That still doesn't protect you from drive by downloads. Firefox and Opera are not immune. If you haven't had an issue it's either because you're lucky or you only think you don't. Without a tool to check how do you know???
Of course it could also be that you don't do anything interesting or different enough to get a virus. If you're suspicious of any web address you Google and only go there if you've heard of it for instance.
What we need is decent anti-virus, not to give up on the concept altogether. Just because it's been done badly doesn't mean it can't be done well.
I hate what they did too, but it's not as simple as you say.
First, FSX was a dog. A complete piece of shit. They shouldn't have released it in the form they did. They got greedy. Went from having a kiosk mode for museums to demonstrate the Wright Flyer with to adding activation DRM to a steaming pile of buggy crap that is still too resource intensive for computers years after it is released. People go on and on about how the lead product manger Phil Taylor was a God. Horseshit. He fucked the franchise.
Secondly it was Bill Gate's pet project and had his protection while he was there. Balmer had no such sentimental attachment and couldn't wait to get rid of it.
Why not move to X-plane or flightgear? Seems like a better solution for players and the developers that want to make addons for them.
Many many reasons - They are STILL not as sophisticated or feature complete. Some of it is extreme. Joystick support is still not as easy as it should be in Flightgear.
- Momentum - not nearly as many addons now means its harder to get the ball rolling
- Both simulators keep changing even in minor releases. Makes it difficult for part time content creators to keep up, and less worthwhile when you know a new version will break it. Well FSX isn't fantastic for backward compatiblity - one of many mistakes, but FS2004 runs most FS2002 planes, and often only minor changes are needed to get an FS2004 plane to work in FSX
- Small changes and tweaks are very easy in FS2004 compared to X-Plane or Flight Gear. Everything but the physical model - from effects to air traffic, even scenery is somewhat easier in FS2004. Repainting is relatively easy too.
Wow! Something totally un-MS related and some fucktard still finds a way to slip it into the conversations. What a fucking zealot.
Actually I wrote extensively against Microsoft's DRM on FSX in number of places including the MS Flight Sim newsgroup at the time. It's the second hit if you type in FSX and DRM into Google. I totally hate that they killed off the franchise. Don't let reality get in the way of your anonymous name calling though.
By the way you should get a refund on your education. You clearly fail comprehension: You don't understand how a parody of FSX based on a movie is related to the topic of parodies of that movie.
You, sir, make those Jehovah Witness kooks look like mere amateurs.
Well lets insult a religious group as well as a tech company while simultaneously ranting about a post being off topic. I sincerely hope you're trolling because otherwise you are just too stupid for words.
and makes the bigger-brained among us yawn at the idea that anyone is impressed with 64 loops around a couple of rocks that aren't going anywhere fast...
That's a bit of an arrogant statement. While you hit the nail right on the head with the margins in spacecraft design, I have to say that seeing the orbital plots of a mission as complex as Cassini, is, in no way, a yawning experience.
Anyone that sees that and claims to have a bigger brain is either lying about the bigger brain, or the bigger brain was installed to store more manure to better fertilize the next crop. What percentage of the population has even done orbital mechanics calculations/simulation? A larger group would be capable of it but there are plenty of people who have trouble calculating change and would have NO hope. Yet some of them have other skills of value. Unlike this bloke who yawns at what he has no idea about.
There use to be an MS Flight Simulator X parody that was roll over on the floor hilarious with a constant stream of in jokes about the frustrations of Flight Simulator enthusiasts with the last, initially buggiest (still not all bugs resolved) and resource hungry version of the simulator. On initial release you had to do all sorts of tweaking to get a usuable system. Two service packs and an addon pack later it was more usuable but still many hobbiests were divided between FS2004 (the previous version) and FSX. Nothing quite like watching Hitler going off his nut with subtitles about being told the scenery and aircraft addons from the previous version didn't work or bugs that caused you to lose your pilot history.
You have to understand that some hobbiests go to extremes to build their machines, and buy hardware and software for flight simulation like no other game. Not unusual to have an outlay of many thousands on hardware and software. I never quite went very far, but I did build a 3 screen gaming machine with Flight Sim as the primary use, and I do have a couple of expensive joysticks, yoke and rudder peddals. Extreme examples see people building cockpits in a rented warehouse to create a simulator worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even with the development team disbanded and Microsoft killing the Flight Simulator franchise that lasted decades, people are STILL releasing addons and there are entire companies of paid developers still working to produce new addons.
