please don't try to pretend that getting hardware to work in linux is easier than windows. remember that we're talking about our grandparents here when we use the phrase "ease of use" and "useability"
Exactly, we're talking about people who won't be using an ATI All-In-Wonder capture card. We're talking about people who will be using a cable modem, a sound card, and maybe a digital camera.
I've never tried anything with a fancy graphics card on Linux. I've tried to install a moderately-fancy graphics card on Windows (this was win2k, about 3 years ago), and only succeeded after 2 days of searching deja to find this weird problem that took 2 manufacturer patches to solved. If I ever try a high-performance video card on Linux I'll update my rant.
However, I have tried configuring digital cameras and network devices on Linux and Windows. IN MY EXPERIENCE Linux was easy and Windows sometimes was easy, sometimes was very hard and sometimes didn't work at all. Maybe you've had the opposite experience, but I think *any* hardware installation is going to be hit-or-miss, especially for a non-technical user.
The example I will continue to use is http://slashdot.org/. When it stops forcing a refresh to fix the sidebar then I will believe Firefox is "acceptable".
Can you explain to me what you're talking about? I've been reading/. on moz for years now and there's always been a sidebar. I've never had to refresh to see it. What problem are you having with it?
Once IE and Office run on Linux natively then Linux can finally be branded "the Windows killer." Until that time it just cannot have it beat.
Sorry, dude, but have never had anyone I've shown firefox to complain about the ways it's different from IE. Office you may have a point about, though about 85% of companies don't need MS Office and don't use most of its features.
I get to visit webpages that do not format correctly in Firefox (at least not without some discomfort)
Really? I don't. Can you name any offhand?
Right and when you get new hardware, plug it in, and restart, what does XP do? Hey, holy shit user, you have new hardware, we need drivers! Oh wait, we have them right here, no recompiles or modules need to be loaded.
OK, I admit, you just gave me a good laugh. Thank you. I switched to Linux for my personal desktops a few years ago because my camera and scanner wouldn't work with Windows but would with SuSE. Here's what my recent experience with adding hardware in XP has been like:
Plug in the hardware
Turn the computer back on (if it was PCI and not USB)
Watch Windows say "I found new hardware"
Watch Windows say "unable to find driver for hardware" (despite the fact that the manufacturer claimed it would work on XP with no problems)
Loading the driver from CD-ROM
Watching the camera start to take a picture and then lose all power
Watch as my USB wifi receiver shuts off inexplicably
Notice in Device Manager that Windows XP has now lost both the camera's drivers I installed and the USB wifi drivers I had isntalled much earlier
Having the whole screen lock up and not respond even to the three-finger-salute
Cursing
Plugging the camera into a SuSE box
Taking pictures
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if I lived in the world that most/.ers seem to wherein Windows XP works better with hardware than Linux, I would have stuck to keeping Linux on the server. However, in my experience, Windows XP simply doesn't handle hardware well and Linux does. YMMV I guess.
All the applications he lists (OpenOffice, Mozilla, GNU Cash) are no where near the level of their Windows counterparts.
Well, I don't use OpenOffice or GNU Cash (Star Office and whatever money program came with my Palm Pilot, personally). However, I will agree that Mozilla is nowhere near the level of IE: it's at least 2 generations ahead of it.
This conclusion is bogus. Basically all hardware works just fine with Windows.
OK, I call bullshit. Tons of hardware doesn't work well or easily with Windows. People just never have to deal with it because Windows gets preinstalled.
i think you're wrong. that "well-roundedness" part is designed to provide the lubrication for the working machine.
Well, actually, in theory it's because we are expected to choose our own goverment and therefore need to be able to think on our own.
i'd rather spend two years concentrating on the skillset that i intend to employ professionally, and then, if i feel like it, educate myself on the other stuff.
Well, it's your life. But as someone employed as a sysadmin with a Liberal Arts degree, I would humbly suggest that you might think about reversing that order. Get an education first, then worry about getting job skills. An education will let you figure out what you actually want out of life; you can then decide what if any employment will help you achieve those goals.
