If you want to prevent tracking, on Firefox,Ghostery and uBlock Origin are your friends:) That and a nice hosts file will keep you out of a lot of trouble:) This new Firefox feature sounds really sweet, this makes a lot of sense. If all the Operating Systems can support "multiple users", why can't our browsers, in 2016, support segregation of web sessions? Make the frontier the Window, the browser instance, the tab, I don't care. Just give us the option to have multiple identities when connected and that's a huge step forward. The "incognito" or "private" mode was a step in the right direction, but that makes the total number of simultaneous identities to 2: the incognito window and the normal one. I believe this is a good step on the right direction, decoupling the sessions from all the "infrastructure" (cookies,history, etc.) is the foundation to later add all the customization and segmentation we might want. Again, on any modern OS, you will get your own "partition" of the system configurations (registry or configuration files), so in essence, the browsers must go the route of the OS: enable multiple identities, running segregated on the same machine, without interfering with each other.
Yes, Avatar was a big hit, a technical breakthrough, but IMO the time window as passed. 9 years for a sequel to Avatar is a bit too much, I doubt it that Avatar 2 will be anywhere close to Avatar in terms of success. Maybe one sequel would be interesting and work out somehow, but 4? Yeah that's some cow-milking right there, except the cow already went home. The reason why big franchises like Star Wars, the MCU or even Fast and the Furious keeps drawing people in is because we are invested in the characters, in the stories, in those universes. That could have happened to Avatar, the potential was there, but the time passed, people moved on, there was nothing there for 9 years to sustain the "love". Cameron trying to jump-start a "true epic saga" with 4 sequels to a movie 7 years old is more or less the same as DC trying to catch-up with 8 years of MCU movies with just one single film. You can't compensate for a gap of 8 years and at least 12 movies with 1 single movie, and you can't create an "true epic saga" by creating 4 sequels to a movie who's flame has notoriously faded away. So Avatar will have 4 sequels? Who really cares these days?
To be honest, securing email is not that hard, unless you want to "manually" set up a structure to check messages for weird stuff. You can "outsource" an email hygiene service, to handle the inbound of your email, clean it, and deliver it to your own server (either Exchange or some other thing). You can do that for outbound as well, so your Exchange (or some other thing) will only send and receive SMTP on port 25 from a very specific group of know IPs (the ones from your email hygiene service provider). This alone will take away a huge chunk of the on-premisses worries with email security (no need to worry about spam attacks, bursts in email messages, workload increases, etc, etc). You just pay other guys to handle that for you. Of course, you can do that with spam assassin, a couple of linux boxes and such (and your email hygiene supplier will most likely be doing something similar). The difference is that they are payed and specialized in keeping an eye on email security and the latest trends, and for you, usually, this is just one of the many "hats" you wear as an IT administrator.
If it's a volume license key, it should be ok (and even then that should be "triangulated" with the number of activations allowed). If it's a retail key (that should be used on only one computer), that's not ok. Also, if a KMS server is being used (that acts as a sort of "proxy" for internal activations), and its key is blacklisted, also not ok. These might be some of the forensic analysis that is done on that data. Just an educated guess:)
... maybe the iPads are their "personal" devices and the Surface are "work" devices?
Nothing against people using either iPads, Surfaces or Nexus, but perhaps the Surfaces are "work assigned" gear, and being managed centrally via GPOs and AD (it is Windows afterall, so it is definitly possible), and maybe are locked down from "amusing sites" and games, and so the commentators have to use their iPads for their Facebook or Farmville fixes.
So, to make "rich people" travel in weightlessness is bad, but the war and military objectives for almost every single technological breakthrough we had last century is good. Count them: the car, the submarine, the internet, GPS, planes, etc. Of course, not all these claimed lives, but many died for all this. That is acceptable, I suppose.
I just don't understand how people that are a little bit tech savvy cope with ads. The first things I do on a new computer (mine or a relative/friend)is:
- install Adblock Plus on all the browsers that support it;
- tweak the host file to block know ads/malware domains I haven't seen an ad in years, the web feels so quiet when you browse like that, without popups, flashes, animations, everyone crying for your attention... Android? Rooted smartphone/tablet? No problem! Here is AdAway, basically tweaking the hosts file on the Android Linux, the same way that you do on a Windows PC. Apple still eludes me, as my only iOS device, an iPad2 is not jailbroken, so I don't really know what's out there for it, so I still see lots of ads when browsing with it... Maybe that's the reason it's the device I do the least browsing with..