But you have raised a fallacy of your own. You admit:
"The fact that they have objectives or skills isn't in question."
What does my admitting that these people have technical skills have to do with it? I did not say they had people skills.
But make arguments that assume those objectives depend on or include you being able to meet your objectives (or anyone else being able to meet their objectives).
If you put yourself up as an expert and willing to help that simply isn't an assumption.
Without this false premise, all your arguments collapse.
You're just hand waving and talking jibberish and hoping I won't notice. You haven't made any kind of coherent argument here.
LOL, my idea of computer security is keeping my tools up to date instead of getting pissed off about having to upgrade my antivirus.
No, you're idea is to allow your antivirus provider to install a kill switch on your system. I'm not arguing against upgrading or doing so in a timely manner, but when it comes to security being a sheep will get you eaten by wolves. That is exactly what you're doing.
Like Apple, you forget what the computer revolution is all about and why people buy these gadgets. They buy them for the things that these gadgets allow people to do. As you restrict that in a misguided attempt to protect them, you make the device less useful. As you lock out developers you reduce those capabilities. Apple has it more wrong than most.
I don't have a lot of trouble with firewalls at home. I'm running a WRT54GL with Tomato (previously was using DD-WRT but I like the graphing in Tomato, and didn't need anything available in DD-WRT but not Tomato so I switched). This setup has given me no trouble (baring one stupid r/c game/simulator with networking that is a total mess and doesn't work properly with or without a router - and even that works intermittently). However I'm not doing anything too advanced with it.
Once you do get to enterprise networking the picture quickly changes. Bear in mind this isn't my area of expertise but I do need to understand the firewalls I work with for trouble shooting. Each architecture is unique. The design decisions aren't well represented in something like Visio and the rules couldn't possibly be generated from that. I would be suspicious of any tool that claimed to be a one click solution from diagram to ready to implement firewall rules. I'm happy to be proven wrong but I've not seen such a tool. Complex means complex, and that often requires those hand rules are tweaked.
That said, I don't really care for Apple's walled garden approach to the iPhone and for those of us nerds, it is a major problem (I've had to jailbreak just for simple things like Googlevoice front ends...or tethering)...for the average user? not a problem. The point is, Apple cares far more for the user than the developer. Microsoft doesn't give a fuck about the user so long as the developers are happy.
Leaving users out in the cold for common features is not caring for the user. Apple cares for Apple. Microsoft cares for Microsoft. No one gives a shit about the user, they just have different approaches to generating sales. Thinking otherwise is naive.
Um, not quite. The company doesn't control whether you can release the app to a device. The company controls whether the app will run on a device (either by buying the app through an app store or paying a set fee to the company). This isn't too far off from the XBox 360, either. To some extent, it's not that far off from most any commercial library/OS (the main difference is whether you effectively pay the fee upfront or whether they try to nickel and dime you later).
What are you talking about? Your first point is pedantry at it's worst. I can't run the software without Apple's consent, so who cares if I can physically install the file?
Your second point is just FUD. I've released minor pieces of freeware for Windows on the PC and no one came back and told me what I could or could not run on the machine or prevented me from running a thing. There are multiple completely free development environments available that leave me with free to distribute executables that will run on any machine without consent from the hardware or OS manufacturer.
You complaining about a company that retains control of whether or not you can release the app to the device even if it conforms perfectly to their APIs. If that's not a deal breaker for you why do you think that complaining about shitty incompatible frameworks or passing colour components on slightly different programs is going to worry them? You're wasting your breath.
The problem is almost certainly you, not the so-called "real arrogant sods".
That's called denial. You don't know me. You don't know the circumstances, yet you're happy to jump to conclusions about both because you don't want to deal with the possibility of a different reality.
My experience has been uniformly positive.
Good for you. And yet mine aren't. What makes yours more valid?
They are not your nursemaid. They are often world-class coders dealing with large numbers of people trying to get as much done as possible and wasting time on people who blame everybody but themselves is not a sensible thing to do.
