelch technical discussion especially regarding (embarrassing) security issues, and in particular agains full-disclosure. Microsoft would like to move to releasing patches once a month rather than once a week on wednesdays and a prerequisite for that is keeping the public out of the loop. In order to stay in business, MS must hinder customers from figuring out that Windows is not ready for the Internet, and won't be for years.
As Schneier predicted, for Microsoft, the threat is bad publicity, and they are going to produce a security system that deals with the threat. Without some kind of disclosure, sysadmins cannot take stop gap measures to secure their systems.
This is just another instance of rather than working on securing its products to a level needed for the Internet, the issue is being handled as a PR problem.
What about due diligence with personal information in digital form? Just as people "shouldn't" go dumpster diving for personal data, they "shouldn't" be rooting file servers. But unlike the choice you have to shred papers before pitching them, you have no choice about the software and OS used by any given business that you must deal with.
What then of your personal data? Would you still say with your best NYC accent that the victim got what they deserved for giving personal data to a business that willfully and knowingly used insecure technology
which cannot be improved for years to come? Especially when more secure options are known and well-documented?
However, there are lots of pages, including banking sites, that refuse to load properly or let you continue
I've heard of that problem, but have not run into it myself for a few years. But it can be easy to solve if there is comptetition:
Vote with your feet or wallet, which is what I did. I had a bank try that and I walked across the street and got better interest rates and lower / fewer service fees plus web access.
You gotta wonder about how secure the MSIE-only sites are anyway. I investigated getting a loan from a third bank, which turned out to be in on the Windows/MSIE MLM scheme, and left a clean e-mail address. Within days that address was getting spam with subjects like "Home Loans" or "Prospective Buyer"
Having pre-installed MSIE onto machines is the only reason it got market share. Unlike five years ago, there are now several very good browsers. If people actually had to choose and install / order a web browser the large majority would go with mozilla or opera
In part of 1995 and 1996 it was so bad that our site had to put a warning for AOL. It was something to the effect of "You have reached the World Wide Web. This is not AOL nor are any pages you see from now onward."
The $40 bn alleged to be on the books is a drop in the bucket (about 2 percent) of a $2.34 trn fine. Most likely it is Enron-style funny money, seeing as that company actually ran an $18 bn loss in 1998 and their only two profitable sectors are both losing market share and coming down in price. Lawsuits and penalties for false advertising, inexcusably poor security, and anti-trust actions are starting to accumulate. It was to computing what big tobacco was to sports.
Besides, it was announced months ago that standalone MSIE is dead and there will be no further versions.
) You're right that you can't delete tickets out of RT, but I don't understand why you'd want to. Just because an issue is dead, does't mean that all records of it should be purged from the database. "killed" is just another status, like open, stalled and resolved and just shows that this issue no longer requires action.
Nor can I think of why it would be a good idea to delete them unless policy dictates that such information be purged. Most of the worksites where I've used a tracker have needed to keep closed tickets around. However, there is no need for the closed tickets to clutter up active tables. One solution would be to move the closed ones to one of several archival tables or databases.
First, there will be a further clamp down on what is convered in the media and how it is spun:
"To Microsoft, the threat is bad publicity, and they are going to produce a security system that deals with the threat," he said. [Schneier] said.
Realize also that Microsoft in all likelihood is going to try to make the option DRM patch mandatory, if for no other reason than to lock out competitors. ""Windows 2003 may be secure, but the level of security it provides could break backwards compatibility."
The last thing MS wants is for people to go over to the new version of OpenOffice.org or to avoid the hidden payloads in WMP9 by using Ogg. Office2003 and WMP9 are essential vectors in getting the "optional" DRM patch into Windows machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Too few articles mention all three and articles mostly fall into one of two categories: Usually the articles praise Mozilla and Opera for features, usability, flexibility, support of standards, stability, security and multi-plaform support. Or they go on about the problems specific to MSIE, while implying that MSIE is the alpha and omega of web browsers, and finish by giving the bad advice to sit still and obediently wait to buy the next upgrade, service pack, bug fix for MSIE. At the same time, users and administrators tied to MSIE are prevented from learning unresolved problems. There are also further costs if company data, such as customer lists, are compromised as a result.
