Have you seen the pseudo-Director's Cut that was included in the last release? I've always thought 3 was better than a lot of people do, but seeing it more like Fincher would have finished it made me genuinely like the film.
Sci Fi doesn't care. Unless you're putting eyeballs on advertisements, you're irrelevant in their calculus. That's the way TV works.
Sci Fi doesn't, but Universal should. The torrent factor is probably one of the reasons why the DVDs sell so well - I get BSG off of BitTorrent because I hate the fixed schedules and advertising of traditional television. But I also buy the DVD sets as soon as they're released, because I want to support the series and get them in a nicer format that feels more permanent.
But most Windows boxes have the.net runtime installed...
You might be surprised. Especially if you're compiling for.NET 2.0, which you should be, since the 2005 IDE is light-years beyond 2003, and the new features of the language are well worth it IMO.
Obviously as time progresses, more and more people will have it, but a lot of them still don't. I put a note in my readmes and on the download pages for the apps I've released publicly, and I still get people asking me why they get an error along the lines of "you must have the.NET Framework v2.0 or higher installed" when they run them.
10+ years ? Are you one of those people that advertise for java developers - must have 10+ years experience ? Java was still called 'oak' 10+ years ago, and all you could do with it was hack a few native gui widgets together. I know - I was there.
Apparently Java 1.0 was released in 1995, so the GP is potentially not exaggerating. I remember my boss giving me a book on it at the time (I was 17 or 18), and I started doing simple work with it in the 1996-1999 era.
It's okay, we're all getting old, and some senility is to be expected.
=)
On a vaguely-related topic, my biggest complaint about Java (versus e.g..NET) is the apparent ease with which its developers can do things that don't work in newer versions of it. I expect a few quirks when you're moving between platforms, but there are far too many Java apps I've had to deal with where they required the 1.3.1 or 1.4.2 JRE specifically and would not work with anything else.
Yep. I was just discussing this topic with my dad - who's been a mechanical engineer all of his adult life (so roughly 30 years) - the other week. He laughed and said something like "yeah, it was the industry standard... in 1982."
I always remember the story he told me about how even in the last version of AutoCAD that he used, if you were checking for line intersections, and had set one or both of them to be dashed or dotted or whatever (for display purposes, NOT to indicate actual holes in the real object being described), it couldn't tell if they intersected if the intersection fell in one of the non-visibly-drawn parts of either line.
He's a big fan of SolidWorks, and I've also heard good things about NX, although that one is something like ten times the price of SolidWorks.
Rigging plumbing, sewage, power, cable, phone, etc for full 360 degree rotation will be tricky.
Anything electrical is easy. Just use a bunch of ring-shaped conductors around the axis of rotation.
I imagine liquid wouldn't be *that* much harder. Have the input water come in at the top of the building and the sewage come out the bottom, with one big pipe connector on each end that runs through the axis of rotation. Because the water is only going one way (down), you don't need a perfect seal, just that the bottom connector be wider than the top one.
We got Vista in for testing at work, so I jumped at the chance to try a 64-bit Windows on my home machine and see what difference it made.
I got it installed, but it didn't recognize my Linksys wireless card. I went to the Linksys website and they don't offer one either. There was a user-provided set of instructions for using the OEM drivers from the actual hardware vendor, but they didn't work for me.
I'd need a 50+ foot-long cat 5 cable to connect to my router, and that's too much of a hassle, so that was the end of Vista 64-bit testing for me.
My XP machine never BSODs either -- it just freezes cursor in place like an unpatched 95 box.
In my experience, that's generally a driver or hardware issue. My machine was doing that for awhile, when I was trying to use some old Matrox Millenniums for multi-monitor output. Yes, I would prefer it if the OS couldn't be locked up by a video driver, but given how low-level a subsystem it is, I can understand how it would be hard to avoid.
Even Linux has refused to work for me if the video isn't working the way it expects - the Ubuntu installer locked up on me at a black screen repeatedly until I realized it was because I had two monitors connected to a dual-output GeForce 7600GT, and disconnected one of them while booting off the install CD.
For a long time a distinction was made between Spam (repeated messages) and UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail).
That must have been before my time, and I was reading USENET in 1991.
I always took "spam" to be related to the mass-crossposting of off-topic messages, e.g. "Make money fast!" Crossposting, USENET-style, isn't something that really applies anywhere else (except some of the old BBS software that was networked in batch mode), and it makes replies to mass-crossposted off-topic messages particularly annoying.
it's a server, why is everything done via a GUI and no decent way to script half the things you need to do on it?