And broad education is *not* about "people skills" particularly. It's about breadth of knowledge, ability to tie together ideas from different fields, and ability to learn diverse subjects quickly. Or, as they used to say at my alma mater, it's about becoming a free and happy human being.
Personally I think the university in TFA sounds stupid. They may call that degree a BSCS, but it's just not a Bachelor's degree. A Bachelor's degree is not an industry certification. It's not an industry certification. It's not a sign of fitness to work at a particular job. It's a sign that you dedicated 4 years of your life to beer^H^H^H^H learning in an at least nominally interdisciplinary environment.
Northface is a trade school. There's nothing wrong with trade schools. But it shouldn't call itself a university or its certification a "bachelor's degree". The article even says it's not intended for students out of high school but rather to retrain current workers -- people who, hopefully, already have an education.
We don't live in a democracy. We live in a republic. There's a distinction.
Only in the sense that there is a distinction between "red" and "tall": they are not the same, nor are the exclusive. They are orthogonal.
A republic is a government whose chief of state is not a monarch (so, yes, the USSR was composed of actual republics -- but the USSR itself was not a Republic since it had no chief of state, which is why summits in the Cold War were so difficult for protocol officers: Kennedy/Nixon/Reagan/etc. were both Chiefs of State and a Heads of Government whereas Kruschev/Brezhnev/Gorbachev/etc. were neither, but only party officials; like the head of the DNC or RNC).
A democracy is a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections. This form of government may be a Republic or it may not (eg, the UK is a monarchical democracy, while the US is a republican democracy). Similarly, a republic may or may not be democratic (eg, Ba'athist Iraq was a Republic because Saddam Houssein was the chief of state but was not a monarch).
So, claiming the USA is not a democracy because it is a republic is like claiming "that building is not red because it is tall".
Not to echo half of your previous replies, but it depends on what your CTO wants. Most manager-types I've consulted for have this idea that there's this magical technology somewhere that makes them suddenly understand their business like they did when it had 20 employees. And for whatever reasons they think that software is a groupware suite.
In my experience, Exchange commits some design sins that are so grevious that there are almost no good situations in which to use it:
All the public emails are stored in a single information store file. Ditto the private emails, contacts, calendar entries. So that's 4 files that hold all of your organization's "crucial" information. These files break easily; in my experience about once a year on a good RAID and much more often on bad hardware or more than about 500 users. At that point your options are rolling back to a backup (which, btw, requires a special expensive plugin for any backup software suite) or paying data recovery people a few hundred dollars to get it back.
Moreover, when even one of those stores go down, the other stores usually stop working. So if your contacts store gets corrupted, you can't use your calendar or send email.
They incorporated email, calendaring and contact management into a single software package. Bad design in principle, but fine. The worse problem is there's no way to extend it to work with the rest of your particular fulfillment chain. Want to do some lead management with your contacts? Host a local NNTP server you want indexed in a public folder as though it were a thread of emails? Want all calendar entries to display in the home office's local time? Tough... pay through the nose for MS's CRM solution, because there's no way to write one yourself without having to reimpliment most of what Exchange does.
You can't distribute its components (mail, calendaring, contacts, etc.) on your network without a lot of handwaving and paying for a lot more licenses.
I've consulted for quite a few managers who really really wanted Exchange. In each case I told them they didn't need it. It can be a real blow to a manager's ego to have to accept that he doesn't run an "enterprise", but in 99% of the cases that's true.
Exchange is a mediocre MTA, a slightly sub-mediocre contact manager, and a slightly better-than-mediocre calendaring system with some glue scripting that sometimes works to tie them all together but often doesn't. Its sweet spot performance-wise is from about 100 to about 300 users broken into 10-15 organizational groups, working on a single VLAN, transporting no more than about 20,000 messages a day total. If your organization fits those criteria, Exchange may well be a good solution for you. If not, I can tell you from my clients' bitter experience and my very expensive overtime cleaning up after it that Exchange WILL end up costing you a lot more money than almost any other solution.