You can simplify that sentence and make it "Anything regarding your children involve a little bit of effort on the parents part." Yes, that's the true, folks, having kids is hard work, for the rest of your life.
More on the topic, my own 8 yo daughter never payed much attention to PC games (she loves to play on the iPad), but when she saw me playing Minecraft, she got interested. She likes to watch, and sometimes play a bit, she is still getting the hang of the keyboard+mouse controls.
Part of the appeal is the feeling of having a "sandbox world" where you can build almost everything, and let your imagination run free. Discovering the several combinations between items and the "rules" of the world is also very rewarding.
The whole retro look is spot on, and it might be part of the appeal to kids, with its simplified blocks, colours and sounds (my daughter loves the bunnies, curiously there is no merchandise with the minecraft bunnies). Also, she doesn't like it when I kill any of the peaceful mobs (pigs, cows, sheep, etc) and she's grown fond of the Enderman for some reason. The music is also great, and to my big surprise, she commented on it before I did.
Also, the fact that Minecraft it's conceptually the equivalent of a Lego kit (where you have a bunch of "resources" and some loose rules, and you run with it, building whatever you imagine), might also contribute to the appeal of Minecraft, to both kids and grown-ups.
And as we know, the hardware is only half the battle. The "software", or in case of intelligence, the actual processes and the way the brain actually works and develops during the life time, is still mostly unknown to us. It's a bit like studying the processor chips from any give age, and trying to "sort" them, or find a way to "classify" them by performance, without actually knowing how or what software then can run.
As with some other things in life, the genes might give you a "framework", or a starting playfield but the rest of the environment plays a huge part in how things will turn out. I believe it makes much more sense, in terms of evolution, that intelligence is something more "organic", adaptable, than a simple, specific gene (or group of genes) that are vulnerable to mutation, etc. Look at the way we are programing AI. Instead of giving it billions and billions of rules and instructions to make it "super smart", we instead try to program it in a way that it can learn by themselves. More or less the way we also learn and develop as we grow up.
I wonder how many "UFO" close encounters reported through the years might be something like this: something very rare, and almost unthinkable to the common people (a passenger jet as target practice for missiles?!), but totally explainable.
For around 2 years I've been using an iPad 2. The experience has been great, it does it's job pretty well, it's a great way to consume content (web surfing, youtubing, social media, light gaming), etc, etc. Yes, it's a walled garden, yes, I can't "drop to the command line and get under the hood". But the fact is that my "tableting needs" are rather basic, and haven't changed much, the apps are inherited limited, and I don't use it for heavy graphic or gaming, so I don't see the need to "upgrade" to a newer version, not now and not on the next couple of years, or even swap it for a Android tablet (my smartphone is a low-cost asian THL W100, btw).
The only gripe that would make me switch my iPad 2 is the internal storage (only 16 GB without expansion). But it would be most likely and cost efective for me to replace it with an iPad 2 without 3G and with 64 GB of storage, than to get a newer, more expensive iPad "4" or "5" or whatever.
I think that the iPad "matured" so rapidly that the need to keep churning new models and for the people to upgrade every 1 or 2 years is pretty much gone.
These examples aren't really very illustrative of the still remaining XP users. I believe that most will be completely oblivious to "end of support" or whatnot (mostly the parents and grandparents population) that know what "Windows" is ("it's the computer!"), and think that "Internet Explorer" is the Internet. A lot of then will be part of a small business where the IT literacy is low, and nobody really cares about the computers, as long as they work.
Something that worries me in all this is the quote "I am worried about security threats, but I'd rather have my identity stolen than put up with Windows 8.". Well, if you don't mind having your identity stolen, then you are not worried about security threats at all. Replace "have my identity stolen" with "became a part of a botnet" and the users starts to look a bit fundamentalist. A good analogy would be someone saying "I am pro-life but I'm fine with kill doctors that perform abortions". Dude, if you are pro-life / security concerned, you *mind* about killing another human being / having your identity stolen.
