The story doesn't list everybody who was honoured, but I'm guessing Andy Serkis got missed again. Surely he contributed toward digital effects in film in numerous ways over the last few years, yet consistently gets overlooked. Sure, he isn't a techie, and he didn't invent the concepts as such, but he's the only actor who has taken a digital character to such extreme lengths?
Something people seem to be forgetting is the impact this could potentially have on the IT industry as a whole. Like them or not, Microsoft are a key player in this industry and if they suddenly take a fall many of us will be brought down with them.
A sudden loss of confidence in the Windows product could spell disaster for a wide range of occupations - imagine an IT-specific recession, resulting in enourmous layoffs and salary cuts.
The worst thing is that there is no way this can turn out to be good news. If it's true, we're in trouble. If it's false, then we're still going to see share prices slump (not just MSFT either), which impacts most of us.
... but Australian education too. A quick survey around the office revealed that Aussies missed out on this little fact too. Same with the UK. Makes you wonder just how much history gets edited to highlight the wonders of our American overlords...
Sorry, but the guy is obviously a complete idiot. He published personal data about kids, then gave a total stranger access to the data. Get him up against the wall...
This is less an issue of who do we give our data to, than one of how do we deal with such a breach of privacy.
Outsourcing is supposed to be the legal equivalent to do it internally, the party being contracted is still bound by the same laws and unless the contract between the parties is inadequate surely this sort of thing is catered for...
Personally, I think this guy deserves a prison sentence as a result of this unbelievable breach of privacy. Having worked with somebody in the childcare industry a lot lately, I can say that there are so many ways this leaked information will be abused and children are the least likely party to be able to protect themselves from that sort of danger.
I'd have to agree with this one... Counterstrike, while definitely the best game in the genre is flooded with dumb-ass kids who cheat. Never much fun, playing a game properly only to be sniped through a wall by some kiddie.
I switched to BF1942 and loved it. It's better on a LAN, simply because you have a better chance of getting a balanced game out of it but once you get the hang of things it's almost as good as CS.
The variety is probably the most impressive part of Desert Combat - I occassionally play with a bunch of friends, and we inevitably separate into our chosen areas of expertise. No sniper-whores, simply because there are many good alternatives.
One criteria for picking a decent FPS online these days though is PunkBuster. Not that it's fool-proof, but at least it weeds out a few of the cheats.
OK, so now we know exactly what beer looks like before we consume it... now how about we take a look at what it looks like afterwards.
Of course, the photo gallery for any such research will inevitably contain unexpected photos of girls the researchers found attractive while they "prepared" their research materials...
One of the key differences between the OS support and car support models (in this example) is the nature of the support. Buying car parts isn't the same as security hotfixes, because parts are a on-shot deal for manufacturers. They figure out how to make them, then churn them out for years to come.
Hotfixes are different - they are unique each time, requiring constant development and improvement. A better example would be expecting the manufacturer of your '72 GTO to offer an EFI update free of charge.
Perhaps somebody can comment on whether or not Apple support 5 year old versions of their OS? (I don't know the answer to this, but I'm guessing they don't provide hotfixes past a certain age).
Operating Systems have a limited lifespan - don't tell me you hadn't noticed? RedHat doesn't support every single distribution they've ever compiled, and there's a reason for that: it's not the way the software industry works.
Sure, there are lots of people out there using Win98 still. Heck, there are still people using Win95! But can you really expect a company to invest in support for a product that is 3 generations out of date? For each OS a company (regardless of whether they're Microsoft, RedHat or Apple) it is necessary to have a testing environment, testing staff, developers, marketing, and who knows what else. Microsoft currently support Windows ME, 2000, 2003 and XP. Surely that's an impressive amount of supported products?
Or perhaps we should demand they support everything they make forever. You never know, there might be one or two Windows 3.1 users out there who still want hotfixes released. I have some DOS 3 floppy disks lying around, surely I'm entitled to lifetime support for these!
Typically enough though, this is Slashdot - every decision by Microsoft has to be wrong, evil, unthinkably unfair. And the link to linux under the word "switch" is a good example of how biased this site has become. After all, I don't see the same level of screaming about me being forced to switch my RedHat 7.0 and 8.0 boxes over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux... surely that is a far more shameful lack of support?