World class coders are still capable of being rude and arrogant. If you're telling me you've never met a world class coder that is rude or arrogant, I'd say you're lying. We've all read about world class coders behaving like jackasses. If you're saying that doing something well excuses bad behaviour, I'd disagree with that too.
In particular if you expect to have everything handed to you on a plate then I'd suggest you head down to the local computer shop where, if the salesdroid smells money, they will fawn all over your fragile ego if that's what pulls your chain.
...and again we have a whole bunch of assumptions about the circumstances, my abilities and my competence that have nothing to do with the argument. Until you know me and the situation I'm thinking of, such speculation is baseless.
On the other hand if you're serious about getting the problem fixed and realize it's a two way exchange you may accomplish a lot.
Developers are not salesdroids (thank god) and it's not reasonable for you to expect them to act that way. They are busy people with objectives different from yours. If you are a beginner there are any number of intermediate level experts willing to help on numerous forums. And like the saying says "God helps those who help themselves."
This is just a crazy rant, pure and simple. "Sales droids" don't behave well either. The fact that they have objectives or skills isn't in question. That you think this either excuses bad behaviour or implies my incompetence is laughable. It's hard to argue with someone with so many straw men in the way.
Frankly and depressingly I find closed source developers to be much more helpful and even willing to accept suggestions and help than elitist open source jerks.
Every time you ask a question, you are asking someone to donate time to you. A lot of people are either volunteers, or they're working for a company with their own priorities and schedule. So turn it around. Why do you expect people to just give you time for free?
Because they put themselves in the position of being an expert on a publicly available tool. If you don't want to answer the question, just don't answer. Far better than abuse.
If you'd ever seen e-mail after e-mail of someone wanting to contribute something / get into coding on a project, and spent hours of your life (via e-mail) trying to help them hobble along, only to find out that they are completely incapable of doing simple debugging, or sometimes even of interpreting a very plain gcc warning ("It says, variable X may not be initialized." [I glance at the 20-line function.] "What happens if Y is false? What will variable X be set to?" "Oh, good catch!") you'd understand why people are short on mailing lists.
So assess their skills as an end user, point them to some documentation on what technical skills are needed, then tell them to come back and you will be happy to help when they have acquired those skills.
I genuinely want to help people become developers for my project. But I don't have the time or emotional energy to teach basic OS primitives (like, what a spinlock is and how to use it), much less teach people basic debugging skills.
Explain that as politely as you have here (no abuse, reasonable terms) and then stop helping them.
Often you'll spend a lot of effort trying to describe something (say, 20-30 minutes writing an e-mail) and the person asking for help will only write 2 lines back asking for more, without any evidence of having spent at least 20-30 minutes trying to get it working themselves. So where I am now is this: spend no more than 5 minutes, and give them just enough hints to get them to the next question. If they manage to sort out how to do X on their own, and to ask the next question, I'll give them another 5 minutes. If they've shown evidence that they're really stuck and have tried a bunch of different things, I'll spend more time, but not more time than I think they've spent.
Fair and reasonable but after the first question or two you should let them know that's your approach so they aren't getting frustrated or thinking of you as unhelpful.
But the fact is, the vast majority of time, the interaction eventually shows that the person is not (at this point, perhaps ever) capable of contributing to the project. And rarely does the person asking acknowledge the time they're asking me to commit to helping them. I'm a natural optimist, and I naturally love to teach people. So at the moment, hope (plus a handful of positive interactions) keeps me trying, even in the face of overwhelming defeat. I can easily understand why people of a different character come to despise those kinds of questions.
If it's a developer question, it's very different to an end user question. Not everyone's going to be able or willing to help at every level. You can expect a lot from a developer, and if they aren't cutting it you can tell them to go do some learning. But the end users are different - they just want to solve their problem well enough to use the product. You can't expect them to contribute. They're the ones when told to RTFM that will promptly insert a Windows CD and chalk it up to Linux being unusable.
My experience is, if you make it clear that you respect someone's time, and have spent a reasonable amount of effort trying to figure it out yourself before asking for help, people are more than willing to give you a hand.