Windows has traditionally had a pretty crappy CLI compared to Unix, but that's changed with Power Shell (formerly Monad).
Even before that, there were tons of ways to script anything, provided whoever wrote the systems you were trying to automate did things in a halfway non-stupid manner. DOS batch scripts are the obvious method, but VBScript is very powerful if you're willing to take a little more time to do the scripting.
Were you thinking of something in particular that you were unable to script?
I personally carry an inexpensive Garmin GPS. An old-style one with a B&W LCD that cost me $70.00 US. It takes 2 AA batteries, and I always carry a spare 4 pack of those, plus more in my laptop bag.
I have one of those, too. It works next to not at all in the Pacific Northwest, where I live. I thought it was broken until I took it on a drive with me to the Midwest, where it was able to get a fix.
But seriously, my point was that it's not an innovative design because it's basically lifted from the prop design of a ~40 year old TV/film series. You may have killed Mr. Spock and Scotty with your so-called "lack of being real," but the props were physically built. They don't actually shoot beams of energy, but that's not what the patent is about.
It looks like any number of Star Trek hand phasers to me. There were plenty of those designs from the 60s onward, with this one looking (IMO) most like the ones in III.
I also think it fails the non-obvious test pretty dramatically. Handheld clicky remotes are at least as old as slide projectors. The only difference is that this one has a button on the bottom as well. How is that not obvious? Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if some of those old slide projector controllers had buttons on the bottom too.
You can grant yourself permissions to read accounts, but it will be logged.
I'm sure in most shops, the admins all have full control over users' mailboxes. We do, because Exchange's admin interface doesn't provide any interface to the mailbox to e.g. delete corrupted items, or see which folders and items are consuming the most space (you just get a total mailbox size). You have to use a client, whether it's Outlook or MFCMAPI or whatever.
Yes, my Exchange admin account is separate from my domain admin account. I could still read peoples' email if I wanted to. Fortunately for them, I have a weird aversion to that kind of thing.
I disagree. It would lend weight to the idea that other companies should do the same. How many of the OP's employer's competitors are writing code that's functionally the same and also keeping it secret? They're not maintaining an advantage, they're all wasting time doing the same thing on their own.
One more company giving its work back to the community may not make a difference, but it helps move the aggregate of all companies in the direction of doing the same.
I say show them the simplified game theory segment in A Beautiful Mind. Everyone trying to get an edge, and everyone losing as a result.
...Chicago is preparing for business to grind to a halt as the entire city's population is simultaneously pulled over to be ticketed for using the "two-meter" instead of "two-second" rule.
Personally, the RIM model makes a lot of sense to me, as you're already trusting your data to "someone else's network" (the wireless carrier). It's a lot easier to implement a connection (always initiated outbound) from your company to RIM than it is to support 1000s of remote devices in the field connecting in to you.
Fair enough. My employer already maintains a server on the perimeter for Outlook Web Access, so your argument doesn't apply to us, but absent that I would be more likely to agree with you.
Also, as has already been said above, the "rogue employee at RIM" would have to crack the AES / 3DES encryption on the traffic as it went through their servers.
Assuming they don't already collect the keys to make support calls easier or somesuch.
Properly configured, that account gives you access to every mailbox on the system, but nothing else. No worse than a mail admin account, and generally with a lot stronger password.
Right, but what I'm getting at is that most admins don't generally set up hundreds of remote devices to do things in the context of their mail admin account.
Because of the BES architecture, isn't a compromised handheld connected to a server running the default configuration a gateway for an attacker to read the email of everyone in the company at best?
Oh yeah, I was also going to mention - the BES depends on the ability of its service account to masquerade as users, rather than having them enter their Windows credential on the handheld and passing it through on a per-user basis. So the BES domain service account tends to have excessive access to the network. Is there a good reason for that design that I'm missing?
I guess this is as good a place as any to ask - how did RIM ever sell the idea of having all corporate email and web traffic for Blackberries routed through their servers? I mean, it's overhead for most corporations to have the data routed to and from Canada, but it also gives RIM the ability to read all that confidential information - as if they themselves are the exact type of vulnerability this white paper discusses.
I realize that they did it most likely to keep customers locked into paying for service, but the potential for abuse by rogue employees there is huge.
Slashdot Mirror
And don't get me started about Alien3.
Have you seen the pseudo-Director's Cut that was included in the last release? I've always thought 3 was better than a lot of people do, but seeing it more like Fincher would have finished it made me genuinely like the film.
Sci Fi doesn't care. Unless you're putting eyeballs on advertisements, you're irrelevant in their calculus. That's the way TV works.