Most managers who want to use Exchange want a public calendar, a big contact database, and IMAP email. That's not rocket science. There are outstanding mail transport agents, contact databases, and public calendars; if you can't get a developer to pipe them together for *much* less than an exchange license, you're looking in the wrong places for developers. Plus, your support costs will be much less with that solution since you don't have the single, concentrated point of frequent failure that Exchange becomes.
And I live in DC, fwiw. btw: we were hit too. Why is that always forgotten by New Yorkers?
And why do Washingtonians always forget their city stops at the south bank of the boundary channel, just past the GW parkway, and that the Pentagon is in the Commonwealth of Virginia?
Sveasoft is using the GPL in a creative, but legal way.
How is it even "creative"? It's explicitly allowed by the GPL, this point is clarified by a lot of the FSF's writings, and companies (like, for instance, the one I work for) have been doing it for a long time. We sell our GPL'd software for tens of thousands of dollars in some cases. Our customers have every right to redistribute it, but who's going to pay $10k to give something away?
Funny, I remember when "Broadband" was used to refer to anything that was not "Baseband", ie, anything that only used part of the available physical spectrum for transmission.
You mean kinda like the RunAs service, which you can access by doing shift-rightclick on an executable and picking Run As... ?
No. For a comparison of the concepts, get to a Linux shell somewhere and compare "man su" to "man 2 setuid" (setuid is a system call, not a program itself).
Windows implements something very much like "su", the "runas" command (on a Windows command prompt, "runas/?" for usage). This runs the requested application as another user. It also requires knowing the other user's password (I seem to recall you need to know the password even for a privilege downgrade, but I could well be wrong about that bit). So, the ability to runas (or su) implies root/Administrator access to the system in question, since you must have that password to do it.
OTOH, POSIX systems also implement setuid, which allows a processes's effective userid and groupid to be changed. A famous example of this is sudo, where root can allow certain programs normally requiring root access to be run by non privileged users. To my knowledge Windows has no such facility: if I want to schedule a task requiring Administrator access, I must save the Administrator password in whatever Windows calls its cron table -- but more to the point, I must know it in the first place. If I can do anything privileged on a Windows machine, I can do everything privileged.
Allowing a true sudo/setuid would be a HUGE step towards securing Windows -- in my opinion it's the biggest step Microsoft should take if they want Windows to be a serious choice for the corporate desktop. I know AD Group Policies allow control almost as fine-grained as setuid and setgid, but this still leaves several problems:
Not every Windows install is part of an Active Directory
Correct local security configuration should not depend on the network's LDAP service
Group Policy is in my experience brittle and prone to difficult-to-trace bugs
And I still probably wouldn't be able to pipe them togather or script them to build a more powerful sum of the indivdual parts.
I totally hear you on the rest of your post, but actually pretty much all of the bourne redirectors work on the Windows command line: | pipes, > redirects, >> appends. Windows doesn't really have a concept of "stderr" as a separate stream so there's not much sense in 2> or 2>&1. Also, findstr is like grep, route works mostly like/sbin/route, etc. These tools are there just aren't often used.
Still, when I do sit down at a Windows machine the first thing I have to do is spend about a day finding and installing the software I need for the machine to be usable (perl, lisp, a firewall, ksh, emacs, firefox, etc.) and for the most part it's just not worth my time.
I also have a problem that judging from/. comments is unique. Windows XP feels incredibly slow to me. Unbelievably slow. I've timed it, and IE can take about 15 seconds to start. MS Office has taken 30 (yes, somehow OOo is actually faster. I never thought I would see the day). And the startup is very slow too: it can take about 3 or 4 minutes for all 5 icons in the notification area to appear; and until they are all there if I try to start *any* application the computer can freeze up. This is the kind of crap that I've just never had to put up with on Linux, and frankly I just don't see the appeal of Windows especially considering how much I'd have to pay for the inferior performance.
No, I just meant the whois query was for the correct domain but when I was typing the response here I accidentally added an "l". That info is the whois query for refestltd.com.
When an outbound HTTPS connection is made to such a URL, the BHO then grabs any outbound POST/GET data from within IE before it is encrypted by SSL. When it captures data, it creates an outbound HTTP connection to http://www.refestltd.com/cgi-bin/yes.pl and feeds the captured data to the script found at that location.
