I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this (/. loading reeeeeeeeallllly slowly at the moment; some pages are/.ed for me at the moment), so, just in case...from the article:
If you could create something that attacked Cisco router software, for example, you really would cause a global Internet meltdown.
Now, I realise fully that that isn't what happened, but wasn't one of the unexpected side-effects of Code Red that it caused a spot of bother for some particular Cisco models?
...but you actually usually have the option. Example: you can run c:\apps\program.exe OR you can run c:/apps/program.exe. This definitely works in NT 4 and Windows 2000; I can't comment about Windows 9x because I can't remember the last time I used it. You can start up Word using winword.exe/nd (to suppress the blank document) OR using winword.exe -nd (except I think they took that parameter out in Word XP; but it works in Word 97 and 2000).
Yes, there are most certainly incompatibilities, subtle and blatant. But let's also remember that one of the great things about standards on the PC is that there are so many of them to choose from. If you wanted to share information 10 years ago with someone who used a different word processor from you and you didn't use a Mac, well, the very best of British luck to you. One thing Microsoft did do was to start introducing some measure of interoperability in the PC software world. By all means, let's hold them (and other vendors) accountable for their less-than-stellar concepts, but let's at least get the facts straight.
And here I am apologizing for telling the truth and defending Microsoft. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
No. The legal messages *usually* (more often than not these days) come at the beginning, and then the warning messages about possible implications appear as you're going through the setup. Specifically, you pick an option or turn something off or give a certain reply, and either as soon as you pick it or when you click next you'll get a pop-up message or a dialog screen warning you of the implications.
If it's NT4, in any case, it'd have to give you some warning because IIS is installed from the Option Pack CD, not from the NT CD. In Win2K it's part of the install, but MS are pretty careful nowadays about warning admins that certain options require other components to support them and making sure they've covered themselves in informing you that IF you do this THEN such-and-such must be installed/turned on/turned off, and are you sure?
You'll find that, frighteningly, MS have actually realised they're not well-regarded in certain areas and have tried to do something about it. By all means, let's hold them accountable for security holes, bugs, poor practise, or whatever; but let's be honest about it.
MY question (and I posted the same exact question in the last/. article) is, has he been given access to his embassy/consulate? Same reasons:
* They at least might be listened to if they decide to say something; * There has been a fair amount of ire in recent weeks over foreign nationals who were executed WITHOUT being advised of their rights to have consular access.
The point isn't that "he's broken the law, so stop whining about his rights, he has none, blah blah blah". Instead, let's think about what you'd want if you were imprisoned (rightly or wrongly) in an overseas country. What's the first thing you'd want? Access to your local embassy. And you *know* damn well that any US citizen in such a situation would have that at the forefront of their mind.
People will say that that's not the point; this is the US, so he's going to get treated better than a US citizen would in another country's prison system. Guess what; that IS the point. You want to be given consular access and other rights/privileges when you're overseas? "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Or, if a country wants its citizens to be treated fairly overseas, do the same to citizens of other countries when they're in YOUR town.
Name an MS application which installs and configures IIS and doesn't warn you about it in one of those screens which administrators would *never* not read completely (after all, that's what users do, right? They complain their PC is broken and, yes, there was some sort of ominous-looking warning message, but they don't have time to read that stuff.).
Do they? Or is it just *installed*? Indexing Services gets installed as part of the default installation, but a lot of boxes don't actually *use* its functionality.
I got the following mail from MS yesterday. (The ironic part is I initially was suspicious because the subject line was in all caps -- how rude!)
The following is a Security Bulletin from the Microsoft Product Security
Notification Service.
Please do not reply to this message, as it was sent from an unattended
mailbox.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
The Microsoft Security Response Center, along with other
organizations listed below, is jointly publishing this alert that
ALL IIS ADMINISTRATORS ARE ASKED TO READ
A Very Real and Present Threat to the Internet:
July 31 Deadline For Action
Summary:
The Code Red Worm and mutations of the worm pose a
continued and serious threat to Internet users. Immediate action
is required to combat this threat. Users who have deployed
software that is vulnerable to the worm (Microsoft IIS
Versions 4.0 and 5.0) must install, if they have not done so
already, a vital security patch.
