Ever since explorezip (the worm before that I Love You thing) appeared and wiped out most of our office network, I have thought that the whole anti-virus industry was on the back foot.
At work we all have this little anti-virus icon in our task bars, updating virus libraries from a central server (and slowing down all our machines as well). But if a new Outlook worm came out and we all started opening it, the anti-virus software would just ignore it until the patch came out. Even if the gap between us getting the worm and the patch was a few seconds, the damage would be done.
So why are we paying thousands of bucks a year for anti-virus when we know it probably will do nothing? Sure, it catches the occasional tired Word macro and maybe an antique trojan on an old floppy, but is that worth it?
Is this about whether people can write by hand in a aesthetically appealing (or at least clear) way, or about whether they can write at all?
If it's the former, then frankly who the crap cares? Really. I can't read Latin. I was taught it in school, but I've fogotten it now. My father and grandfathers could read it pretty well.
I can't make boats out of tree bark either, nor can I cure my own bacon.
What the hell does it matter if I can feed and clothe myself by other means?
There is legislation in the UK similar to this that's been in force for a few years now, and it's VERY effective.
It's also added a lot of momentum to voluntary industry codes of practice for other media as well, most of which are run by the The Direct Marketing Association.
A couple of years ago, I subscribed to the DMA's (free) Fax Preference Service in an attempt to cut down on the junk faxes I was getting at home (about 3-5 a day). After about a month, my listing kicked in and I got ONE junk fax about a week later, followed by none at all until we moved house last year. I did the same for our fax at work (getting about 15-20 a day) and it had the same effect. I was pretty surpised, and it's rised my estimation of the marketing industry quite a lot.
With a bit of luck the same will happen in the States - good luck!
You're from a.edu address so I'll go easy on you:-)
Firstly, it's not England's choice whether to adopt the Euro, it's Great Britain and Northern Ireland's choice. But hey.
Secondly, if the argument against adoption of the Euro was as simple as you make out then we'd have sorted it out on day one!
Apart from ignoring the fact that Sterling is steadily weakening against the Euro, you make the (very common) mistake of making a value judgement about "strong" currency being good for ecomomies and "weak" currency being bad.
Monetary economics doesn't work like that - "strong" and "weak" are simply labels, like "bull" and "bear" on the stock market. Which is good and which is bad depends on what view you have of the market. If you're a manufacturer, then you want a weak currency so that people buy your goods for export. This is the reason why the CBI is pretty much pro Europe right now, and why many multi-national manufacturing businesses have shut down their UK production in recent years.
But if you're a holiday maker, or a business that relies on imports to do its job, then you want a strong one so that your currency goes further abroad.
But the strength of the pound is simply *one* aspect of a huge number of things that have a bearing on whether Euro entry would be good for the UK or not.
But since this is totally off-topic I won't go into that.
Most people don't care if the OS crashes. It's annoying, but as long as data's not lost, we can live with it. Everyone here saves their work regularly and backs up at the end of the day, after all. Would that change if the OS didn't go tits up now and again?
The alternative is higher software costs to pay for herculean debugging programmes and other tactics nail the causes of crashes. I'd pay for that in an OS controlling a nuclear power station, but not for a glorified typewriter I play Quake on from time to time.
Am I missing something, or does remote (as in off-site) backup for large amounts of data imply vast bandwidth costs?
Transferring 200Gb a day accross a 2Mb/s leased line (point to point) would be fairly fast, but then it would be idle most of the time while you're paying a monthly fee.
The only remote backup solutions I've ever heard of are remote as in fiber to the next room (or building if you're lucky). Then it goes to tape.
I agree - although my father, now retired, spent most of his working life dictating letters to a dictaphone. It's a really impressive skill - he kinda thinks a then, dictates a couple of sentences. Stops, thinks again then does another five or six. Rewinds to review it, maybe changes a bit in the middle, pads out anything that needs it with a bit of silence, then continues.
The fact is that we're used to keyboards and word processors, clipboards, etc. so we can't see another way of doing it. We also tend to "micro edit" and don't think very far ahead into what were want to say. But that can change.
For my part, I'd just be happy to have some "meta control" over my PC: saying maybe application or document names ("Word - letter to bank.doc") to start them rather than opening the Start menu or hunting the desktop.
I find a mail reader (that works well on Windows) that allows me to check multiple POP accounts and read all the incoming mail IN ONE PLACE, and then lets me reply from the right email address to these mails.