... companies can only use information for the purpose they stated when they collected it. So if their forms say it's not going to be sold off, or is just for statistical purposes, they can be sued for misuse of private information.
Of course, proving they sold your email address to those spamming assholes is pretty hard. Proof once again that even the best of laws is easily beaten by those who want to:( (not to mention the fact that our laws only apply to companies based here in Australia)
It's a pain in the neck, but for those occassions when I really need (or want) to use a piece of software containing spyware I run a virtual PC. I've got a few Virtual PC images on my machine, one for BeOS, one for WinXP, a couple of Win2003 test servers, etc - if I'm going to run a piece of software that I either know or suspect to be risky, I just run it up on my test WinXP box.
It's usually adequate for most apps, virtualisation software has come a long way in the last year or two.
Check out Connectix Virtual PC (now owned by Microsoft), and VMWare for a couple of good options.
I went through this last year, and it changed the way I look at work completely. I'm back in a relatively "normal" IT consulting job, but I did some time contracting and enjoyed it.
The downside of course, and the underlying message in this guys website is that it's not easy being unemployed. He hints at the downsides, like not eating the things you used to, not having the option of going out or buying new things. Of course, he wrote that page simply to cheer himself (and maybe others) up. Pity 'bout the political statement he felt obligated to make.
When I was out of work, I started a blog. It made a good place to gather my thoughts, and I've written up quite a few entries on the subject of job-hunting. Not that I'm a master at it, I spent 5 weeks out of work when my last contract ended and got to enjoy 5 weeks of hell.
Valid points -- perhaps the next generation of firewalls will be purely internal, possibly built into our network switches? Maybe we're due for a new type of internal networking, where we can not only protect ourselves from the world in general, but from ourselves?
Yes, I know we can do a limited amount of filtering internally already but there's nothing even close to what I have in mind. I'm thinking of application-layer filtering, perhaps even down to blocking specific attacks. Similar to Snort in some ways, only active rather than passive...
rc.loco is dead right when (s)he suggests that the bulk of compromise situations are internal. They are - perhaps the point of entry was external, and the attacker (be it an automated attack, such as a worm, or a pimply faced geek in his parents basement) outside your network, but the follow-up attacks are internal. Only the first hit stood any chance of being touched by your perimeter defences, everything else is easy from there.
The minute we started encapsulating protocols within other protocols, we made it absolutely necessary to have application-layer firewalls.
RPC over HTTP is a good example of this, as are the many other protocols people see fit to encapsulate in HTTP (RDP / Terminal Services, instant messaging, etc).
Originally, the rules were dead simple. One port == one protocol. Some protocols used multiple ports, but even then it was kept nice and simple. But no, not everybody liked this situation. In the interests of making IM available to more people, clients started using HTTP so that even office staff (behind firewalls and proxies) could use it. Sure, this was blatantly circumventing the firewalls that were put up for this very reason, but that didn't stop anybody.
Application layer firewalls are a must-have. Of course, that will just force people to start using SSL...:(
If that's how you define "reality", perhaps you need to be a little more open minded...
Something doesn't have to be physical to be real - a good example of this would be the on-line working relationships I have with many employees within my organisation. We've never met, we only communicate electronically (thanks to distance and time-differences). Does this mean that because we only talk online, we aren't actually friends?
The fact of the matter is that people currently perceive most of the things that happen online as being irrelevant, as being games. But that's over-simplifying things. Just like your attempt to simplify life down to children and sex is overly simplistic.
As for being a geek who "aint getting any", wrong again.
The Internet has been much more than a mechanism for media delivery - the interactive nature of it, along with the incredibly wide range of sources makes it significantly different to any other form of media we've seen so far.
IMHO, comparing it to the invention of the automobile or airplane is a valid one - both of these mechanical inventions brought people closer together. The Internet does this too. By making communication possible between people who would not (or could not) have spoken previously.
The best comparison though is the telephone. You're definitely on the right track there.
The addiction to online gaming is real, and has existed since long before Everquest. MUDs, a text-based role-playing game, were every bit as addictive and dangerous.
It was quite disturbing throughout my time at university seeing fellow students drop out due to these games. Hell, even I had problems with them - I missed plenty of assignment deadlines all in the name of some rare sword.