How Big Is The Problem?
On July 19, the Code Red worm infected more than 250,000 systems
in just 9 hours. The worm scans the Internet, identifies
vulnerable systems, and infects these systems by installing
itself. Each newly installed worm joins all the others causing
the rate of scanning to grow rapidly. This uncontrolled growth
in scanning directly decreases the speed of the Internet and
can cause sporadic but widespread outages among all types of
systems. Code Red is likely to start spreading again on
July 31st, 2001 8:00 PM EDT and has mutated so that it may be
even more dangerous. This spread has the potential to disrupt
business and personal use of the Internet for applications such
as electronic commerce, email and entertainment.
Who Must Act?
Every organization or person who has Windows NT or Windows 2000
systems AND the IIS web server software may be vulnerable.
IIS is installed automatically for many applications. If you
are not certain, follow the instructions attached to determine
whether you are running IIS 4.0 or 5.0. If you are using
Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows Me, there is no action that
you need to take in response to this alert.
What To Do If You Are Vulnerable?
a. To rid your machine of the current worm, reboot your computer.
b. To protect your system from re-infection:
Install Microsoft's patch for the Code Red vulnerability problem:
Step-by-step instructions for these actions are posted at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default. asp?
url=/technet/itsolutions/security/topics/codeptch. asp
Microsoft's description of the patch and its installation,
and the vulnerability it addresses is posted at:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/defaul t. asp?
url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-033.asp
Because of the importance of this threat, this alert is
being made jointly by:
Microsoft
The National Infrastructure Protection Center
Federal Computer Incident Response Center (FedCIRC)
Information Technology Association of America (ITAA)
CERT Coordination Center
SANS Institute
Internet Security Systems
Internet Security Alliance
If Lucy wins an award for her preformance (sic) we Aussies better hurry up and claim her as our own, she did work in Australia for a while, maybe not as an actor, but...
She's ours! Piss off! We've got Lucy Lawless and Sam Neill, Lee Tamahori is the favourite pick to direct the next Bond flick, and the two stories in the past 24 hours that have made Slashdotters tearfully grateful for the good old days have both been about insane kiwis.
And you guys hosted the last "Survivor", so no sheep jokes, right? Or else it's the crutching irons...
Funnily enough, d'you know who first split the atom? Ernest Rutherford. Guess where he grew up. (Here's a hint: lots of sheep and a jet-propelled beer-cooler...oh, okay, it was New Zealand.)
Something which made me sit up and take notice of gun statistics was a right-wing web site (can't remember the name of it now) that I accidentally stumbled across last week. This site happened to mention several countries in which it is now easier to purchase guns than it is in the US. These same countries have vastly lower gun-related crime rates than the US. One of these was my home country.
Well, guess what? I lived there for thirty years in the largest city in the country and am struggling to try and think of anywhere I could go to buy a gun. I've lived in the US for 20 months now and can think of five gun stores within a ten-minute drive of where I live without even trying.
It was quite simply a bare-faced lie by an idiot with no integrity.
Does anyone know if the Russian embassy or consulate has been in touch with him? I'm just thinking about the news in recent death-penalty cases that some prisoners were not properly advised of their rights to contact their embassy/consulate. AFAIK, this is a requirement anytime a foreign citizen is arrested, not just in capital cases (can someone confirm this?). One wonders if that would make much difference, but surely it's a potential avenue?
Games manufacturers used to deliberately place errors on the old 5 1/4" disks in order to defeat copiers. What happened? A variety of work-arounds were soon found (all for the genuine purpose of making only backup copies, natch, as those floppies really were rather delicate).
The favoured method, IIRC, was to use a duplication method called parameter copying. People worked out what they needed to do to get around the specific method employed on their favourite game, and then wrote a little plug-in which the copier could use to modify its copying methods for that specific disk.
As a side effect, interestingly enough, those errors often used to cause the 1541 disk drives a lot of grief. Depending on the error, the 1541 would get so confused that it would try to realign the read head by forcibly moving to the outside rail and banging very rapidly against the rail, causing a loud chattering sound. You could even get a program which would write a small loader program and lots of errors to a blank disk, causing the disk drive to play tunes by going through this realignment procedure and knocking the read head against the realignment rail at different speeds. It did this for all of 10 minutes until your 1541 died a noisy death...