Clearly censorship is not the optimal long term nor even short term solution. IT staff can save time and money now by migrating their users to Mozilla and Opera.
A significant amount of early Internet history is there as well: Stuff you don't/won't see in AOL or MSN and stuff you certainly won't see in newspapers or books anymore because it doesn't validate today's corporate dogma.
The Usenet archives need to find some independent mirrors before Google gets torn to shreds and its remains sold of to appease shareholder pressure. It's not hard to imaging the new group of MBA overlords deciding that maintenance of the archive is not profitable enough to warrant the active effort it takes to keep it from entropy.
The best thing Oracle could do if the acquisition is successful would be to close down PeopleSoft as a project. That would save millions for its users in development fees and free up staff (i.e. secretary) time to do other work. All of the end users that I have contact with at my alma mater have had anything but a good experience with it in regards to usefulness, ease of use, and effectiveness. So far my alma mater has pumped many millions over many years into trying to get it off the ground. That university has done many things right, but occasionaly you get a mistake like PeopleSoft or trying to cover up overbilling the government for computing services and firing the whistleblower.
I just haven't had time to fuck around getting it to work...
My sentiments exactly. That's why I gave Windows the heave. I've been using Linux and Solaris at work for 6 and 9 years respectively and RedHat Linux at home for 2 years. With all the trouble I had getting modems and other devices to work under Windows, I wish I had switched years earlier. Too bad RedHat is throwing away the brand.The truth of the matter is a well designed OS shouldn't even be noticable, it should just work behind the scenes and let you do what you need to do.
Ah! So your an OS X fan, too!Releasing only a fraction of what they could just makes it that much easier and cheaper for one person/group/entity to become a major shareholder. Maybe going fully public would be out of some key company's price class.
If there were something for OS X (beyond iTunes) or for GNU + Linux then this would be news. It looks to me like just another drive to get the gullible to install DRM.
I'd look for parallels with the attacks against Quicken. The borg has encountered this kind of resistance before. Going IPO would allow hostile take over and reduce the ability to resist. Not such a clever idea unless they really are interested in throwing in the towel.
Yes, but that would be a good thing for MS if they are trying to get rid of those embarassing Usenet archives. even now, a lot of newbies never learn about Usenet. Blocking them altogether will even hide those old discussions about anti-competitive behaviour or history of abyssmal security problems.
Yes, security must be layered, but the "Crunchy on the outside" / "soft on the inside" model advocated by His Billness does nothing to help. All this barking about firewalls sounds like more trying to distract from the real problems which for the technical side of MS-Windows center on fundamental design flaws. On the financial side, fines, penalties, cancelled/delayed products, cancelled services and shrinking markets are becoming mainstrean knowledge.
The A-bomb was such experimental technology that it was very uncertain that either model would even detonate, thus one of the reasons to do the missions in secret rather than announcing a demo out in the harbor. The second bomb was used to show that the U.S. had the resources/luck/skill to pull off a second detonation. It was of a completely different design and if the first one failed to work, maybe this one would.
Again, at the time, there was no knowledge of what would actually happen, especially in regards to after effects due to radiation exposure. Additionally, mass destruction of urban areas was standard practice at the time. See examples from various fire bombings in Europe.
In hind sight, we now know how nasty radiation poisoning is, but that was not known then. A lot was not known then, carcinogens and mutagens/hormone mimics like asbestos and DDT were considered OK. Even wrist watches and alarm clocks had radium lighted dials.
eEurope 2005 hits hard by not only requiring a secure infrastructure by 2005 (automatically ruling out the current line of MS tools), but also by ensure that there is competition and interoperability. The latter, interoperability, requires use of open standards, some thing which Microsoft could do but has consistently chosen to corrupt or pervert. See its treatment of HTTP, LDAP or Kerberos for three of many examples. In the former, MS is the subject of numerous anti-trust, anti-competition and anti-freemarket cases.
Of course on a less serious note, the UK could get out of this one by secedng from the EU and joining the U.S. That woud have the side benefit of Tony Bliar becoming a natural born U.S. citizen and thus eligable to replace Bush.
Then there's Linux/BSD/QNX + GNU. All of which have Wintel clobbered for ease of maintenance (including stability and security) and at least tied for ease of use.