That's not been my experience at all I'm afraid. And not just with Linux. There are reasonable people. Then there are real arrogant sods. Unfortunately the later outnumber the former.
Old threats are so rare that they may as well have disappeared.
Now that is an incredible display of ignorance. Old threats are routinely tracked and routinely only go away when the OS they infect or method of spread falls into disuse. If this is your idea of superior computer security expertise, you can keep it.
They didn't install their software on your servers, YOU did. So they didn't disrupt your business, YOU did. Whether it's because you were ignorant or lazy is irrelevant. It still comes down to YOU.
Actually I don't use the software, so I did nothing.
THEY chose to send a software update which they knew would disable their customer's antivirus. THEY did do something. YOU are a fool for refusing to accept that.
HA HA HA.....an out of date antivirus IS as bad as no antivirus. Dear God, I hope you don't work doing this stuff.
An out of date antivirus doesn't protect you against new stuff but the old threats don't just disappear. Go look at the literature before lecturing me on what you hope I don't work doing. Idiot.
"ClamAV forced upgrade breaks email servers" should read "Failure to upgrade despite six months warning breaks email servers" or "Inattentive server admins cause massive downtime".
If ClamAV caused downtime by doing something to the system that broke it, ClamAV is the virus. Anti-virus software is suppose to prevent disruption of your system due to malware trying to do things with it that you did not intend.
What if someone had worked out a way to exploit the kill switch built into the server? Are you happy with other people being able to remotely kill your software? If so, you have no business commenting.
2. Stop supporting 0.94, leaving users who don't know to update basically unprotected..
Unprotected against new viruses is not the same as unprotected. Sending a final update critically broke the system. You're saying that's okay just to get the user's attention so that they're forced to upgrade. But the purpose of the antivirus tool is to prevent risk and impact on the business. In this case the update WAS the virus.
Slashdot Mirror
My eyes! My eyes!
That still doesn't protect you from drive by downloads. Firefox and Opera are not immune. If you haven't had an issue it's either because you're lucky or you only think you don't. Without a tool to check how do you know???
Of course it could also be that you don't do anything interesting or different enough to get a virus. If you're suspicious of any web address you Google and only go there if you've heard of it for instance.
What we need is decent anti-virus, not to give up on the concept altogether. Just because it's been done badly doesn't mean it can't be done well.
Or he only watches "reputable porn"?
Well then he can just "fuck off" ;-)
How does reputable porn work anyway? "Pass the vagina would you please Giles." "Yes, sir"???
Jobs didn't say "Apple won't sell porn" he said "We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone". He's mad.
Nah, just grumpy. He just needs to get laid.
I hate what they did too, but it's not as simple as you say.
First, FSX was a dog. A complete piece of shit. They shouldn't have released it in the form they did. They got greedy. Went from having a kiosk mode for museums to demonstrate the Wright Flyer with to adding activation DRM to a steaming pile of buggy crap that is still too resource intensive for computers years after it is released. People go on and on about how the lead product manger Phil Taylor was a God. Horseshit. He fucked the franchise.
Secondly it was Bill Gate's pet project and had his protection while he was there. Balmer had no such sentimental attachment and couldn't wait to get rid of it.
Why not move to X-plane or flightgear?
Seems like a better solution for players and the developers that want to make addons for them.
Many many reasons
- They are STILL not as sophisticated or feature complete. Some of it is extreme. Joystick support is still not as easy as it should be in Flightgear.
- Momentum - not nearly as many addons now means its harder to get the ball rolling
- Both simulators keep changing even in minor releases. Makes it difficult for part time content creators to keep up, and less worthwhile when you know a new version will break it. Well FSX isn't fantastic for backward compatiblity - one of many mistakes, but FS2004 runs most FS2002 planes, and often only minor changes are needed to get an FS2004 plane to work in FSX
- Small changes and tweaks are very easy in FS2004 compared to X-Plane or Flight Gear. Everything but the physical model - from effects to air traffic, even scenery is somewhat easier in FS2004. Repainting is relatively easy too.
Wow! Something totally un-MS related and some fucktard still finds a way to slip it into the conversations. What a fucking zealot.