Intrigued, I went to those scumware vendors and saw that they are, in fact, dishing out scumware. So, in the interests of justice:
whois refestltd.com Domain name: reflestltd.com
Registrant: Jay Seaton (6PPPG) jay@tremjade.com
United States
(913)6814254
Not that I condone using that information for any nefarious purposes...
If all viruses were based on security holes in software, you would have a point. But they aren't.
Many (most?) malicious programs do not exploit any software security holes; they just rely on stupid or careless users. The point of something like Norton Antivirus is not to make up for security holes in Windows/Office/whatever, it's mostly to mitigate users' carelessness or naivete.
And against known attacks? That's what yum and apt are for. If a virus is unable to affect your computer, then what is anti-virus good for?
Can your user account on your computer send mail? Connect to an arbitrary Internet host? Hell, spawn a process? If so, congratulations! you have just become a potential target of malicious software. Proprietary AV software doesn't particularly look for holes in OS's and applications, it looks at files and running processes for A) known signatures and B) known malicious behavior. I think an open source AV solution could potentially do that better.
As much as I admire the clam folks, it's just not there yet.
AV is something that could really benefit from an open, distributed development model if we could find the right precautions to take. If users could report and characterise malicious attacks as they happen, I think we could start to offer an alternative to the big AV company's virus dictionaries (sort of like wikipedia compared to britannica).
Obviously this would not be an easy thing to set up well (consider the. We would need some sort of "karma" like system that would reward reporting users for correctly identifying malicious software and punish them for incorrectly identifying it.
The other thing it would require is a client that could profile and find signatures for the malicious processes/files, and some trust mechanism for these signatures to be put into a central database. Again, this would lead to some interesting security dilemmas but I don't think it's anything insurmountable.
Antivirus software (openav is getting there, but isn't there yet)
Antimalware software
Antivirus software
Activity auditing software for multiple LDAP/auth schemes
A firewall for windows
Antivirus software
#5 is a Windows-only deficiency, but the rest aren't. I mentioned Antivirus software 3 times because I think it's at least 3 times as important as the others. As more and more (read: dumber and dumber) people migrate to non-Windows platforms, viruses and malware are going to start to be more of a problem for those of us on Better Platforms.
Not really. Mailing to AOL is a hit-or-miss thing. We run a lot of mailing lists (bands' fanlists, organiztions' newsletters, etc.) and about half of the time you have AOL addresses on a list they bounce it. And they don't *just* bounce it, they set up a slow-ass connection to your bounce server and time it out (clever idea actually).
So, if you were a spammer, AOL addresses would be of dubious use.
IIRC the hotfix for the offensive characters (some font had a swastika or something like that) was listed with the "critical" updates on windows update. Maybe I'm remembering wrong though.
I have a theory that as a response to the "radical liberalism" of the past decades, and since 9/11, we've seen a growth of "radical conservatives"
Eh? "Radical liberalism" of the 1990's? Where were you?
The 90s were a decidedly conservative decade compared to the 70s (consider: Nixon created the EPA & NEA. Clinton slashed the Federal gov't to half the size it was when he took office.) Clinton was forced to the right of Nixon on a lot of things. For that matter, the "center" today is to the right of Goldwater 40 years ago on some issues. We don't notice this because the media are so conservative. There have been radical conservatives since Goldwater and LaRouche; the last real radical liberal we had was Hoffman (though Moore is making some headway now).
That would make more sense, wouldn't it? But this is accounting. Oddly enough, if I buy a new server to put my web hosting clients on, that server is "profit". If I overpay for the same server, the overpayment amount is "goodwill". Which is why I'm glad I'm not an accountant...
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, we're talking about people who won't be using an ATI All-In-Wonder capture card. We're talking about people who will be using a cable modem, a sound card, and maybe a digital camera.
I've never tried anything with a fancy graphics card on Linux. I've tried to install a moderately-fancy graphics card on Windows (this was win2k, about 3 years ago), and only succeeded after 2 days of searching deja to find this weird problem that took 2 manufacturer patches to solved. If I ever try a high-performance video card on Linux I'll update my rant.