In 2010, I bought a 120 GB SSD for my aging Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 desktop "gaming machine". 120 GB is well enough for Windows, and even a couple of games (I have a separate RAID5 for everything else and the kitchen sink), and although I can't play recent games in super-duper-high resolutions (I would need a total upgrade for that), the fact is that I've postponed my 4-year-cyle-full-desktop upgrade indefinitely. I don't game as much as I used to, and the computer feels extremely responsive, specially for a 6 year old machine. I've been evangelizing everyone about the "magical powers" of SSDs ever since, and I firmly believe that it is the single component that will cause the greatest impact on the machine performance, hands down. So if you still have any doubts about the 120 GB SSD making any difference on a "old" machine, rest assured, it will make a *lot* of difference.
Uau, can't believe nobody mentioned the 7th Guest and 11th Hour soundtracks, some of my all time favourite game music:)
Anyway, my question to Mr. Sanger is this: how was it to be part of some of the first "digital media" titles? To live in the middle of the hype and be part of some ground breaking works of art?
This is amazing news... I believe we might not be far from some sort of sensor that will monitor our main "health checks" (sugar level in blood, cholesterol, blood pressure, heart rate, etc) and give us an accurate, real time report, in a non-intrusive / painful way...
Yes. We also had tablets before the iPad, they were also "PCs". The gamechanging aspect in both situations is to pack the hardware in a conveninent, atractive and easy package to gain traction. Before the iPad, nobody would give a damn about the "PC tablets". Now everyone wants a cut of a market that was pratically non-existing. In the present case with the SteamBox and SteamOS, we have both an OS custom tailored to be used with Steam, and a (predictable) large number of hardware alternatives to use that OS, and the Steam service. Instead of jumping the hops to build a "living room PC", lots of people will apreciate the convenience. This might indeed be a gamechanger.
No, no, no! Preemptive strikes are only used against enemies that can't retaliate and that hold valuable goods inside their boundaries.
Oh, no, scratch that, I meant enemies that have "OMD" (real or otherwise)...
It is not very clear yet if NK is a real threat or not (perhaps when they actually fire something at someone, somebody might think about doing a "pre-emptiy")...
My ex-boss had to deal with this problem. Short version: power issues are potentially worse to SSD than to hard disks. I got an SSD one and half year ago, for my home desktop rig, and "teased" my then-boss into getting one for his work laptop. My SSD is up and running nicelly (with stable current, very rare power outs), always shutdown, no hibernates or something like that. My ex-boss had to RMA 3 or 4 diferent SSDs, because he uses hibernate on his laptop and a couple of times after resuming, the SSD simply "reverted" to a previous "disc state". For example, after installing Windows 7, and the software and data, the SSD would "reset" back to the point right after installing Windows. Also, one of the times he completely formatted the SSD and after a reboot, it went back to the time it had Windows and everything else! Really odd and freakish, and usually an hibernate or even a normal shutdown was done before the SSD broke / bricked / froze... The laptop was not very recent (was probably 2 or 3 years old by the time he got the SSD), so some SATA driver issue combined with different power requirements or improvement over those years might explain such an unlucky streak... My SSD is still running nice and good, my ex-boss meanwhile replaced his laptop and SSD.
Just abstracting a bit from the age factor (as I believe some other "comenteers" will address that in much competent ways than I), I would advice you to get your hands on virtualization. It's starting to become ubiquitous in all sorts of companies (big and small) and there is much to be done in terms of management, best practices, designing, troubleshooting, etc. Your "outside" view on IT can be a good thing, as sometimes the skewed view on this-or-that-operating-system can hinder a bit the work on virtualization. Besides, as anything related to infrastructures (both IT and non-IT), it looks easy to do, but it's hard to master. With IT, as you might know, the constant wish to learn and evolve is a must. As long as you have it in you, and you keep it during your (hopefully) successful career, you will be fine:) Good luck!
You have a choice: do your business somewhere else. That's part of the "free market" you talk about. The freedom to do business with whoever you choose. Nobody is forcing you to buy with Amazon. Just "vote with your wallet". You are part of the free market too.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to prevent tracking, on Firefox,Ghostery and uBlock Origin are your friends :) :) ,history, etc.) is the foundation to later add all the customization and segmentation we might want. Again, on any modern OS, you will get your own "partition" of the system configurations (registry or configuration files), so in essence, the browsers must go the route of the OS: enable multiple identities, running segregated on the same machine, without interfering with each other.