Actually I wrote extensively against Microsoft's DRM on FSX in number of places including the MS Flight Sim newsgroup at the time. It's the second hit if you type in FSX and DRM into Google. I totally hate that they killed off the franchise. Don't let reality get in the way of your anonymous name calling though.
By the way you should get a refund on your education. You clearly fail comprehension: You don't understand how a parody of FSX based on a movie is related to the topic of parodies of that movie.
You, sir, make those Jehovah Witness kooks look like mere amateurs.
Well lets insult a religious group as well as a tech company while simultaneously ranting about a post being off topic. I sincerely hope you're trolling because otherwise you are just too stupid for words.
and makes the bigger-brained among us yawn at the idea that anyone is impressed with 64 loops around a couple of rocks that aren't going anywhere fast...
That's a bit of an arrogant statement. While you hit the nail right on the head with the margins in spacecraft design, I have to say that seeing the orbital plots of a mission as complex as Cassini, is, in no way, a yawning experience.
Anyone that sees that and claims to have a bigger brain is either lying about the bigger brain, or the bigger brain was installed to store more manure to better fertilize the next crop. What percentage of the population has even done orbital mechanics calculations/simulation? A larger group would be capable of it but there are plenty of people who have trouble calculating change and would have NO hope. Yet some of them have other skills of value. Unlike this bloke who yawns at what he has no idea about.
There use to be an MS Flight Simulator X parody that was roll over on the floor hilarious with a constant stream of in jokes about the frustrations of Flight Simulator enthusiasts with the last, initially buggiest (still not all bugs resolved) and resource hungry version of the simulator. On initial release you had to do all sorts of tweaking to get a usuable system. Two service packs and an addon pack later it was more usuable but still many hobbiests were divided between FS2004 (the previous version) and FSX. Nothing quite like watching Hitler going off his nut with subtitles about being told the scenery and aircraft addons from the previous version didn't work or bugs that caused you to lose your pilot history.
You have to understand that some hobbiests go to extremes to build their machines, and buy hardware and software for flight simulation like no other game. Not unusual to have an outlay of many thousands on hardware and software. I never quite went very far, but I did build a 3 screen gaming machine with Flight Sim as the primary use, and I do have a couple of expensive joysticks, yoke and rudder peddals. Extreme examples see people building cockpits in a rented warehouse to create a simulator worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even with the development team disbanded and Microsoft killing the Flight Simulator franchise that lasted decades, people are STILL releasing addons and there are entire companies of paid developers still working to produce new addons.
But you have raised a fallacy of your own. You admit:
"The fact that they have objectives or skills isn't in question."
What does my admitting that these people have technical skills have to do with it? I did not say they had people skills.
But make arguments that assume those objectives depend on or include you being able to meet your objectives (or anyone else being able to meet their objectives).
If you put yourself up as an expert and willing to help that simply isn't an assumption.
Without this false premise, all your arguments collapse.
You're just hand waving and talking jibberish and hoping I won't notice. You haven't made any kind of coherent argument here.
LOL, my idea of computer security is keeping my tools up to date instead of getting pissed off about having to upgrade my antivirus.
No, you're idea is to allow your antivirus provider to install a kill switch on your system. I'm not arguing against upgrading or doing so in a timely manner, but when it comes to security being a sheep will get you eaten by wolves. That is exactly what you're doing.
Like Apple, you forget what the computer revolution is all about and why people buy these gadgets. They buy them for the things that these gadgets allow people to do. As you restrict that in a misguided attempt to protect them, you make the device less useful. As you lock out developers you reduce those capabilities. Apple has it more wrong than most.
I don't have a lot of trouble with firewalls at home. I'm running a WRT54GL with Tomato (previously was using DD-WRT but I like the graphing in Tomato, and didn't need anything available in DD-WRT but not Tomato so I switched). This setup has given me no trouble (baring one stupid r/c game/simulator with networking that is a total mess and doesn't work properly with or without a router - and even that works intermittently). However I'm not doing anything too advanced with it.