More interestingly, cities like Turku and Munich got large discounts for even mentioning that they were considering investigating Linux. The mention that Microsoft cannot give discounts anymore implies that they've run out of money to do so. Shrinking revenues as well as accumulated fines and penalties could easily account for this, even when cancelled products and services are acconuted for.
I have to appreciate Australian fire management: toss your cig into the brush and if it burns it was ready to. Like it or not fire is a part of the ecology there in California, too, and the longer you let it go between burns, the worse it will be. Oily bark, twigs and seeds accumulate and would normally burn away at intervals preventing build up to dangerous levels.
Fire code is too important to neglect, even for style. If your house has grass up to the wall and nice juniper bushes against the wall and wood shingles, it's going up in flames if even a small brush fire passes through the neighborhood. It's a shame that "developers" are not held accountable for the houses they build.
Tankers woulnd't have done any good with the wind and amount of flammable material. Nice distraction from the economy though.
If you only send/receive e-mail to other users on the same MS-exchange server and 100% of your client workstations run the same version of MS-Windows, then it might be usable, especially if it is not connected to the Internet. Otherwise, stick with a traditional MTA like Sendmail, which is highly configurable, or postfix, qmail or exim which are simpler and more focused on security. Sendmail, postfix, exim and qmail have proven track records for reliability.
It is also backed up with the way they fought against full-disclosure and bundling patches / advisories several years ago. A year later, the bundled patches were spun as a reduced number of vulnerabilities/advisories.
Everyone except the average stockholder knows it's over for Microsoft, especially as it's customers are figuring out that, despite bleatings from the marketing teams, Windows is not ready for the Internet. The bad reputation they've worked so hard to earn in the tech community is now starting to spread to the general public.
Even though you're sticking with Windows 2000, which is what many Windows users are planning to do, you threw away your options on refusing DRM when you installed SP3. Windows 2000 SP3 gives MS admin rights to your box, which has been suggested as a means to force upgrades even if it means breaking your existing applications. MS has worked hard and long enough to earn its shoddy reputation that I don't doubt that if it stays in business, it will eventually force DRM once Palladium (aka NGSCB/BIOS/LaGrande/Office2003) reaches critical market saturation.
Though as a business you have more flexibility as there is less obligation to keep records accessible to the public than would a government agency or service. Plus if vendor lock-in and unreasonable IT costs tip your business over the edge into bankruptcy, no one except you would notice. Every one else just sees a failed company.
As Schneier predicted, for Microsoft, the threat is bad publicity, and they are going to produce a security system that deals with the threat. Without some kind of disclosure, sysadmins cannot take stop gap measures to secure their systems. This is just another instance of rather than working on securing its products to a level needed for the Internet, the issue is being handled as a PR problem.
Time to upgrade if you haven't already.
What then of your personal data? Would you still say with your best NYC accent that the victim got what they deserved for giving personal data to a business that willfully and knowingly used insecure technology which cannot be improved for years to come? Especially when more secure options are known and well-documented?
Vote with your feet or wallet, which is what I did. I had a bank try that and I walked across the street and got better interest rates and lower / fewer service fees plus web access.
You gotta wonder about how secure the MSIE-only sites are anyway. I investigated getting a loan from a third bank, which turned out to be in on the Windows/MSIE MLM scheme, and left a clean e-mail address. Within days that address was getting spam with subjects like "Home Loans" or "Prospective Buyer"
Having pre-installed MSIE onto machines is the only reason it got market share. Unlike five years ago, there are now several very good browsers. If people actually had to choose and install / order a web browser the large majority would go with mozilla or opera
I wish I'd saved a screen shot.
Besides, it was announced months ago that standalone MSIE is dead and there will be no further versions.
First, there will be a further clamp down on what is convered in the media and how it is spun: "To Microsoft, the threat is bad publicity, and they are going to produce a security system that deals with the threat," he said. [Schneier] said.
Realize also that Microsoft in all likelihood is going to try to make the option DRM patch mandatory, if for no other reason than to lock out competitors. ""Windows 2003 may be secure, but the level of security it provides could break backwards compatibility."
The last thing MS wants is for people to go over to the new version of OpenOffice.org or to avoid the hidden payloads in WMP9 by using Ogg. Office2003 and WMP9 are essential vectors in getting the "optional" DRM patch into Windows machines.