Outlook 2000 lets me do this. The Mozilla mailer is cool, but insists on keeping all my POP accounts in separate inboxen. I've tried The Bat, and Eudora, but nothing seems to beat the ease of use of Outlook (well, if you ignore the unhinged Options layout - so very clearly designed by people on drugs).
I've also found that the attitude of just about anyone in my family is that because I work with "computers" I must be up for technical support.
In fact, while my work may be technical (I'm a systems analyst) I'm no more qualified to diagnose why Windows can't see a CD drive than Greta Garbo.
Doesn't stop me from trying though. When I fail, the pitiful looks on people's faces are similar to if my profession were garage mechanic and I couldn't fix their car.
Maybe this is what working for the Secret Service is like - not even your mum can know what you do for a living.
I totally agree, but do find it sad that Apple spent all the time and effort only to find that creating an OS was beyond them, so they chucked it all out and went for Unix. And Unix had been there for them all along.
Ah well, a good lesson learned. Now if only somebody could work out how to teach Microsoft a similar one...
Why do US publications not REVIEW?
on
Palm PDA Roundup
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This question is a bit OT, but it's been annoying me for a while: why do so few US websites and print magazines seem to independently review products like they do in Europe? All the PDAs on show here just have re-hashed press releases to read. I could just go the manufacturer's websites and read that. Christ it must be boring to write as well.
Are there any sites that say things like "After three weeks of using the Zarus, I was ready to catapult it into a tree" or "The Clie is wonderful, but if you want to use it more than 10 feet from a power socket, forget it."
Granted, there aren't many European publications that go to the extreme of actually panning a product, but if it's fair comment, they will. Most at least try to inject some insight into comparative reviews, however terrified their editors might be of losing advertising revenue.
It was a recumbent bicycle encased in a fibreglass moulding, "invented" in Britain by Sir Clive Sinclair in the early 80's, and got very similar publicity to the Segway. In fact, when I saw all the media hype about "it" and Steve Jobs saying cities will be re-designed around it I really got powerful deja-vu.
Needless to say it bombed. The reason being that it was only going to appeal to people who would probably buy bicycles or maybe mopeds to travel around in, but it was overpriced, dangerous in heavy traffic (too low to be seen by trucks) and made you look like a loon.
Personally, I thank god the Segway is popping its clogs. At a time when obesity is a rapidly growing problem brought about by lack of exercise, if they caught on we'd all end up as terminal lard-buckets.
Well, I suppose it's because Google are a private company they can do what they want within the law. Might not be very fair, but well, life isn't completely fair all of the time.
Maybe you should do a cost/benefit analysis: how much revenue would you lose by not selling any more guns vs how much you would gain by being listed on Google.
Worth a go I'd say, unless you put more than monetary value on guns that is (I live in the UK so I can't really do anything else).
I'd say you're right, but for one thing about the Act. It also says that if the Data Controller has the ability to identify living people from otherwise anonymous data then that anonymous data would also be classed as being "personal".
Sure, this doesn't affect IP addresses much, but anonymous cookies it sure does. Once the anonymous user fills out a registration form on the site - bingo! The site suddenly has their previous usage history.
Perhaps I've misunderstood something here, but isn't the data that Google stores on users anonymous? That is, they have no way of knowing who (as in name, address, email or the like) is accessing their system.
If so, then what's all the fuss about? Isn't it a bit like saying the Highway Authority knows that 100,000 cars pass a certain point every day, and that 20,000 of them are 1985 Fords? Ooh - they could even use that data to find out how many people might want to buy new Hondas! They just don't know who those people are.
Big deal! What's the worry?
Of course, if you *give* them your personal details, then they'll have a pretty good history on you (assuming you've been accepting their cookies), but that's a whole different matter.
I'm sure they don't expect it, but since for all I know their script has already been used by spammers to bomb the hell out of MY server, I was simply pointing out that they should be more responsible.
Troll indeed! Would I be a troll if I pointed out that somebody should stop smoking at he petrol station?
If I were a troll, I would post anonymously - like you in fact. Not called Anonymous Coward for nothing it seems.
The company I work for has just won the pitch to deliver Microsoft's below the line advertising and "CRM" campaign for.NET (as in the product line as much as the framework) in the UK and perhaps Europe. It's a £750,000 budget over 6 months I think.