However, I have tried configuring digital cameras and network devices on Linux and Windows. IN MY EXPERIENCE Linux was easy and Windows sometimes was easy, sometimes was very hard and sometimes didn't work at all. Maybe you've had the opposite experience, but I think *any* hardware installation is going to be hit-or-miss, especially for a non-technical user.
Can you explain to me what you're talking about? I've been reading /. on moz for years now and there's always been a sidebar. I've never had to refresh to see it. What problem are you having with it?
Sorry, dude, but have never had anyone I've shown firefox to complain about the ways it's different from IE. Office you may have a point about, though about 85% of companies don't need MS Office and don't use most of its features.
Really? I don't. Can you name any offhand?
OK, I admit, you just gave me a good laugh. Thank you. I switched to Linux for my personal desktops a few years ago because my camera and scanner wouldn't work with Windows but would with SuSE. Here's what my recent experience with adding hardware in XP has been like:
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if I lived in the world that most /.ers seem to wherein Windows XP works better with hardware than Linux, I would have stuck to keeping Linux on the server. However, in my experience, Windows XP simply doesn't handle hardware well and Linux does. YMMV I guess.
Well, I don't use OpenOffice or GNU Cash (Star Office and whatever money program came with my Palm Pilot, personally). However, I will agree that Mozilla is nowhere near the level of IE: it's at least 2 generations ahead of it.
OK, I call bullshit. Tons of hardware doesn't work well or easily with Windows. People just never have to deal with it because Windows gets preinstalled.
Well, actually, in theory it's because we are expected to choose our own goverment and therefore need to be able to think on our own.
Well, it's your life. But as someone employed as a sysadmin with a Liberal Arts degree, I would humbly suggest that you might think about reversing that order. Get an education first, then worry about getting job skills. An education will let you figure out what you actually want out of life; you can then decide what if any employment will help you achieve those goals.
And broad education is *not* about "people skills" particularly. It's about breadth of knowledge, ability to tie together ideas from different fields, and ability to learn diverse subjects quickly. Or, as they used to say at my alma mater, it's about becoming a free and happy human being.
Personally I think the university in TFA sounds stupid. They may call that degree a BSCS, but it's just not a Bachelor's degree. A Bachelor's degree is not an industry certification. It's not an industry certification. It's not a sign of fitness to work at a particular job. It's a sign that you dedicated 4 years of your life to beer^H^H^H^H learning in an at least nominally interdisciplinary environment.
Northface is a trade school. There's nothing wrong with trade schools. But it shouldn't call itself a university or its certification a "bachelor's degree". The article even says it's not intended for students out of high school but rather to retrain current workers -- people who, hopefully, already have an education.
Only in the sense that there is a distinction between "red" and "tall": they are not the same, nor are the exclusive. They are orthogonal.
A republic is a government whose chief of state is not a monarch (so, yes, the USSR was composed of actual republics -- but the USSR itself was not a Republic since it had no chief of state, which is why summits in the Cold War were so difficult for protocol officers: Kennedy/Nixon/Reagan/etc. were both Chiefs of State and a Heads of Government whereas Kruschev/Brezhnev/Gorbachev/etc. were neither, but only party officials; like the head of the DNC or RNC).
A democracy is a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections. This form of government may be a Republic or it may not (eg, the UK is a monarchical democracy, while the US is a republican democracy). Similarly, a republic may or may not be democratic (eg, Ba'athist Iraq was a Republic because Saddam Houssein was the chief of state but was not a monarch).
So, claiming the USA is not a democracy because it is a republic is like claiming "that building is not red because it is tall".
Not to echo half of your previous replies, but it depends on what your CTO wants. Most manager-types I've consulted for have this idea that there's this magical technology somewhere that makes them suddenly understand their business like they did when it had 20 employees. And for whatever reasons they think that software is a groupware suite.
