The worst Apple site I know about (I don't work there myself, which is why it isn't on my CV) is a publishing house. Half-days are lost to network problems frequently. People are forever having to walk halfway round the building to a printer that their Mac can actually see this afternoon. And so on.
All the Apple shops I've come across have had problems just like you get on Windows networks - wrong versions of drivers, printers disappearing from the network, servers not responding, somebody still has to manage the backups, etc etc. The only difference being that it's harder to find Apple sysadmins.
Your call is compared to all the other outstanding calls and if they're busy they only go to the highest priority ones.
Many people here say they want to pay more of the relevant local tax so as to get more police, but the politicians seem not to believe them and don't do it.
BTW, anyone who doesn't really understand what the police do with their time might find it interesting to spend a shift riding (or cycling or whatever) round with their local policeman. Access to this service is likely to differ in different places, but I just had to ask nicely.
... if you want to catch criminals, to make it safer for you to walk down the street, why not make a donation to your local police force?
I dunno what it's like in the US, but over here the police are always having to turn down requests from the public to enforce the law because they don't have enough money.
It is generally believed that if, say, the US government really wanted to hack something and was prepared to expend unlimited resources on the effort it would in due course succeed (if only by doing something as crude as conscripting every publicly-owned computer in the US and doing a distributed brute force attack).
In this particular instance they could, if they really wanted to, design and build and launch another satellite which sat next to the target one and snooped all the traffic in both directions - yer average script kiddie isn't about to do this, so the threat is different.
Anyone who doesn't try that hard doesn't have "enough" motivation and you're safe from them.
It's generally considered that silly children (the type of hacker usually discussed here) don't try that hard, industrial spies try rather harder and enemy governments in wartime try even harder.
You meet the threat accordingly. There's no point in wasting money trying to protect an SME's payroll system against an enemy government, for example.
How many of you think that you could decipher the structure of the command (given the motivation)?
Anything can be hacked given enough motivation. That's why different levels of security are applied to different perceived threats - you guess how much motivation the opposition are likely to muster and decide how much to invest in security accordingly.
Think back a few years to when buying a database engine involved months of price negotiation with a suited salesman and you ended up paying an absolute fortune. Or when you had to pay thousands of dollars for anything more sophisticated than the free C compiler than came with your proprietary Unix? Or when fonts were specialised products sold mostly to people like newspapers, again for thousands?
So MS introduced SQL Server for a grand or so compared to tens of thousands for the competitors.
And development tools for a few hundred compared to around ten times as much for the same thing on a Unix box.
MS themselves didn't directly drive font prices down from thousands or hundreds to pennies, but the introduction of Windows 3.1 did.
So now some of the competitors have been forced to drop their prices, or introduce low-end products, to compete with MS, and some aren't there any more, and the font market has changed beyond recognition. And the Unix development tool market was so ludicrously overpriced that there is now plenty of competition, some of it open source and/or free beer, on Unix as well.
Next? Well, the next thing that I would like to become "high volume low price" is mapping data. Down to the level of where the pipes and wires go in the pavement outside my house.
(Note for American readers: in the UK "conservative" is normally a term of abuse. Unlike the USA, where one gathers that "conservative" is normal and "liberal" is a term of abuse.)
(Further note for American readers: "Tory" means "Conservative".)
... stories from Ireland and the UK are likely to be written in English. The/. audience includes a good number of Americans who would probably prefer a story in English to one in Italian or Dutch or whatever.
Why are people still coding buffer overflows anyway?
Sure, I've seen fixed size buffers with no checking, or calls to malloc with no checking, on ancient Unix code written in C dating back to the 1980s, but surely nobody has written gibberish like that for years?
Or are there still hordes of new graduates, with no commercial training or experience, let loose on real products with no checking of their work?
No, I'm telling you that it's easier to learn and remember that to change anything you right click on it and choose Properties than it is to discover, learn and remember that to change one thing is CTRL-ALT-BACKSLASH whereas to change another thing is ESC ESC ] and to change another...
It's even worse if one has to go looking for documentation first. Just:
"if you want to change something you right click on it and choose Properties"
Well, many "embedded" systems are actually things like set top boxes, phones, and suchlike.
Much of the web, like it or not, is targetted at IE.
An operating system which only supports browsers with substantially less functionality than IE, eg it's harder to find downloadable plugins for common formats, is less likely to be used for these applications.
Everyone is telling you to put conduit in... this reminds me:
The Cambridge University Computing Service, several years back, wanted to run a network round the city to connect to various University departments, colleges etc. To pay fo this they had to persuade all these bodies to cough up a significant amount of money as their share of the capital costs.
Trouble was that people thought they were being asked to pay for high-tech stuff which would go out of date in a few years, so the marketing job was to persuade them that they were actually being asked to pay for an extremely low tech hole in the ground, through which any appropriate type of cable could easily and cheaply be drawn in years to come.
Each Windows OS does indeed implement the largely unchanged core Win32 API (which came out with NT, of course, not 95) but there are additions and variations throughout the product range, not all of which can be worked round by including an extra DLL or two with the app.