I had a read of the pitch briefing documents they sent us and nowhere does it mention Linux or Solaris as being significant theats. They identify Sun has being in financial difficulty and therefore less able to keep up the profile they once had.
They're far more worried about IBM and Oracle, so the brief we have is to stick into the idea of.NET being able to run rings around the old dinosaurs etc., and to present.NET as a viable platform for the "enterprise". The key word for the campaigns will be "agility". It'll be interesting to see what kind of results this has (since our performance as an agency will be measured using "key performance indicators"). They seem to be pinning a lot of hope on development turn-around and quick-and-easy, but is that what high-end corporates want? I'd say it was strength and security myself. I'd be happy to sacrifice some whizz-bang "agility" to avoid some skript kiddies busting me open on port 80.
But hey, I work in the Technical Department of a SME, what the hell do I know (apart from the fact we now need to spend £30K on hitherto pirated MS software licenses for fear of being busted)?
Hey, they sure know how to put together an HTML form processor that doesn't allow me to hijack it and bomb the hell out of their mail server with polite messages about the GPL.
As I recall, Netscape imposed, and for all I know still does impose, a similar ban on benchmarking it's Enterprise web server, and also made some attempt to limit how you reviewed the software. Those benchmarks that were done showed it was a dog (allegedly).
But I don't think it's necessarily because they alienated their geek audience with all that "soft" science stuff. I think it's because they're simply abandoning proper science coverage completely.
These days, scientific innovation is complex stuff often operating at levels 99% of the population have no clue even exist (e.g. quantum physics). Explaining it in a visual medium reliant by definition on pictures is usually just about impossible. Despite all the recent cloning coverage, I doubt you'd find hardly anyone on the street who could tell you what the Human Genome Project is, or even what DNA is.
The BBC is fighting for its life to defend the licence fee, and to do so it has to broaden its appeal. Science is the first major category for the culling. After One Man And His Dog, natch.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever since explorezip (the worm before that I Love You thing) appeared and wiped out most of our office network, I have thought that the whole anti-virus industry was on the back foot.
At work we all have this little anti-virus icon in our task bars, updating virus libraries from a central server (and slowing down all our machines as well). But if a new Outlook worm came out and we all started opening it, the anti-virus software would just ignore it until the patch came out. Even if the gap between us getting the worm and the patch was a few seconds, the damage would be done.
So why are we paying thousands of bucks a year for anti-virus when we know it probably will do nothing? Sure, it catches the occasional tired Word macro and maybe an antique trojan on an old floppy, but is that worth it?
Hmm.
Is this about whether people can write by hand in a aesthetically appealing (or at least clear) way, or about whether they can write at all?
If it's the former, then frankly who the crap cares? Really. I can't read Latin. I was taught it in school, but I've fogotten it now. My father and grandfathers could read it pretty well.
I can't make boats out of tree bark either, nor can I cure my own bacon.
What the hell does it matter if I can feed and clothe myself by other means?
There is legislation in the UK similar to this that's been in force for a few years now, and it's VERY effective.
It's also added a lot of momentum to voluntary industry codes of practice for other media as well, most of which are run by the The Direct Marketing Association.
A couple of years ago, I subscribed to the DMA's (free) Fax Preference Service in an attempt to cut down on the junk faxes I was getting at home (about 3-5 a day). After about a month, my listing kicked in and I got ONE junk fax about a week later, followed by none at all until we moved house last year. I did the same for our fax at work (getting about 15-20 a day) and it had the same effect. I was pretty surpised, and it's rised my estimation of the marketing industry quite a lot.
With a bit of luck the same will happen in the States - good luck!
You're from a .edu address so I'll go easy on you :-)
Firstly, it's not England's choice whether to adopt the Euro, it's Great Britain and Northern Ireland's choice. But hey.
Secondly, if the argument against adoption of the Euro was as simple as you make out then we'd have sorted it out on day one!
Apart from ignoring the fact that Sterling is steadily weakening against the Euro, you make the (very common) mistake of making a value judgement about "strong" currency being good for ecomomies and "weak" currency being bad.
Monetary economics doesn't work like that - "strong" and "weak" are simply labels, like "bull" and "bear" on the stock market. Which is good and which is bad depends on what view you have of the market. If you're a manufacturer, then you want a weak currency so that people buy your goods for export. This is the reason why the CBI is pretty much pro Europe right now, and why many multi-national manufacturing businesses have shut down their UK production in recent years.