That's like me going to a deserted island and laying claim to it and starting a nation.
Why? That seems rather better than the alternative (which is how most nations started) -- going to a populated island (or other, somewhat more vaguely delineated, chunk of land) and laying claim to it and starting a nation.
Just make sure you know what you're getting into as far as your existing citizenship is concerned. Some countries don't mind you holding dual citizenship; others view it as tantamount to treason and will revoke your existing citizenship right sharpish.
Yes, you're right (good thing I found this post before I posted the same comment myself and risked the wrath of the redundancy police).
One of the most important "features" of a keyboard is that it should ideally provide some bounce-back. The problem with modern electronic keyboards (on electronic typewriters as well as computers) is that, being nice and sophisticated and everything, they don't really bounce back with any force worth speaking of when you strike them, and thus fail to bounce your fingers back into their holding position like the old manual typewriters do. Therefore, you have to exert yourself to pull your fingers back up. I believe that some experts recommend users should deliberately strike keys harder and try to get some sort of bounce-back from the whole action-reaction thing.
The phone system is an interesting example. I now live in the US, but grew up in New Zealand. A couple of years ago, when I was still there and my fiancee was living in Pennsylvania (just outside of Philadelphia, one of the largest cities in the country), we used to spend a lot of time on the phone. She called me once, and got stuck with a phone bill of well over $100 (US) for an hour's chatting. If I called her, I could stay on the phone for as long as I liked (and we would literally stay on for several hours) and pay a flat $10 (NZ). That's something like $5 US (give or take, depending on the exchange rate). Yes, we have a better calling plan now, but still nothing like as cheap as going the other way. I've yet to see any provider offer me a plan whereby I can talk for as long as I like to my family in NZ or England and pay no more than $X.
It's interesting to note that New Zealand has one of the most advanced telecommunications infrastructures in the world. Why? Well, the telecom industry has a lot of overseas ownership, including US, and those owners see New Zealand as an ideal proving ground for new technologies. It's small enough that implementing new technologies can be done fairly cheaply and quickly. That's why EFTPOS (the concept behind swiping your bank card at the local dairy to buy a carton of milk and some sweets) has been in NZ longer than anywhere else (I think; I'm sure someone will scream if I'm wrong).
By the way, I grew up with Meccano, and found it far more fascinating than Lego! I could play for hours with it...
As a (non-self-employed) consultant, everything lives or dies based on billable hours. So for an employer to send me on a course entails:
(i) cost of the course -- usually into the thousands;
(ii) lost revenue for the length of the course when I could be on site being billed out at an exorbitant rate.
Given this, it's often difficult for an employer to justify sending me on a course. But ask them for books, and they're usually more than happy, especially if those books are leading up to certification exams. The more bits of paper I have, the more I can be charged out at. (Note: this is not intended to start a debate on the value of certifications, paper-CNE/MCSE, etc., etc. So if you're going to take it as an excuse for that, well, umm...I didn't do it!)
One of the more interesting policies I've come across was at the end of last year when I was interviewing for a new job with a number of different companies. I found one company which would have included a $5000 "education" stipend in my contract -- and that education could be anything, even if it wasn't job-related, and was over and above anything the company might spend to send me on what they perceived as necessary training. If I had taken the job, I could literally have spent that $5000 on flower-arranging courses and they wouldn't have grumbled.
It seems reasonable to me that any employer should be willing to buy self-training materials such as study guides and books; it can't help but increase knowledge and productivity. But there are far more ways of increasing knowledge than just the books. Example: the coffee lounge where the programmers gather to relax for half an hour and inevitably start talking about the project they're working on and how such-and-such a segment of code isn't working, and then someone else says why don't you try this, and presto it's fixed! Difficult to justify to an employer maybe, but invaluable as a learning resource.
Thanks; that makes sense. Does anyone happen to know what criteria are used in making a decision to halt trading? Who's responsible for making such a call? And how long does it normally last -- is there a prescribed "cooling-off" period of, say, 30 minutes?
(1) Yes, they heard someone talking and decided it was rather an unpopular concept; but...
(2) they are not averse to resurrecting it in a later version.