All the security APIs, btw, are not implemented in Win9x, and there are many other fundamental differences between the toy and real OSs. Most apps which say they only work on NT/2k do so for good reason, which is that they are using large chunks of Win32 which are not present on 9x. (On the other hand apps, such as virus checkers, which say they only work on NT Workstation and not NT Server have been deliberately crippled to try to make more money by charging more for the uncrippled version.)
Microsoft themselves, for example, earlier this year sent me a tool that ran on 2k and not on NT, because they'd used an API that wasn't on NT and they hadn't tested it on NT. When I complained they rewrote a couple of lines of code and shipped me a version that did run on NT.
Of course some apps which say "requires 98 or higher" on the box might actually run on 95. The marketroid who wrote the box may simply have been told "we haven't been arsed to test on Win95 so haven't a clue whether it works or not". Other apps will really not run on 95 because they use features not present on 95 for which there are no easy patches.
If "a lot of people were stung" it's because they deliberately chose to run executables that they unexpectedly received via email. After being told not to how many times?
The virus writers target Windows for the simple reason that almost everyone is running Windows.
If almost everyone were to switch to Brand X then yes, that would stop Windows viruses, but only because all the virus writers would now be writing for Brand X.
You get the high bandwidth quoted only when stationary next to a base station. If you're driving the bit rate drops to well below anything you'd want to use to watch video.
... as the rest of the world, and use them across the whole country.
Then we'll no longer have phones that work in only 199 countries of the world, we'll be able to get ones that work in the USA as well, and no longer be in a communications black hole when travelling to the States!
(For making voice calls, that is. Of course nobody wants video clips or other advertising on their phone.)
No, this didn't use my software engineering skills, but it did use my management experience gained on software projects. (Oh, and really you do need some experience of elections as well.)
[Most of the volunteers at the Kosovo election were looking forward with more or less trepidation to the call to Afghanistan in a couple of years' time...]
This one just needs a standard phone, but it's even easier to find DoS attacks against WAP phones.
Interestingly enough I have found the Microsoft browser to be less prone to crash than all the others I've tried. (But no, I still don't know why anyone would want a web browser on a (2G) cellphone.)
Slashdot Mirror
The worst Apple site I know about (I don't work there myself, which is why it isn't on my CV) is a publishing house. Half-days are lost to network problems frequently. People are forever having to walk halfway round the building to a printer that their Mac can actually see this afternoon. And so on.
All the Apple shops I've come across have had problems just like you get on Windows networks - wrong versions of drivers, printers disappearing from the network, servers not responding, somebody still has to manage the backups, etc etc. The only difference being that it's harder to find Apple sysadmins.
Not here.
Your call is compared to all the other outstanding calls and if they're busy they only go to the highest priority ones.
Many people here say they want to pay more of the relevant local tax so as to get more police, but the politicians seem not to believe them and don't do it.
BTW, anyone who doesn't really understand what the police do with their time might find it interesting to spend a shift riding (or cycling or whatever) round with their local policeman. Access to this service is likely to differ in different places, but I just had to ask nicely.
... if you want to catch criminals, to make it safer for you to walk down the street, why not make a donation to your local police force?
I dunno what it's like in the US, but over here the police are always having to turn down requests from the public to enforce the law because they don't have enough money.
Eg Europe, where reverse engineering is explicitly legal regardless of any terms and conditions the software vendor may seek to impose.
Why is this such a widespread belief?
It is generally believed that if, say, the US government really wanted to hack something and was prepared to expend unlimited resources on the effort it would in due course succeed (if only by doing something as crude as conscripting every publicly-owned computer in the US and doing a distributed brute force attack).
In this particular instance they could, if they really wanted to, design and build and launch another satellite which sat next to the target one and snooped all the traffic in both directions - yer average script kiddie isn't about to do this, so the threat is different.
Anyone who doesn't try that hard doesn't have "enough" motivation and you're safe from them.
It's generally considered that silly children (the type of hacker usually discussed here) don't try that hard, industrial spies try rather harder and enemy governments in wartime try even harder.
You meet the threat accordingly. There's no point in wasting money trying to protect an SME's payroll system against an enemy government, for example.
How many of you think that you could decipher the structure of the command (given the motivation)?
Anything can be hacked given enough motivation. That's why different levels of security are applied to different perceived threats - you guess how much motivation the opposition are likely to muster and decide how much to invest in security accordingly.
Lots of MS software is high volume low price.
Think back a few years to when buying a database engine involved months of price negotiation with a suited salesman and you ended up paying an absolute fortune. Or when you had to pay thousands of dollars for anything more sophisticated than the free C compiler than came with your proprietary Unix? Or when fonts were specialised products sold mostly to people like newspapers, again for thousands?
So MS introduced SQL Server for a grand or so compared to tens of thousands for the competitors.
And development tools for a few hundred compared to around ten times as much for the same thing on a Unix box.
MS themselves didn't directly drive font prices down from thousands or hundreds to pennies, but the introduction of Windows 3.1 did.