This isn't going to change, but hopefully society as a whole will learn to acknowledge how strong a role these games can play in some people's life. Perhaps they will even become a tool for creating new communities, merging the physical with the virtual...
So when will things change, and people stop considering such social experiments to be "games"? Surely by now we're starting to see that the society represented electronically in these MMORPGs is no less valid than the physical world...
Personally, I've been caught up in a couple of these MMORPGs and while I've always managed to keep the boundaries between the "game" and "real-life" nice and clear not all players manage to do this. To some of them, their on-line "life" is just as important as what most people consider to be reality.
Also consider that one of the key boundaries between virtual and physical worlds is gradually breaking down - money. It is far easier to purchase items, assistance, support and knowledge for these "games" than it was just a couple of years ago. Now that people are willing to spend real-world money on not-so-real-world commodities, does this make them less of a game?
Judging by the typical end-users I deal with, a mere 24MiB/MB per gig isn't going to help - to them 1GB == FREE.
10GB == Their Email archive.
20GB == How much space they chew up when they.copy their entire hard disk up to the fileserver!
50GB == How much space they deserve.
Do any users actually pay attention to disk space, or do they just fill it up? You decide...
I certainly did. What about an Atari 2600? Did you ever purchase Atari games over the counter?
How 'bout the Amiga? Surely no self-respecting geek can say he hasn't ever touched one of these...
In a few more years, we're all going to sound like our grandparents - "when I was a boy, we had to wait 15 YEARS for a single file to download! Our computers were made of STONE, and we had to carve them ourselves!".
Face it, the serious geeks are dying out, and the new ones just aren't the same. Maybe they're better than us, maybe they're worse... all I know for sure is that script-kiddies are lame.
Slashdot Mirror
The story doesn't list everybody who was honoured, but I'm guessing Andy Serkis got missed again. Surely he contributed toward digital effects in film in numerous ways over the last few years, yet consistently gets overlooked. Sure, he isn't a techie, and he didn't invent the concepts as such, but he's the only actor who has taken a digital character to such extreme lengths?
Something people seem to be forgetting is the impact this could potentially have on the IT industry as a whole. Like them or not, Microsoft are a key player in this industry and if they suddenly take a fall many of us will be brought down with them.
A sudden loss of confidence in the Windows product could spell disaster for a wide range of occupations - imagine an IT-specific recession, resulting in enourmous layoffs and salary cuts.
The worst thing is that there is no way this can turn out to be good news. If it's true, we're in trouble. If it's false, then we're still going to see share prices slump (not just MSFT either), which impacts most of us.
Friday the 13th is always a pain in the neck.
... but Australian education too. A quick survey around the office revealed that Aussies missed out on this little fact too. Same with the UK. Makes you wonder just how much history gets edited to highlight the wonders of our American overlords...
Sorry, but the guy is obviously a complete idiot. He published personal data about kids, then gave a total stranger access to the data. Get him up against the wall...
Children have neither the social, legal nor physical abilities to protect themselves against the better equiped human (adult) predators out there.
This guy screwed up, and deserves to be punished. That he screwed up and endangered children makes it that much worse.
This is less an issue of who do we give our data to, than one of how do we deal with such a breach of privacy.
Outsourcing is supposed to be the legal equivalent to do it internally, the party being contracted is still bound by the same laws and unless the contract between the parties is inadequate surely this sort of thing is catered for...
Personally, I think this guy deserves a prison sentence as a result of this unbelievable breach of privacy. Having worked with somebody in the childcare industry a lot lately, I can say that there are so many ways this leaked information will be abused and children are the least likely party to be able to protect themselves from that sort of danger.
I'd have to agree with this one... Counterstrike, while definitely the best game in the genre is flooded with dumb-ass kids who cheat. Never much fun, playing a game properly only to be sniped through a wall by some kiddie.
I switched to BF1942 and loved it. It's better on a LAN, simply because you have a better chance of getting a balanced game out of it but once you get the hang of things it's almost as good as CS.
The variety is probably the most impressive part of Desert Combat - I occassionally play with a bunch of friends, and we inevitably separate into our chosen areas of expertise. No sniper-whores, simply because there are many good alternatives.