That and a nice hosts file will keep you out of a lot of trouble
This new Firefox feature sounds really sweet, this makes a lot of sense. If all the Operating Systems can support "multiple users", why can't our browsers, in 2016, support segregation of web sessions?
Make the frontier the Window, the browser instance, the tab, I don't care. Just give us the option to have multiple identities when connected and that's a huge step forward.
The "incognito" or "private" mode was a step in the right direction, but that makes the total number of simultaneous identities to 2: the incognito window and the normal one.
I believe this is a good step on the right direction, decoupling the sessions from all the "infrastructure" (cookies
Yes, Avatar was a big hit, a technical breakthrough, but IMO the time window as passed.
9 years for a sequel to Avatar is a bit too much, I doubt it that Avatar 2 will be anywhere close to Avatar in terms of success. Maybe one sequel would be interesting and work out somehow, but 4? Yeah that's some cow-milking right there, except the cow already went home.
The reason why big franchises like Star Wars, the MCU or even Fast and the Furious keeps drawing people in is because we are invested in the characters, in the stories, in those universes. That could have happened to Avatar, the potential was there, but the time passed, people moved on, there was nothing there for 9 years to sustain the "love". Cameron trying to jump-start a "true epic saga" with 4 sequels to a movie 7 years old is more or less the same as DC trying to catch-up with 8 years of MCU movies with just one single film. You can't compensate for a gap of 8 years and at least 12 movies with 1 single movie, and you can't create an "true epic saga" by creating 4 sequels to a movie who's flame has notoriously faded away.
So Avatar will have 4 sequels? Who really cares these days?
To be honest, securing email is not that hard, unless you want to "manually" set up a structure to check messages for weird stuff.
You can "outsource" an email hygiene service, to handle the inbound of your email, clean it, and deliver it to your own server (either Exchange or some other thing). You can do that for outbound as well, so your Exchange (or some other thing) will only send and receive SMTP on port 25 from a very specific group of know IPs (the ones from your email hygiene service provider). This alone will take away a huge chunk of the on-premisses worries with email security (no need to worry about spam attacks, bursts in email messages, workload increases, etc, etc). You just pay other guys to handle that for you.
Of course, you can do that with spam assassin, a couple of linux boxes and such (and your email hygiene supplier will most likely be doing something similar). The difference is that they are payed and specialized in keeping an eye on email security and the latest trends, and for you, usually, this is just one of the many "hats" you wear as an IT administrator.
And this is why ad-blocking should be done at the hosts file level... Oh, you can't do that with an iOS device? Well, well, well...
If it's a volume license key, it should be ok (and even then that should be "triangulated" with the number of activations allowed). If it's a retail key (that should be used on only one computer), that's not ok. Also, if a KMS server is being used (that acts as a sort of "proxy" for internal activations), and its key is blacklisted, also not ok. These might be some of the forensic analysis that is done on that data. Just an educated guess :)
... maybe the iPads are their "personal" devices and the Surface are "work" devices?
Nothing against people using either iPads, Surfaces or Nexus, but perhaps the Surfaces are "work assigned" gear, and being managed centrally via GPOs and AD (it is Windows afterall, so it is definitly possible), and maybe are locked down from "amusing sites" and games, and so the commentators have to use their iPads for their Facebook or Farmville fixes.
Just a wild guess.
So, to make "rich people" travel in weightlessness is bad, but the war and military objectives for almost every single technological breakthrough we had last century is good. Count them: the car, the submarine, the internet, GPS, planes, etc. Of course, not all these claimed lives, but many died for all this. That is acceptable, I suppose.
I just don't understand how people that are a little bit tech savvy cope with ads. The first things I do on a new computer (mine or a relative/friend)is:
- install Adblock Plus on all the browsers that support it;
- tweak the host file to block know ads/malware domains
I haven't seen an ad in years, the web feels so quiet when you browse like that, without popups, flashes, animations, everyone crying for your attention...
Android? Rooted smartphone/tablet? No problem! Here is AdAway, basically tweaking the hosts file on the Android Linux, the same way that you do on a Windows PC.
Apple still eludes me, as my only iOS device, an iPad2 is not jailbroken, so I don't really know what's out there for it, so I still see lots of ads when browsing with it... Maybe that's the reason it's the device I do the least browsing with..