But if you're a holiday maker, or a business that relies on imports to do its job, then you want a strong one so that your currency goes further abroad.
But the strength of the pound is simply *one* aspect of a huge number of things that have a bearing on whether Euro entry would be good for the UK or not.
But since this is totally off-topic I won't go into that.
It didn't stop the Mac from getting popular.
Most people don't care if the OS crashes. It's annoying, but as long as data's not lost, we can live with it. Everyone here saves their work regularly and backs up at the end of the day, after all. Would that change if the OS didn't go tits up now and again?
The alternative is higher software costs to pay for herculean debugging programmes and other tactics nail the causes of crashes. I'd pay for that in an OS controlling a nuclear power station, but not for a glorified typewriter I play Quake on from time to time.
Am I missing something, or does remote (as in off-site) backup for large amounts of data imply vast bandwidth costs?
Transferring 200Gb a day accross a 2Mb/s leased line (point to point) would be fairly fast, but then it would be idle most of the time while you're paying a monthly fee.
The only remote backup solutions I've ever heard of are remote as in fiber to the next room (or building if you're lucky). Then it goes to tape.
JJ
I agree - although my father, now retired, spent most of his working life dictating letters to a dictaphone. It's a really impressive skill - he kinda thinks a then, dictates a couple of sentences. Stops, thinks again then does another five or six. Rewinds to review it, maybe changes a bit in the middle, pads out anything that needs it with a bit of silence, then continues.
The fact is that we're used to keyboards and word processors, clipboards, etc. so we can't see another way of doing it. We also tend to "micro edit" and don't think very far ahead into what were want to say. But that can change.
For my part, I'd just be happy to have some "meta control" over my PC: saying maybe application or document names ("Word - letter to bank.doc") to start them rather than opening the Start menu or hunting the desktop.
But who the hell would use AOL for business purposes? Really, these companies should be educated that AOL is a home users ISP.
Vernor Vinge wrote a much better (well, more rounded) analysis of this here
I find a mail reader (that works well on Windows) that allows me to check multiple POP accounts and read all the incoming mail IN ONE PLACE, and then lets me reply from the right email address to these mails.
Outlook 2000 lets me do this. The Mozilla mailer is cool, but insists on keeping all my POP accounts in separate inboxen. I've tried The Bat, and Eudora, but nothing seems to beat the ease of use of Outlook (well, if you ignore the unhinged Options layout - so very clearly designed by people on drugs).
I've also found that the attitude of just about anyone in my family is that because I work with "computers" I must be up for technical support.
In fact, while my work may be technical (I'm a systems analyst) I'm no more qualified to diagnose why Windows can't see a CD drive than Greta Garbo.
Doesn't stop me from trying though. When I fail, the pitiful looks on people's faces are similar to if my profession were garage mechanic and I couldn't fix their car.
Maybe this is what working for the Secret Service is like - not even your mum can know what you do for a living.
Hey way OT, but what the hell...
I totally agree, but do find it sad that Apple spent all the time and effort only to find that creating an OS was beyond them, so they chucked it all out and went for Unix. And Unix had been there for them all along.
Ah well, a good lesson learned. Now if only somebody could work out how to teach Microsoft a similar one...
This question is a bit OT, but it's been annoying me for a while: why do so few US websites and print magazines seem to independently review products like they do in Europe? All the PDAs on show here just have re-hashed press releases to read. I could just go the manufacturer's websites and read that. Christ it must be boring to write as well.
Are there any sites that say things like "After three weeks of using the Zarus, I was ready to catapult it into a tree" or "The Clie is wonderful, but if you want to use it more than 10 feet from a power socket, forget it."
Granted, there aren't many European publications that go to the extreme of actually panning a product, but if it's fair comment, they will. Most at least try to inject some insight into comparative reviews, however terrified their editors might be of losing advertising revenue.
> If they just stuck a seat on it everything would be different.
The original post was meant to be FUNNY. It was a SARCASTIC remark. He didn't mean it seriously.
Jeezuz - you really have to spell it out some times!
It was a recumbent bicycle encased in a fibreglass moulding, "invented" in Britain by Sir Clive Sinclair in the early 80's, and got very similar publicity to the Segway. In fact, when I saw all the media hype about "it" and Steve Jobs saying cities will be re-designed around it I really got powerful deja-vu.
Needless to say it bombed. The reason being that it was only going to appeal to people who would probably buy bicycles or maybe mopeds to travel around in, but it was overpriced, dangerous in heavy traffic (too low to be seen by trucks) and made you look like a loon.