To me, this is one of the most telling, and puzzling, parts of the tale. Microsoft have for years stated that changes to interfaces and methodologies come about as the direct result of testing with everyday users. (Presumably this is why they've thrown out all the old manuals ever written on how to design a user interface -- remember "consistency within menus" or "safer/safest button should be the default"?)
So why, if they've accepted this is an unpopular concept, have they taken it out only to keep it in scope for future versions? What does this say about how much attention they really pay to what users want?
I'm not a bash-MS-regardless type, but this and other recent policies (specifically the whole licensing idiocy) are really beginning to vex me.
I don't know if it's just me, but I'd never even heard of the term until I moved to the States. So no, not a dumb question at all (and thanks for the explanation, Mr. House).
He's not blaming the corporations per se; he's saying that we have given the corporations control by default due to our apathy and lack of involvement. That's quite different.
By the way, I really wish people would recognize that there are states existing between pure capitalism and pure socialism. There seems to be a problem in the psyches of some people that disallows the possibility of admitting that a country can combine capitalism with other, rather more humanitarian, philosophies. Philosophies and economic systems may look rather simple in theory, but the practise of both usually involves rather a lot of compromise. The difficulty comes when people believe they are in a purely capitalist society, and decry others as being purely socialist. There are a hell of a lot of countries out there who take pretty damn good care of their citizens in matters such as public health care and yet allow the free market to run relatively unimpeded. They're not -- despite what the knee-jerk activist may say -- socialist; nor are they capitalist. They're not even perfect. They are, however, a healthy balance of ideologies.
Ultimately, there are a lot of people posting to forums like SlashDot, writing in newspapers, and speaking on radio talkshows, who desperately need to read a dictionary, read some newspapers (including some with sources from outside their country of residence), and get a grip on reality & stop thinking in terms of pure black and white. Life usually isn't quite that simple, unlike the inhabitants.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this (/. loading reeeeeeeeallllly slowly at the moment; some pages are /.ed for me at the moment), so, just in case...from the article:
If you could create something that attacked Cisco router software, for example, you really would cause a global Internet meltdown.
Now, I realise fully that that isn't what happened, but wasn't one of the unexpected side-effects of Code Red that it caused a spot of bother for some particular Cisco models?
...but you actually usually have the option. Example: you can run c:\apps\program.exe OR you can run c:/apps/program.exe. This definitely works in NT 4 and Windows 2000; I can't comment about Windows 9x because I can't remember the last time I used it. You can start up Word using winword.exe /nd (to suppress the blank document) OR using winword.exe -nd (except I think they took that parameter out in Word XP; but it works in Word 97 and 2000).
Yes, there are most certainly incompatibilities, subtle and blatant. But let's also remember that one of the great things about standards on the PC is that there are so many of them to choose from. If you wanted to share information 10 years ago with someone who used a different word processor from you and you didn't use a Mac, well, the very best of British luck to you. One thing Microsoft did do was to start introducing some measure of interoperability in the PC software world. By all means, let's hold them (and other vendors) accountable for their less-than-stellar concepts, but let's at least get the facts straight.
And here I am apologizing for telling the truth and defending Microsoft. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
No. The legal messages *usually* (more often than not these days) come at the beginning, and then the warning messages about possible implications appear as you're going through the setup. Specifically, you pick an option or turn something off or give a certain reply, and either as soon as you pick it or when you click next you'll get a pop-up message or a dialog screen warning you of the implications.
If it's NT4, in any case, it'd have to give you some warning because IIS is installed from the Option Pack CD, not from the NT CD. In Win2K it's part of the install, but MS are pretty careful nowadays about warning admins that certain options require other components to support them and making sure they've covered themselves in informing you that IF you do this THEN such-and-such must be installed/turned on/turned off, and are you sure?
You'll find that, frighteningly, MS have actually realised they're not well-regarded in certain areas and have tried to do something about it. By all means, let's hold them accountable for security holes, bugs, poor practise, or whatever; but let's be honest about it.
MY question (and I posted the same exact question in the last /. article) is, has he been given access to his embassy/consulate? Same reasons:
* They at least might be listened to if they decide to say something;
* There has been a fair amount of ire in recent weeks over foreign nationals who were executed WITHOUT being advised of their rights to have consular access.