Sci Fi doesn't, but Universal should. The torrent factor is probably one of the reasons why the DVDs sell so well - I get BSG off of BitTorrent because I hate the fixed schedules and advertising of traditional television. But I also buy the DVD sets as soon as they're released, because I want to support the series and get them in a nicer format that feels more permanent.
But most Windows boxes have the .net runtime installed...
.NET 2.0, which you should be, since the 2005 IDE is light-years beyond 2003, and the new features of the language are well worth it IMO.
.NET Framework v2.0 or higher installed" when they run them.
You might be surprised. Especially if you're compiling for
Obviously as time progresses, more and more people will have it, but a lot of them still don't. I put a note in my readmes and on the download pages for the apps I've released publicly, and I still get people asking me why they get an error along the lines of "you must have the
10+ years ? Are you one of those people that advertise for java developers - must have 10+ years experience ? Java was still called 'oak' 10+ years ago, and all you could do with it was hack a few native gui widgets together. I know - I was there.
.NET) is the apparent ease with which its developers can do things that don't work in newer versions of it. I expect a few quirks when you're moving between platforms, but there are far too many Java apps I've had to deal with where they required the 1.3.1 or 1.4.2 JRE specifically and would not work with anything else.
Apparently Java 1.0 was released in 1995, so the GP is potentially not exaggerating. I remember my boss giving me a book on it at the time (I was 17 or 18), and I started doing simple work with it in the 1996-1999 era.
It's okay, we're all getting old, and some senility is to be expected.
=)
On a vaguely-related topic, my biggest complaint about Java (versus e.g.
I agree, but calling it threeaxesandthreedimensions doesn't get you a snappy palindromic name.
That's why they should have called it something super-awesome like Axis of Threevil.
Yep. I was just discussing this topic with my dad - who's been a mechanical engineer all of his adult life (so roughly 30 years) - the other week. He laughed and said something like "yeah, it was the industry standard... in 1982."
I always remember the story he told me about how even in the last version of AutoCAD that he used, if you were checking for line intersections, and had set one or both of them to be dashed or dotted or whatever (for display purposes, NOT to indicate actual holes in the real object being described), it couldn't tell if they intersected if the intersection fell in one of the non-visibly-drawn parts of either line.
He's a big fan of SolidWorks, and I've also heard good things about NX, although that one is something like ten times the price of SolidWorks.
I'm sure he meant Riddilin, the new product from the makers of Smilex. One of the side-effects is getting green question mark-shaped rashes.
Rigging plumbing, sewage, power, cable, phone, etc for full 360 degree rotation will be tricky.
Anything electrical is easy. Just use a bunch of ring-shaped conductors around the axis of rotation.
I imagine liquid wouldn't be *that* much harder. Have the input water come in at the top of the building and the sewage come out the bottom, with one big pipe connector on each end that runs through the axis of rotation. Because the water is only going one way (down), you don't need a perfect seal, just that the bottom connector be wider than the top one.
Driver support still isn't great, mainly.
Yep.
We got Vista in for testing at work, so I jumped at the chance to try a 64-bit Windows on my home machine and see what difference it made.
I got it installed, but it didn't recognize my Linksys wireless card. I went to the Linksys website and they don't offer one either. There was a user-provided set of instructions for using the OEM drivers from the actual hardware vendor, but they didn't work for me.
I'd need a 50+ foot-long cat 5 cable to connect to my router, and that's too much of a hassle, so that was the end of Vista 64-bit testing for me.
My XP machine never BSODs either -- it just freezes cursor in place like an unpatched 95 box.
In my experience, that's generally a driver or hardware issue. My machine was doing that for awhile, when I was trying to use some old Matrox Millenniums for multi-monitor output. Yes, I would prefer it if the OS couldn't be locked up by a video driver, but given how low-level a subsystem it is, I can understand how it would be hard to avoid.
Even Linux has refused to work for me if the video isn't working the way it expects - the Ubuntu installer locked up on me at a black screen repeatedly until I realized it was because I had two monitors connected to a dual-output GeForce 7600GT, and disconnected one of them while booting off the install CD.
For a long time a distinction was made between Spam (repeated messages) and UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail).
That must have been before my time, and I was reading USENET in 1991.
I always took "spam" to be related to the mass-crossposting of off-topic messages, e.g. "Make money fast!" Crossposting, USENET-style, isn't something that really applies anywhere else (except some of the old BBS software that was networked in batch mode), and it makes replies to mass-crossposted off-topic messages particularly annoying.
it's a server, why is everything done via a GUI and no decent way to script half the things you need to do on it?