Once you do get to enterprise networking the picture quickly changes. Bear in mind this isn't my area of expertise but I do need to understand the firewalls I work with for trouble shooting. Each architecture is unique. The design decisions aren't well represented in something like Visio and the rules couldn't possibly be generated from that. I would be suspicious of any tool that claimed to be a one click solution from diagram to ready to implement firewall rules. I'm happy to be proven wrong but I've not seen such a tool. Complex means complex, and that often requires those hand rules are tweaked.
That said, I don't really care for Apple's walled garden approach to the iPhone and for those of us nerds, it is a major problem (I've had to jailbreak just for simple things like Googlevoice front ends...or tethering)...for the average user? not a problem. The point is, Apple cares far more for the user than the developer. Microsoft doesn't give a fuck about the user so long as the developers are happy.
Leaving users out in the cold for common features is not caring for the user. Apple cares for Apple. Microsoft cares for Microsoft. No one gives a shit about the user, they just have different approaches to generating sales. Thinking otherwise is naive.
Um, not quite. The company doesn't control whether you can release the app to a device. The company controls whether the app will run on a device (either by buying the app through an app store or paying a set fee to the company). This isn't too far off from the XBox 360, either. To some extent, it's not that far off from most any commercial library/OS (the main difference is whether you effectively pay the fee upfront or whether they try to nickel and dime you later).
What are you talking about? Your first point is pedantry at it's worst. I can't run the software without Apple's consent, so who cares if I can physically install the file?
Your second point is just FUD. I've released minor pieces of freeware for Windows on the PC and no one came back and told me what I could or could not run on the machine or prevented me from running a thing. There are multiple completely free development environments available that leave me with free to distribute executables that will run on any machine without consent from the hardware or OS manufacturer.
#ifdef APPLE_HARDWARE
doItTheirWayOrHitTheRoad();
#endif
You complaining about a company that retains control of whether or not you can release the app to the device even if it conforms perfectly to their APIs. If that's not a deal breaker for you why do you think that complaining about shitty incompatible frameworks or passing colour components on slightly different programs is going to worry them? You're wasting your breath.
The problem is almost certainly you, not the so-called "real arrogant sods".
That's called denial. You don't know me. You don't know the circumstances, yet you're happy to jump to conclusions about both because you don't want to deal with the possibility of a different reality.
My experience has been uniformly positive.
Good for you. And yet mine aren't. What makes yours more valid?
They are not your nursemaid. They are often world-class coders dealing with large numbers of people trying to get as much done as possible and wasting time on people who blame everybody but themselves is not a sensible thing to do.
World class coders are still capable of being rude and arrogant. If you're telling me you've never met a world class coder that is rude or arrogant, I'd say you're lying. We've all read about world class coders behaving like jackasses. If you're saying that doing something well excuses bad behaviour, I'd disagree with that too.
In particular if you expect to have everything handed to you on a plate then I'd suggest you head down to the local computer shop where, if the salesdroid smells money, they will fawn all over your fragile ego if that's what pulls your chain.
...and again we have a whole bunch of assumptions about the circumstances, my abilities and my competence that have nothing to do with the argument. Until you know me and the situation I'm thinking of, such speculation is baseless.
On the other hand if you're serious about getting the problem fixed and realize it's a two way exchange you may accomplish a lot.
Developers are not salesdroids (thank god) and it's not reasonable for you to expect them to act that way. They are busy people with objectives different from yours. If you are a beginner there are any number of intermediate level experts willing to help on numerous forums. And like the saying says "God helps those who help themselves."
This is just a crazy rant, pure and simple. "Sales droids" don't behave well either. The fact that they have objectives or skills isn't in question. That you think this either excuses bad behaviour or implies my incompetence is laughable. It's hard to argue with someone with so many straw men in the way.
Every time you ask a question, you are asking someone to donate time to you. A lot of people are either volunteers, or they're working for a company with their own priorities and schedule. So turn it around. Why do you expect people to just give you time for free?
Because they put themselves in the position of being an expert on a publicly available tool. If you don't want to answer the question, just don't answer. Far better than abuse.
If you'd ever seen e-mail after e-mail of someone wanting to contribute something / get into coding on a project, and spent hours of your life (via e-mail) trying to help them hobble along, only to find out that they are completely incapable of doing simple debugging, or sometimes even of interpreting a very plain gcc warning ("It says, variable X may not be initialized." [I glance at the 20-line function.] "What happens if Y is false? What will variable X be set to?" "Oh, good catch!") you'd understand why people are short on mailing lists.