As an example we have the Indian mission to Mars, which cost just a fraction of what NASA would have to spend.
You can simplify that sentence and make it "Anything regarding your children involve a little bit of effort on the parents part." Yes, that's the true, folks, having kids is hard work, for the rest of your life.
More on the topic, my own 8 yo daughter never payed much attention to PC games (she loves to play on the iPad), but when she saw me playing Minecraft, she got interested. She likes to watch, and sometimes play a bit, she is still getting the hang of the keyboard+mouse controls.
Part of the appeal is the feeling of having a "sandbox world" where you can build almost everything, and let your imagination run free. Discovering the several combinations between items and the "rules" of the world is also very rewarding.
The whole retro look is spot on, and it might be part of the appeal to kids, with its simplified blocks, colours and sounds (my daughter loves the bunnies, curiously there is no merchandise with the minecraft bunnies). Also, she doesn't like it when I kill any of the peaceful mobs (pigs, cows, sheep, etc) and she's grown fond of the Enderman for some reason. The music is also great, and to my big surprise, she commented on it before I did.
Also, the fact that Minecraft it's conceptually the equivalent of a Lego kit (where you have a bunch of "resources" and some loose rules, and you run with it, building whatever you imagine), might also contribute to the appeal of Minecraft, to both kids and grown-ups.
And as we know, the hardware is only half the battle. The "software", or in case of intelligence, the actual processes and the way the brain actually works and develops during the life time, is still mostly unknown to us. It's a bit like studying the processor chips from any give age, and trying to "sort" them, or find a way to "classify" them by performance, without actually knowing how or what software then can run.
As with some other things in life, the genes might give you a "framework", or a starting playfield but the rest of the environment plays a huge part in how things will turn out. I believe it makes much more sense, in terms of evolution, that intelligence is something more "organic", adaptable, than a simple, specific gene (or group of genes) that are vulnerable to mutation, etc. Look at the way we are programing AI. Instead of giving it billions and billions of rules and instructions to make it "super smart", we instead try to program it in a way that it can learn by themselves. More or less the way we also learn and develop as we grow up.
I wonder how many "UFO" close encounters reported through the years might be something like this: something very rare, and almost unthinkable to the common people (a passenger jet as target practice for missiles?!), but totally explainable.
For around 2 years I've been using an iPad 2. The experience has been great, it does it's job pretty well, it's a great way to consume content (web surfing, youtubing, social media, light gaming), etc, etc. Yes, it's a walled garden, yes, I can't "drop to the command line and get under the hood". But the fact is that my "tableting needs" are rather basic, and haven't changed much, the apps are inherited limited, and I don't use it for heavy graphic or gaming, so I don't see the need to "upgrade" to a newer version, not now and not on the next couple of years, or even swap it for a Android tablet (my smartphone is a low-cost asian THL W100, btw).
The only gripe that would make me switch my iPad 2 is the internal storage (only 16 GB without expansion). But it would be most likely and cost efective for me to replace it with an iPad 2 without 3G and with 64 GB of storage, than to get a newer, more expensive iPad "4" or "5" or whatever.
I think that the iPad "matured" so rapidly that the need to keep churning new models and for the people to upgrade every 1 or 2 years is pretty much gone.
These examples aren't really very illustrative of the still remaining XP users. I believe that most will be completely oblivious to "end of support" or whatnot (mostly the parents and grandparents population) that know what "Windows" is ("it's the computer!"), and think that "Internet Explorer" is the Internet. A lot of then will be part of a small business where the IT literacy is low, and nobody really cares about the computers, as long as they work.
Something that worries me in all this is the quote "I am worried about security threats, but I'd rather have my identity stolen than put up with Windows 8.". Well, if you don't mind having your identity stolen, then you are not worried about security threats at all. Replace "have my identity stolen" with "became a part of a botnet" and the users starts to look a bit fundamentalist. A good analogy would be someone saying "I am pro-life but I'm fine with kill doctors that perform abortions". Dude, if you are pro-life / security concerned, you *mind* about killing another human being / having your identity stolen.
It's a real religion with real practitioners.
So as "true" and "trustworthy" as all the other religions then...