One criteria for picking a decent FPS online these days though is PunkBuster. Not that it's fool-proof, but at least it weeds out a few of the cheats.
OK, so now we know exactly what beer looks like before we consume it... now how about we take a look at what it looks like afterwards.
Of course, the photo gallery for any such research will inevitably contain unexpected photos of girls the researchers found attractive while they "prepared" their research materials...
One of the key differences between the OS support and car support models (in this example) is the nature of the support. Buying car parts isn't the same as security hotfixes, because parts are a on-shot deal for manufacturers. They figure out how to make them, then churn them out for years to come.
Hotfixes are different - they are unique each time, requiring constant development and improvement. A better example would be expecting the manufacturer of your '72 GTO to offer an EFI update free of charge.
Perhaps somebody can comment on whether or not Apple support 5 year old versions of their OS? (I don't know the answer to this, but I'm guessing they don't provide hotfixes past a certain age).
Operating Systems have a limited lifespan - don't tell me you hadn't noticed? RedHat doesn't support every single distribution they've ever compiled, and there's a reason for that: it's not the way the software industry works.
Sure, there are lots of people out there using Win98 still. Heck, there are still people using Win95! But can you really expect a company to invest in support for a product that is 3 generations out of date? For each OS a company (regardless of whether they're Microsoft, RedHat or Apple) it is necessary to have a testing environment, testing staff, developers, marketing, and who knows what else. Microsoft currently support Windows ME, 2000, 2003 and XP. Surely that's an impressive amount of supported products?
Or perhaps we should demand they support everything they make forever. You never know, there might be one or two Windows 3.1 users out there who still want hotfixes released. I have some DOS 3 floppy disks lying around, surely I'm entitled to lifetime support for these!
Typically enough though, this is Slashdot - every decision by Microsoft has to be wrong, evil, unthinkably unfair. And the link to linux under the word "switch" is a good example of how biased this site has become. After all, I don't see the same level of screaming about me being forced to switch my RedHat 7.0 and 8.0 boxes over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux... surely that is a far more shameful lack of support?
When I saw this article I thought it was about Keanu Reeves. Turns out it's about some slightly more animated martial arts robots...
... on a rooftop not too far away a sniper is annoyed he missed.
... companies can only use information for the purpose they stated when they collected it. So if their forms say it's not going to be sold off, or is just for statistical purposes, they can be sued for misuse of private information.
:( (not to mention the fact that our laws only apply to companies based here in Australia)
Of course, proving they sold your email address to those spamming assholes is pretty hard. Proof once again that even the best of laws is easily beaten by those who want to
It's a pain in the neck, but for those occassions when I really need (or want) to use a piece of software containing spyware I run a virtual PC. I've got a few Virtual PC images on my machine, one for BeOS, one for WinXP, a couple of Win2003 test servers, etc - if I'm going to run a piece of software that I either know or suspect to be risky, I just run it up on my test WinXP box.
It's usually adequate for most apps, virtualisation software has come a long way in the last year or two.
Check out Connectix Virtual PC (now owned by Microsoft), and VMWare for a couple of good options.
I went through this last year, and it changed the way I look at work completely. I'm back in a relatively "normal" IT consulting job, but I did some time contracting and enjoyed it.
The downside of course, and the underlying message in this guys website is that it's not easy being unemployed. He hints at the downsides, like not eating the things you used to, not having the option of going out or buying new things. Of course, he wrote that page simply to cheer himself (and maybe others) up. Pity 'bout the political statement he felt obligated to make.
When I was out of work, I started a blog. It made a good place to gather my thoughts, and I've written up quite a few entries on the subject of job-hunting. Not that I'm a master at it, I spent 5 weeks out of work when my last contract ended and got to enjoy 5 weeks of hell.
Traditional firewalls (port filters) are like using a picket fence to stop a flood.
Valid points -- perhaps the next generation of firewalls will be purely internal, possibly built into our network switches? Maybe we're due for a new type of internal networking, where we can not only protect ourselves from the world in general, but from ourselves?