The point isn't that "he's broken the law, so stop whining about his rights, he has none, blah blah blah". Instead, let's think about what you'd want if you were imprisoned (rightly or wrongly) in an overseas country. What's the first thing you'd want? Access to your local embassy. And you *know* damn well that any US citizen in such a situation would have that at the forefront of their mind.
People will say that that's not the point; this is the US, so he's going to get treated better than a US citizen would in another country's prison system. Guess what; that IS the point. You want to be given consular access and other rights/privileges when you're overseas? "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Or, if a country wants its citizens to be treated fairly overseas, do the same to citizens of other countries when they're in YOUR town.
Name an MS application which installs and configures IIS and doesn't warn you about it in one of those screens which administrators would *never* not read completely (after all, that's what users do, right? They complain their PC is broken and, yes, there was some sort of ominous-looking warning message, but they don't have time to read that stuff.).
Do they? Or is it just *installed*? Indexing Services gets installed as part of the default installation, but a lot of boxes don't actually *use* its functionality.
A bit like documentation and geeks, really.
I got the following mail from MS yesterday. (The ironic part is I initially was suspicious because the subject line was in all caps -- how rude!)
l easeID=30833
l easeID=30800
. asp?
url=/technet/itsolutions/security/topics/codeptch. asp
l t. asp?
url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-033.asp
The following is a Security Bulletin from the Microsoft Product Security Notification Service.
Please do not reply to this message, as it was sent from an unattended mailbox.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
The Microsoft Security Response Center, along with other organizations listed below, is jointly publishing this alert that ALL IIS ADMINISTRATORS ARE ASKED TO READ
A Very Real and Present Threat to the Internet: July 31 Deadline For Action
Summary:
The Code Red Worm and mutations of the worm pose a continued and serious threat to Internet users. Immediate action is required to combat this threat. Users who have deployed software that is vulnerable to the worm (Microsoft IIS Versions 4.0 and 5.0) must install, if they have not done so already, a vital security patch.
How Big Is The Problem?
On July 19, the Code Red worm infected more than 250,000 systems in just 9 hours. The worm scans the Internet, identifies vulnerable systems, and infects these systems by installing itself. Each newly installed worm joins all the others causing the rate of scanning to grow rapidly. This uncontrolled growth in scanning directly decreases the speed of the Internet and can cause sporadic but widespread outages among all types of systems. Code Red is likely to start spreading again on July 31st, 2001 8:00 PM EDT and has mutated so that it may be even more dangerous. This spread has the potential to disrupt business and personal use of the Internet for applications such as electronic commerce, email and entertainment.
Who Must Act?
Every organization or person who has Windows NT or Windows 2000 systems AND the IIS web server software may be vulnerable. IIS is installed automatically for many applications. If you are not certain, follow the instructions attached to determine whether you are running IIS 4.0 or 5.0. If you are using Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows Me, there is no action that you need to take in response to this alert.
What To Do If You Are Vulnerable?
a. To rid your machine of the current worm, reboot your computer.
b. To protect your system from re-infection:
Install Microsoft's patch for the Code Red vulnerability problem:
- - Windows NT version 4.0:
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/Release.asp?Re
- - Windows 2000 Professional, Server and Advanced Server:
http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/Release.asp?Re
Step-by-step instructions for these actions are posted at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default
Microsoft's description of the patch and its installation, and the vulnerability it addresses is posted at:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/defau
Because of the importance of this threat, this alert is being made jointly by:
Microsoft
The National Infrastructure Protection Center
Federal Computer Incident Response Center (FedCIRC)
Information Technology Association of America (ITAA)
CERT Coordination Center
SANS Institute
Internet Security Systems
Internet Security Alliance
If Lucy wins an award for her preformance (sic) we Aussies better hurry up and claim her as our own, she did work in Australia for a while, maybe not as an actor, but...
She's ours! Piss off! We've got Lucy Lawless and Sam Neill, Lee Tamahori is the favourite pick to direct the next Bond flick, and the two stories in the past 24 hours that have made Slashdotters tearfully grateful for the good old days have both been about insane kiwis.
And you guys hosted the last "Survivor", so no sheep jokes, right? Or else it's the crutching irons...