So now some of the competitors have been forced to drop their prices, or introduce low-end products, to compete with MS, and some aren't there any more, and the font market has changed beyond recognition. And the Unix development tool market was so ludicrously overpriced that there is now plenty of competition, some of it open source and/or free beer, on Unix as well.
Next? Well, the next thing that I would like to become "high volume low price" is mapping data. Down to the level of where the pipes and wires go in the pavement outside my house.
(Note for American readers: in the UK "conservative" is normally a term of abuse. Unlike the USA, where one gathers that "conservative" is normal and "liberal" is a term of abuse.)
(Further note for American readers: "Tory" means "Conservative".)
respective keyboards will have it already on their keys
;" (without the spaces) and displayed correctly.
It's on the two year old keyboard I'm using right now. "ALT GR" and "4".
Now let's see how Unicode-clean slashdot is:
""
Well, I keyed "ALT GR" and "4", and it got somehow translated to "& # 8364
It isn't in ASCII.
... stories from Ireland and the UK are likely to be written in English. The /. audience includes a good number of Americans who would probably prefer a story in English to one in Italian or Dutch or whatever.
No, sorry, forgot - this is slashdot.
Why are people still coding buffer overflows anyway?
Sure, I've seen fixed size buffers with no checking, or calls to malloc with no checking, on ancient Unix code written in C dating back to the 1980s, but surely nobody has written gibberish like that for years?
Or are there still hordes of new graduates, with no commercial training or experience, let loose on real products with no checking of their work?
No, I'm telling you that it's easier to learn and remember that to change anything you right click on it and choose Properties than it is to discover, learn and remember that to change one thing is CTRL-ALT-BACKSLASH whereas to change another thing is ESC ESC ] and to change another ...
It's even worse if one has to go looking for documentation first. Just:
"if you want to change something you right click on it and choose Properties"
you learn once, and then you can work everything.
Ctrl+Alt+ keypad [+] or keypad [-]. If that doesn't work, you need to edit /etc/X11/XF86Config-4.
I'd rather just right click, myself.
Well, many "embedded" systems are actually things like set top boxes, phones, and suchlike.
Much of the web, like it or not, is targetted at IE.
An operating system which only supports browsers with substantially less functionality than IE, eg it's harder to find downloadable plugins for common formats, is less likely to be used for these applications.
Everyone is telling you to put conduit in ... this reminds me:
The Cambridge University Computing Service, several years back, wanted to run a network round the city to connect to various University departments, colleges etc. To pay fo this they had to persuade all these bodies to cough up a significant amount of money as their share of the capital costs.
Trouble was that people thought they were being asked to pay for high-tech stuff which would go out of date in a few years, so the marketing job was to persuade them that they were actually being asked to pay for an extremely low tech hole in the ground, through which any appropriate type of cable could easily and cheaply be drawn in years to come.
This worked. The hole got built.
Each Windows OS does indeed implement the largely unchanged core Win32 API (which came out with NT, of course, not 95) but there are additions and variations throughout the product range, not all of which can be worked round by including an extra DLL or two with the app.
All the security APIs, btw, are not implemented in Win9x, and there are many other fundamental differences between the toy and real OSs. Most apps which say they only work on NT/2k do so for good reason, which is that they are using large chunks of Win32 which are not present on 9x. (On the other hand apps, such as virus checkers, which say they only work on NT Workstation and not NT Server have been deliberately crippled to try to make more money by charging more for the uncrippled version.)
Microsoft themselves, for example, earlier this year sent me a tool that ran on 2k and not on NT, because they'd used an API that wasn't on NT and they hadn't tested it on NT. When I complained they rewrote a couple of lines of code and shipped me a version that did run on NT.
Of course some apps which say "requires 98 or higher" on the box might actually run on 95. The marketroid who wrote the box may simply have been told "we haven't been arsed to test on Win95 so haven't a clue whether it works or not". Other apps will really not run on 95 because they use features not present on 95 for which there are no easy patches.
If "a lot of people were stung" it's because they deliberately chose to run executables that they unexpectedly received via email. After being told not to how many times?
The virus writers target Windows for the simple reason that almost everyone is running Windows.
If almost everyone were to switch to Brand X then yes, that would stop Windows viruses, but only because all the virus writers would now be writing for Brand X.
You get the high bandwidth quoted only when stationary next to a base station. If you're driving the bit rate drops to well below anything you'd want to use to watch video.
... as the rest of the world, and use them across the whole country.
Then we'll no longer have phones that work in only 199 countries of the world, we'll be able to get ones that work in the USA as well, and no longer be in a communications black hole when travelling to the States!
(For making voice calls, that is. Of course nobody wants video clips or other advertising on their phone.)
... helping to run the election.
...]
No, this didn't use my software engineering skills, but it did use my management experience gained on software projects. (Oh, and really you do need some experience of elections as well.)
[Most of the volunteers at the Kosovo election were looking forward with more or less trepidation to the call to Afghanistan in a couple of years' time
This one just needs a standard phone, but it's even easier to find DoS attacks against WAP phones.
Interestingly enough I have found the Microsoft browser to be less prone to crash than all the others I've tried. (But no, I still don't know why anyone would want a web browser on a (2G) cellphone.)