Personally, I thank god the Segway is popping its clogs. At a time when obesity is a rapidly growing problem brought about by lack of exercise, if they caught on we'd all end up as terminal lard-buckets.
Well, I suppose it's because Google are a private company they can do what they want within the law. Might not be very fair, but well, life isn't completely fair all of the time.
Maybe you should do a cost/benefit analysis: how much revenue would you lose by not selling any more guns vs how much you would gain by being listed on Google.
Worth a go I'd say, unless you put more than monetary value on guns that is (I live in the UK so I can't really do anything else).
I'd say you're right, but for one thing about the Act. It also says that if the Data Controller has the ability to identify living people from otherwise anonymous data then that anonymous data would also be classed as being "personal".
Sure, this doesn't affect IP addresses much, but anonymous cookies it sure does. Once the anonymous user fills out a registration form on the site - bingo! The site suddenly has their previous usage history.
"Google essentially has complete access to your hard disk "
How? What does "access" mean? That they could report all my passwords to the police? That they can create a profile on me from my browser cache?
Bollox.
Perhaps I've misunderstood something here, but isn't the data that Google stores on users anonymous? That is, they have no way of knowing who (as in name, address, email or the like) is accessing their system.
If so, then what's all the fuss about? Isn't it a bit like saying the Highway Authority knows that 100,000 cars pass a certain point every day, and that 20,000 of them are 1985 Fords? Ooh - they could even use that data to find out how many people might want to buy new Hondas! They just don't know who those people are.
Big deal! What's the worry?
Of course, if you *give* them your personal details, then they'll have a pretty good history on you (assuming you've been accepting their cookies), but that's a whole different matter.
I'm sure they don't expect it, but since for all I know their script has already been used by spammers to bomb the hell out of MY server, I was simply pointing out that they should be more responsible.
Troll indeed! Would I be a troll if I pointed out that somebody should stop smoking at he petrol station?
If I were a troll, I would post anonymously - like you in fact. Not called Anonymous Coward for nothing it seems.
The company I work for has just won the pitch to deliver Microsoft's below the line advertising and "CRM" campaign for .NET (as in the product line as much as the framework) in the UK and perhaps Europe. It's a £750,000 budget over 6 months I think.
.NET being able to run rings around the old dinosaurs etc., and to present .NET as a viable platform for the "enterprise". The key word for the campaigns will be "agility". It'll be interesting to see what kind of results this has (since our performance as an agency will be measured using "key performance indicators"). They seem to be pinning a lot of hope on development turn-around and quick-and-easy, but is that what high-end corporates want? I'd say it was strength and security myself. I'd be happy to sacrifice some whizz-bang "agility" to avoid some skript kiddies busting me open on port 80.
I had a read of the pitch briefing documents they sent us and nowhere does it mention Linux or Solaris as being significant theats. They identify Sun has being in financial difficulty and therefore less able to keep up the profile they once had.
They're far more worried about IBM and Oracle, so the brief we have is to stick into the idea of
But hey, I work in the Technical Department of a SME, what the hell do I know (apart from the fact we now need to spend £30K on hitherto pirated MS software licenses for fear of being busted)?
Hey, they sure know how to put together an HTML form processor that doesn't allow me to hijack it and bomb the hell out of their mail server with polite messages about the GPL.
Do they?
<INPUT TYPE='hidden' NAME='recipient' value="weborders@castle.uk.co">
Hmmm...
Given the recent disaster.
As I recall, Netscape imposed, and for all I know still does impose, a similar ban on benchmarking it's Enterprise web server, and also made some attempt to limit how you reviewed the software. Those benchmarks that were done showed it was a dog (allegedly).
... and has been dead for a while.
But I don't think it's necessarily because they alienated their geek audience with all that "soft" science stuff. I think it's because they're simply abandoning proper science coverage completely.
These days, scientific innovation is complex stuff often operating at levels 99% of the population have no clue even exist (e.g. quantum physics). Explaining it in a visual medium reliant by definition on pictures is usually just about impossible. Despite all the recent cloning coverage, I doubt you'd find hardly anyone on the street who could tell you what the Human Genome Project is, or even what DNA is.
The BBC is fighting for its life to defend the licence fee, and to do so it has to broaden its appeal. Science is the first major category for the culling. After One Man And His Dog, natch.