Oh, go on...you're too kind...
I'll blush if you keep it up.
Funnily enough, d'you know who first split the atom? Ernest Rutherford. Guess where he grew up. (Here's a hint: lots of sheep and a jet-propelled beer-cooler...oh, okay, it was New Zealand.)
Something which made me sit up and take notice of gun statistics was a right-wing web site (can't remember the name of it now) that I accidentally stumbled across last week. This site happened to mention several countries in which it is now easier to purchase guns than it is in the US. These same countries have vastly lower gun-related crime rates than the US. One of these was my home country.
Well, guess what? I lived there for thirty years in the largest city in the country and am struggling to try and think of anywhere I could go to buy a gun. I've lived in the US for 20 months now and can think of five gun stores within a ten-minute drive of where I live without even trying.
It was quite simply a bare-faced lie by an idiot with no integrity.
Does anyone know if the Russian embassy or consulate has been in touch with him? I'm just thinking about the news in recent death-penalty cases that some prisoners were not properly advised of their rights to contact their embassy/consulate. AFAIK, this is a requirement anytime a foreign citizen is arrested, not just in capital cases (can someone confirm this?). One wonders if that would make much difference, but surely it's a potential avenue?
Games manufacturers used to deliberately place errors on the old 5 1/4" disks in order to defeat copiers. What happened? A variety of work-arounds were soon found (all for the genuine purpose of making only backup copies, natch, as those floppies really were rather delicate).
The favoured method, IIRC, was to use a duplication method called parameter copying. People worked out what they needed to do to get around the specific method employed on their favourite game, and then wrote a little plug-in which the copier could use to modify its copying methods for that specific disk.
As a side effect, interestingly enough, those errors often used to cause the 1541 disk drives a lot of grief. Depending on the error, the 1541 would get so confused that it would try to realign the read head by forcibly moving to the outside rail and banging very rapidly against the rail, causing a loud chattering sound. You could even get a program which would write a small loader program and lots of errors to a blank disk, causing the disk drive to play tunes by going through this realignment procedure and knocking the read head against the realignment rail at different speeds. It did this for all of 10 minutes until your 1541 died a noisy death...
That's like me going to a deserted island and laying claim to it and starting a nation.
Why? That seems rather better than the alternative (which is how most nations started) -- going to a populated island (or other, somewhat more vaguely delineated, chunk of land) and laying claim to it and starting a nation.
Just make sure you know what you're getting into as far as your existing citizenship is concerned. Some countries don't mind you holding dual citizenship; others view it as tantamount to treason and will revoke your existing citizenship right sharpish.
Yes, but the Messenger Service can be used independently of MSN. Several people use it, as an example, to chat with their friends who are on Hotmail.
Yes, you're right (good thing I found this post before I posted the same comment myself and risked the wrath of the redundancy police).
One of the most important "features" of a keyboard is that it should ideally provide some bounce-back. The problem with modern electronic keyboards (on electronic typewriters as well as computers) is that, being nice and sophisticated and everything, they don't really bounce back with any force worth speaking of when you strike them, and thus fail to bounce your fingers back into their holding position like the old manual typewriters do. Therefore, you have to exert yourself to pull your fingers back up. I believe that some experts recommend users should deliberately strike keys harder and try to get some sort of bounce-back from the whole action-reaction thing.
The phone system is an interesting example. I now live in the US, but grew up in New Zealand. A couple of years ago, when I was still there and my fiancee was living in Pennsylvania (just outside of Philadelphia, one of the largest cities in the country), we used to spend a lot of time on the phone. She called me once, and got stuck with a phone bill of well over $100 (US) for an hour's chatting. If I called her, I could stay on the phone for as long as I liked (and we would literally stay on for several hours) and pay a flat $10 (NZ). That's something like $5 US (give or take, depending on the exchange rate). Yes, we have a better calling plan now, but still nothing like as cheap as going the other way. I've yet to see any provider offer me a plan whereby I can talk for as long as I like to my family in NZ or England and pay no more than $X.