In my experience, Exchange commits some design sins that are so grevious that there are almost no good situations in which to use it:
I've consulted for quite a few managers who really really wanted Exchange. In each case I told them they didn't need it. It can be a real blow to a manager's ego to have to accept that he doesn't run an "enterprise", but in 99% of the cases that's true.
Exchange is a mediocre MTA, a slightly sub-mediocre contact manager, and a slightly better-than-mediocre calendaring system with some glue scripting that sometimes works to tie them all together but often doesn't. Its sweet spot performance-wise is from about 100 to about 300 users broken into 10-15 organizational groups, working on a single VLAN, transporting no more than about 20,000 messages a day total. If your organization fits those criteria, Exchange may well be a good solution for you. If not, I can tell you from my clients' bitter experience and my very expensive overtime cleaning up after it that Exchange WILL end up costing you a lot more money than almost any other solution.
Most managers who want to use Exchange want a public calendar, a big contact database, and IMAP email. That's not rocket science. There are outstanding mail transport agents, contact databases, and public calendars; if you can't get a developer to pipe them together for *much* less than an exchange license, you're looking in the wrong places for developers. Plus, your support costs will be much less with that solution since you don't have the single, concentrated point of frequent failure that Exchange becomes.
And why do Washingtonians always forget their city stops at the south bank of the boundary channel, just past the GW parkway, and that the Pentagon is in the Commonwealth of Virginia?
How is it even "creative"? It's explicitly allowed by the GPL, this point is clarified by a lot of the FSF's writings, and companies (like, for instance, the one I work for) have been doing it for a long time. We sell our GPL'd software for tens of thousands of dollars in some cases. Our customers have every right to redistribute it, but who's going to pay $10k to give something away?
Routers don't forward the MAC addresses of the communicating nodes. That's the beauty of a stacked protocol like TCP/IP.
Funny, I remember when "Broadband" was used to refer to anything that was not "Baseband", ie, anything that only used part of the available physical spectrum for transmission.
No. For a comparison of the concepts, get to a Linux shell somewhere and compare "man su" to "man 2 setuid" (setuid is a system call, not a program itself).
Windows implements something very much like "su", the "runas" command (on a Windows command prompt, "runas /?" for usage). This runs the requested application as another user. It also requires knowing the other user's password (I seem to recall you need to know the password even for a privilege downgrade, but I could well be wrong about that bit). So, the ability to runas (or su) implies root/Administrator access to the system in question, since you must have that password to do it.
OTOH, POSIX systems also implement setuid, which allows a processes's effective userid and groupid to be changed. A famous example of this is sudo, where root can allow certain programs normally requiring root access to be run by non privileged users. To my knowledge Windows has no such facility: if I want to schedule a task requiring Administrator access, I must save the Administrator password in whatever Windows calls its cron table -- but more to the point, I must know it in the first place. If I can do anything privileged on a Windows machine, I can do everything privileged.
Allowing a true sudo/setuid would be a HUGE step towards securing Windows -- in my opinion it's the biggest step Microsoft should take if they want Windows to be a serious choice for the corporate desktop. I know AD Group Policies allow control almost as fine-grained as setuid and setgid, but this still leaves several problems:
I totally hear you on the rest of your post, but actually pretty much all of the bourne redirectors work on the Windows command line: | pipes, > redirects, >> appends. Windows doesn't really have a concept of "stderr" as a separate stream so there's not much sense in 2> or 2>&1. Also, findstr is like grep, route works mostly like /sbin/route, etc. These tools are there just aren't often used.
Still, when I do sit down at a Windows machine the first thing I have to do is spend about a day finding and installing the software I need for the machine to be usable (perl, lisp, a firewall, ksh, emacs, firefox, etc.) and for the most part it's just not worth my time.
I also have a problem that judging from /. comments is unique. Windows XP feels incredibly slow to me. Unbelievably slow. I've timed it, and IE can take about 15 seconds to start. MS Office has taken 30 (yes, somehow OOo is actually faster. I never thought I would see the day). And the startup is very slow too: it can take about 3 or 4 minutes for all 5 icons in the notification area to appear; and until they are all there if I try to start *any* application the computer can freeze up. This is the kind of crap that I've just never had to put up with on Linux, and frankly I just don't see the appeal of Windows especially considering how much I'd have to pay for the inferior performance.