In 2010, I bought a 120 GB SSD for my aging Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 desktop "gaming machine". 120 GB is well enough for Windows, and even a couple of games (I have a separate RAID5 for everything else and the kitchen sink), and although I can't play recent games in super-duper-high resolutions (I would need a total upgrade for that), the fact is that I've postponed my 4-year-cyle-full-desktop upgrade indefinitely. I don't game as much as I used to, and the computer feels extremely responsive, specially for a 6 year old machine.
I've been evangelizing everyone about the "magical powers" of SSDs ever since, and I firmly believe that it is the single component that will cause the greatest impact on the machine performance, hands down.
So if you still have any doubts about the 120 GB SSD making any difference on a "old" machine, rest assured, it will make a *lot* of difference.
Uau, can't believe nobody mentioned the 7th Guest and 11th Hour soundtracks, some of my all time favourite game music :)
Anyway, my question to Mr. Sanger is this: how was it to be part of some of the first "digital media" titles? To live in the middle of the hype and be part of some ground breaking works of art?
This is amazing news... I believe we might not be far from some sort of sensor that will monitor our main "health checks" (sugar level in blood, cholesterol, blood pressure, heart rate, etc) and give us an accurate, real time report, in a non-intrusive / painful way...
Maybe they should have thought about an alliance *before* the NSA came knocking at their door...
Yes. We also had tablets before the iPad, they were also "PCs". The gamechanging aspect in both situations is to pack the hardware in a conveninent, atractive and easy package to gain traction. Before the iPad, nobody would give a damn about the "PC tablets". Now everyone wants a cut of a market that was pratically non-existing.
In the present case with the SteamBox and SteamOS, we have both an OS custom tailored to be used with Steam, and a (predictable) large number of hardware alternatives to use that OS, and the Steam service. Instead of jumping the hops to build a "living room PC", lots of people will apreciate the convenience. This might indeed be a gamechanger.
No, no, no! Preemptive strikes are only used against enemies that can't retaliate and that hold valuable goods inside their boundaries.
Oh, no, scratch that, I meant enemies that have "OMD" (real or otherwise)...
It is not very clear yet if NK is a real threat or not (perhaps when they actually fire something at someone, somebody might think about doing a "pre-emptiy")...
My ex-boss had to deal with this problem. Short version: power issues are potentially worse to SSD than to hard disks.
I got an SSD one and half year ago, for my home desktop rig, and "teased" my then-boss into getting one for his work laptop.
My SSD is up and running nicelly (with stable current, very rare power outs), always shutdown, no hibernates or something like that.
My ex-boss had to RMA 3 or 4 diferent SSDs, because he uses hibernate on his laptop and a couple of times after resuming, the SSD simply "reverted" to a previous "disc state". For example, after installing Windows 7, and the software and data, the SSD would "reset" back to the point right after installing Windows. Also, one of the times he completely formatted the SSD and after a reboot, it went back to the time it had Windows and everything else! Really odd and freakish, and usually an hibernate or even a normal shutdown was done before the SSD broke / bricked / froze...
The laptop was not very recent (was probably 2 or 3 years old by the time he got the SSD), so some SATA driver issue combined with different power requirements or improvement over those years might explain such an unlucky streak...
My SSD is still running nice and good, my ex-boss meanwhile replaced his laptop and SSD.
... to see some countries still stuck in the "cold war" mindset. Worse, to see some countries trapped in the "middle ages" mindset...
Just abstracting a bit from the age factor (as I believe some other "comenteers" will address that in much competent ways than I), I would advice you to get your hands on virtualization. It's starting to become ubiquitous in all sorts of companies (big and small) and there is much to be done in terms of management, best practices, designing, troubleshooting, etc. :)
Your "outside" view on IT can be a good thing, as sometimes the skewed view on this-or-that-operating-system can hinder a bit the work on virtualization. Besides, as anything related to infrastructures (both IT and non-IT), it looks easy to do, but it's hard to master.
With IT, as you might know, the constant wish to learn and evolve is a must. As long as you have it in you, and you keep it during your (hopefully) successful career, you will be fine
Good luck!
You have a choice: do your business somewhere else. That's part of the "free market" you talk about. The freedom to do business with whoever you choose. Nobody is forcing you to buy with Amazon. Just "vote with your wallet". You are part of the free market too.