It's interesting to note that New Zealand has one of the most advanced telecommunications infrastructures in the world. Why? Well, the telecom industry has a lot of overseas ownership, including US, and those owners see New Zealand as an ideal proving ground for new technologies. It's small enough that implementing new technologies can be done fairly cheaply and quickly. That's why EFTPOS (the concept behind swiping your bank card at the local dairy to buy a carton of milk and some sweets) has been in NZ longer than anywhere else (I think; I'm sure someone will scream if I'm wrong).
By the way, I grew up with Meccano, and found it far more fascinating than Lego! I could play for hours with it...
As a (non-self-employed) consultant, everything lives or dies based on billable hours. So for an employer to send me on a course entails:
(i) cost of the course -- usually into the thousands;
(ii) lost revenue for the length of the course when I could be on site being billed out at an exorbitant rate.
Given this, it's often difficult for an employer to justify sending me on a course. But ask them for books, and they're usually more than happy, especially if those books are leading up to certification exams. The more bits of paper I have, the more I can be charged out at. (Note: this is not intended to start a debate on the value of certifications, paper-CNE/MCSE, etc., etc. So if you're going to take it as an excuse for that, well, umm...I didn't do it!)
One of the more interesting policies I've come across was at the end of last year when I was interviewing for a new job with a number of different companies. I found one company which would have included a $5000 "education" stipend in my contract -- and that education could be anything, even if it wasn't job-related, and was over and above anything the company might spend to send me on what they perceived as necessary training. If I had taken the job, I could literally have spent that $5000 on flower-arranging courses and they wouldn't have grumbled.
It seems reasonable to me that any employer should be willing to buy self-training materials such as study guides and books; it can't help but increase knowledge and productivity. But there are far more ways of increasing knowledge than just the books. Example: the coffee lounge where the programmers gather to relax for half an hour and inevitably start talking about the project they're working on and how such-and-such a segment of code isn't working, and then someone else says why don't you try this, and presto it's fixed! Difficult to justify to an employer maybe, but invaluable as a learning resource.
I mean...wow...perceptive...
Thanks; that makes sense. Does anyone happen to know what criteria are used in making a decision to halt trading? Who's responsible for making such a call? And how long does it normally last -- is there a prescribed "cooling-off" period of, say, 30 minutes?
...why trading was halted? Not used to stocks and trading, sorry, so I just don't understand why this happened.
Cheers
Ian
(1) Yes, they heard someone talking and decided it was rather an unpopular concept; but...
(2) they are not averse to resurrecting it in a later version.
To me, this is one of the most telling, and puzzling, parts of the tale. Microsoft have for years stated that changes to interfaces and methodologies come about as the direct result of testing with everyday users. (Presumably this is why they've thrown out all the old manuals ever written on how to design a user interface -- remember "consistency within menus" or "safer/safest button should be the default"?)
So why, if they've accepted this is an unpopular concept, have they taken it out only to keep it in scope for future versions? What does this say about how much attention they really pay to what users want?
I'm not a bash-MS-regardless type, but this and other recent policies (specifically the whole licensing idiocy) are really beginning to vex me.
I don't know if it's just me, but I'd never even heard of the term until I moved to the States. So no, not a dumb question at all (and thanks for the explanation, Mr. House).
He's not blaming the corporations per se; he's saying that we have given the corporations control by default due to our apathy and lack of involvement. That's quite different.
By the way, I really wish people would recognize that there are states existing between pure capitalism and pure socialism. There seems to be a problem in the psyches of some people that disallows the possibility of admitting that a country can combine capitalism with other, rather more humanitarian, philosophies. Philosophies and economic systems may look rather simple in theory, but the practise of both usually involves rather a lot of compromise. The difficulty comes when people believe they are in a purely capitalist society, and decry others as being purely socialist. There are a hell of a lot of countries out there who take pretty damn good care of their citizens in matters such as public health care and yet allow the free market to run relatively unimpeded. They're not -- despite what the knee-jerk activist may say -- socialist; nor are they capitalist. They're not even perfect. They are, however, a healthy balance of ideologies.
Ultimately, there are a lot of people posting to forums like SlashDot, writing in newspapers, and speaking on radio talkshows, who desperately need to read a dictionary, read some newspapers (including some with sources from outside their country of residence), and get a grip on reality & stop thinking in terms of pure black and white. Life usually isn't quite that simple, unlike the inhabitants.