Try again. I had a typo when I was typing the response from the whois query; the query was for refestltd.com.
And anyways, if this guy's being joe jobbed, this is the wakeup call he needs.
No, I just meant the whois query was for the correct domain but when I was typing the response here I accidentally added an "l". That info is the whois query for refestltd.com.
Unlike the domain name, that will not be fraudulant:
host www.refestltd.com
66.226.64.11
whois 66.226.64.0
Abacus America Inc.
ABAC
5276 Eastgate Mall
San Diego
CA
support@aplus.net
That query is for "refestldt.com" and I stupidly typed "reflestldt.com" after "domain name". The whois info is accurate, just not what I typed there.
Intrigued, I went to those scumware vendors and saw that they are, in fact, dishing out scumware. So, in the interests of justice:
whois refestltd.com
Domain name: reflestltd.com
Registrant: Jay Seaton (6PPPG) jay@tremjade.com
United States
(913)6814254
Not that I condone using that information for any nefarious purposes...
If all viruses were based on security holes in software, you would have a point. But they aren't.
Many (most?) malicious programs do not exploit any software security holes; they just rely on stupid or careless users. The point of something like Norton Antivirus is not to make up for security holes in Windows/Office/whatever, it's mostly to mitigate users' carelessness or naivete.
Can your user account on your computer send mail? Connect to an arbitrary Internet host? Hell, spawn a process? If so, congratulations! you have just become a potential target of malicious software. Proprietary AV software doesn't particularly look for holes in OS's and applications, it looks at files and running processes for A) known signatures and B) known malicious behavior. I think an open source AV solution could potentially do that better.
As much as I admire the clam folks, it's just not there yet.
AV is something that could really benefit from an open, distributed development model if we could find the right precautions to take. If users could report and characterise malicious attacks as they happen, I think we could start to offer an alternative to the big AV company's virus dictionaries (sort of like wikipedia compared to britannica).
Obviously this would not be an easy thing to set up well (consider the. We would need some sort of "karma" like system that would reward reporting users for correctly identifying malicious software and punish them for incorrectly identifying it.
The other thing it would require is a client that could profile and find signatures for the malicious processes/files, and some trust mechanism for these signatures to be put into a central database. Again, this would lead to some interesting security dilemmas but I don't think it's anything insurmountable.
#5 is a Windows-only deficiency, but the rest aren't. I mentioned Antivirus software 3 times because I think it's at least 3 times as important as the others. As more and more (read: dumber and dumber) people migrate to non-Windows platforms, viruses and malware are going to start to be more of a problem for those of us on Better Platforms.
Not really. Mailing to AOL is a hit-or-miss thing. We run a lot of mailing lists (bands' fanlists, organiztions' newsletters, etc.) and about half of the time you have AOL addresses on a list they bounce it. And they don't *just* bounce it, they set up a slow-ass connection to your bounce server and time it out (clever idea actually).
So, if you were a spammer, AOL addresses would be of dubious use.
Or "excessively", as in, you are too concerned about grammar to post anything on /.
IIRC the hotfix for the offensive characters (some font had a swastika or something like that) was listed with the "critical" updates on windows update. Maybe I'm remembering wrong though.
Eh? "Radical liberalism" of the 1990's? Where were you?
The 90s were a decidedly conservative decade compared to the 70s (consider: Nixon created the EPA & NEA. Clinton slashed the Federal gov't to half the size it was when he took office.) Clinton was forced to the right of Nixon on a lot of things. For that matter, the "center" today is to the right of Goldwater 40 years ago on some issues. We don't notice this because the media are so conservative. There have been radical conservatives since Goldwater and LaRouche; the last real radical liberal we had was Hoffman (though Moore is making some headway now).
That would make more sense, wouldn't it? But this is accounting. Oddly enough, if I buy a new server to put my web hosting clients on, that server is "profit". If I overpay for the same server, the overpayment amount is "goodwill". Which is why I'm glad I'm not an accountant...