Yes, I know we can do a limited amount of filtering internally already but there's nothing even close to what I have in mind. I'm thinking of application-layer filtering, perhaps even down to blocking specific attacks. Similar to Snort in some ways, only active rather than passive...
rc.loco is dead right when (s)he suggests that the bulk of compromise situations are internal. They are - perhaps the point of entry was external, and the attacker (be it an automated attack, such as a worm, or a pimply faced geek in his parents basement) outside your network, but the follow-up attacks are internal. Only the first hit stood any chance of being touched by your perimeter defences, everything else is easy from there.
The minute we started encapsulating protocols within other protocols, we made it absolutely necessary to have application-layer firewalls.
:(
RPC over HTTP is a good example of this, as are the many other protocols people see fit to encapsulate in HTTP (RDP / Terminal Services, instant messaging, etc).
Originally, the rules were dead simple. One port == one protocol. Some protocols used multiple ports, but even then it was kept nice and simple. But no, not everybody liked this situation. In the interests of making IM available to more people, clients started using HTTP so that even office staff (behind firewalls and proxies) could use it. Sure, this was blatantly circumventing the firewalls that were put up for this very reason, but that didn't stop anybody.
Application layer firewalls are a must-have. Of course, that will just force people to start using SSL...
If that's how you define "reality", perhaps you need to be a little more open minded...
Something doesn't have to be physical to be real - a good example of this would be the on-line working relationships I have with many employees within my organisation. We've never met, we only communicate electronically (thanks to distance and time-differences). Does this mean that because we only talk online, we aren't actually friends?
The fact of the matter is that people currently perceive most of the things that happen online as being irrelevant, as being games. But that's over-simplifying things. Just like your attempt to simplify life down to children and sex is overly simplistic.
As for being a geek who "aint getting any", wrong again.
The Internet has been much more than a mechanism for media delivery - the interactive nature of it, along with the incredibly wide range of sources makes it significantly different to any other form of media we've seen so far.
IMHO, comparing it to the invention of the automobile or airplane is a valid one - both of these mechanical inventions brought people closer together. The Internet does this too. By making communication possible between people who would not (or could not) have spoken previously.
The best comparison though is the telephone. You're definitely on the right track there.
The addiction to online gaming is real, and has existed since long before Everquest. MUDs, a text-based role-playing game, were every bit as addictive and dangerous.
It was quite disturbing throughout my time at university seeing fellow students drop out due to these games. Hell, even I had problems with them - I missed plenty of assignment deadlines all in the name of some rare sword.
This isn't going to change, but hopefully society as a whole will learn to acknowledge how strong a role these games can play in some people's life. Perhaps they will even become a tool for creating new communities, merging the physical with the virtual...
So when will things change, and people stop considering such social experiments to be "games"? Surely by now we're starting to see that the society represented electronically in these MMORPGs is no less valid than the physical world...
Personally, I've been caught up in a couple of these MMORPGs and while I've always managed to keep the boundaries between the "game" and "real-life" nice and clear not all players manage to do this. To some of them, their on-line "life" is just as important as what most people consider to be reality.
Also consider that one of the key boundaries between virtual and physical worlds is gradually breaking down - money. It is far easier to purchase items, assistance, support and knowledge for these "games" than it was just a couple of years ago. Now that people are willing to spend real-world money on not-so-real-world commodities, does this make them less of a game?
Funny, because that's not the way most admins see it... providing a service is my job, dealing with people who abuse it isn't.
It always amuses me to see such responses posted anonymously.
Not that I'm actually in support any more (haven't been for a couple of years now).
Judging by the typical end-users I deal with, a mere 24MiB/MB per gig isn't going to help - to them 1GB == FREE.
10GB == Their Email archive.20GB == How much space they chew up when they
50GB == How much space they deserve.
Do any users actually pay attention to disk space, or do they just fill it up? You decide...
Lurgen.comLurgen's Blog
Yes, but did you own a 300bps acoustic coupler?
I certainly did. What about an Atari 2600? Did you ever purchase Atari games over the counter?
How 'bout the Amiga? Surely no self-respecting geek can say he hasn't ever touched one of these...
In a few more years, we're all going to sound like our grandparents - "when I was a boy, we had to wait 15 YEARS for a single file to download! Our computers were made of STONE, and we had to carve them ourselves!".
Face it, the serious geeks are dying out, and the new ones just aren't the same. Maybe they're better than us, maybe they're worse... all I know for sure is that script-kiddies are lame.