So assess their skills as an end user, point them to some documentation on what technical skills are needed, then tell them to come back and you will be happy to help when they have acquired those skills.
I genuinely want to help people become developers for my project. But I don't have the time or emotional energy to teach basic OS primitives (like, what a spinlock is and how to use it), much less teach people basic debugging skills.
Explain that as politely as you have here (no abuse, reasonable terms) and then stop helping them.
Often you'll spend a lot of effort trying to describe something (say, 20-30 minutes writing an e-mail) and the person asking for help will only write 2 lines back asking for more, without any evidence of having spent at least 20-30 minutes trying to get it working themselves. So where I am now is this: spend no more than 5 minutes, and give them just enough hints to get them to the next question. If they manage to sort out how to do X on their own, and to ask the next question, I'll give them another 5 minutes. If they've shown evidence that they're really stuck and have tried a bunch of different things, I'll spend more time, but not more time than I think they've spent.
Fair and reasonable but after the first question or two you should let them know that's your approach so they aren't getting frustrated or thinking of you as unhelpful.
But the fact is, the vast majority of time, the interaction eventually shows that the person is not (at this point, perhaps ever) capable of contributing to the project. And rarely does the person asking acknowledge the time they're asking me to commit to helping them. I'm a natural optimist, and I naturally love to teach people. So at the moment, hope (plus a handful of positive interactions) keeps me trying, even in the face of overwhelming defeat. I can easily understand why people of a different character come to despise those kinds of questions.
If it's a developer question, it's very different to an end user question. Not everyone's going to be able or willing to help at every level. You can expect a lot from a developer, and if they aren't cutting it you can tell them to go do some learning. But the end users are different - they just want to solve their problem well enough to use the product. You can't expect them to contribute. They're the ones when told to RTFM that will promptly insert a Windows CD and chalk it up to Linux being unusable.
My experience is, if you make it clear that you respect someone's time, and have spent a reasonable amount of effort trying to figure it out yourself before asking for help, people are more than willing to give you a hand.
That's not been my experience at all I'm afraid. And not just with Linux. There are reasonable people. Then there are real arrogant sods. Unfortunately the later outnumber the former.
Old threats are so rare that they may as well have disappeared.
Now that is an incredible display of ignorance. Old threats are routinely tracked and routinely only go away when the OS they infect or method of spread falls into disuse. If this is your idea of superior computer security expertise, you can keep it.
My wife's friend from high school died in a car accident a few weeks ago. She learnt about it on Facebook. All that's changed is the medium.
They didn't install their software on your servers, YOU did. So they didn't disrupt your business, YOU did. Whether it's because you were ignorant or lazy is irrelevant. It still comes down to YOU.
Actually I don't use the software, so I did nothing.
THEY chose to send a software update which they knew would disable their customer's antivirus. THEY did do something. YOU are a fool for refusing to accept that.
HA HA HA.....an out of date antivirus IS as bad as no antivirus. Dear God, I hope you don't work doing this stuff.
An out of date antivirus doesn't protect you against new stuff but the old threats don't just disappear. Go look at the literature before lecturing me on what you hope I don't work doing. Idiot.
Read the story. They didn't just disable new updates. They disabled the Antivirus engine altogether.
"ClamAV forced upgrade breaks email servers" should read "Failure to upgrade despite six months warning breaks email servers" or "Inattentive server admins cause massive downtime".
If ClamAV caused downtime by doing something to the system that broke it, ClamAV is the virus. Anti-virus software is suppose to prevent disruption of your system due to malware trying to do things with it that you did not intend.
What if someone had worked out a way to exploit the kill switch built into the server? Are you happy with other people being able to remotely kill your software? If so, you have no business commenting.
2. Stop supporting 0.94, leaving users who don't know to update basically unprotected..
Unprotected against new viruses is not the same as unprotected. Sending a final update critically broke the system. You're saying that's okay just to get the user's attention so that they're forced to upgrade. But the purpose of the antivirus tool is to prevent risk and impact on the business. In this case the update WAS the virus.