Windows has traditionally had a pretty crappy CLI compared to Unix, but that's changed with Power Shell (formerly Monad).
Even before that, there were tons of ways to script anything, provided whoever wrote the systems you were trying to automate did things in a halfway non-stupid manner. DOS batch scripts are the obvious method, but VBScript is very powerful if you're willing to take a little more time to do the scripting.
Were you thinking of something in particular that you were unable to script?
I personally carry an inexpensive Garmin GPS. An old-style one with a B&W LCD that cost me $70.00 US. It takes 2 AA batteries, and I always carry a spare 4 pack of those, plus more in my laptop bag.
I have one of those, too. It works next to not at all in the Pacific Northwest, where I live. I thought it was broken until I took it on a drive with me to the Midwest, where it was able to get a fix.
In software version numbers, the "decimal point" is often a major/minor separator instead, so you have:
... ...
0.7
0.8
0.9
0.10
0.11
0.28
0.29
0.30
1.0
etc.
Star Trek isn't real, dude.
Nooooooooooooooo!
But seriously, my point was that it's not an innovative design because it's basically lifted from the prop design of a ~40 year old TV/film series. You may have killed Mr. Spock and Scotty with your so-called "lack of being real," but the props were physically built. They don't actually shoot beams of energy, but that's not what the patent is about.
It looks like any number of Star Trek hand phasers to me. There were plenty of those designs from the 60s onward, with this one looking (IMO) most like the ones in III.
I also think it fails the non-obvious test pretty dramatically. Handheld clicky remotes are at least as old as slide projectors. The only difference is that this one has a button on the bottom as well. How is that not obvious? Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if some of those old slide projector controllers had buttons on the bottom too.
You can grant yourself permissions to read accounts, but it will be logged.
I'm sure in most shops, the admins all have full control over users' mailboxes. We do, because Exchange's admin interface doesn't provide any interface to the mailbox to e.g. delete corrupted items, or see which folders and items are consuming the most space (you just get a total mailbox size). You have to use a client, whether it's Outlook or MFCMAPI or whatever.
Yes, my Exchange admin account is separate from my domain admin account. I could still read peoples' email if I wanted to. Fortunately for them, I have a weird aversion to that kind of thing.
The competitive risk far outweighs any benefits.
I disagree. It would lend weight to the idea that other companies should do the same. How many of the OP's employer's competitors are writing code that's functionally the same and also keeping it secret? They're not maintaining an advantage, they're all wasting time doing the same thing on their own.
One more company giving its work back to the community may not make a difference, but it helps move the aggregate of all companies in the direction of doing the same.
I say show them the simplified game theory segment in A Beautiful Mind. Everyone trying to get an edge, and everyone losing as a result.
...Chicago is preparing for business to grind to a halt as the entire city's population is simultaneously pulled over to be ticketed for using the "two-meter" instead of "two-second" rule.
an ICBM with a stealth fighter attached isn't cool?
Seriously, that sketch is neat looking. Very Dyna Soar-esque, and I have a soft spot for cancelled aerospace projects.
And if you've driven through them, you'll realize the difference is moot.
I drove through both of them last month, and they seemed very different to me. Now, Iowa and Nebraska, those were pretty similar IMO.
Personally, the RIM model makes a lot of sense to me, as you're already trusting your data to "someone else's network" (the wireless carrier). It's a lot easier to implement a connection (always initiated outbound) from your company to RIM than it is to support 1000s of remote devices in the field connecting in to you.
Fair enough. My employer already maintains a server on the perimeter for Outlook Web Access, so your argument doesn't apply to us, but absent that I would be more likely to agree with you.
Also, as has already been said above, the "rogue employee at RIM" would have to crack the AES / 3DES encryption on the traffic as it went through their servers.
Assuming they don't already collect the keys to make support calls easier or somesuch.
Properly configured, that account gives you access to every mailbox on the system, but nothing else. No worse than a mail admin account, and generally with a lot stronger password.
Right, but what I'm getting at is that most admins don't generally set up hundreds of remote devices to do things in the context of their mail admin account.
Because of the BES architecture, isn't a compromised handheld connected to a server running the default configuration a gateway for an attacker to read the email of everyone in the company at best?
Oh yeah, I was also going to mention - the BES depends on the ability of its service account to masquerade as users, rather than having them enter their Windows credential on the handheld and passing it through on a per-user basis. So the BES domain service account tends to have excessive access to the network. Is there a good reason for that design that I'm missing?
I guess this is as good a place as any to ask - how did RIM ever sell the idea of having all corporate email and web traffic for Blackberries routed through their servers? I mean, it's overhead for most corporations to have the data routed to and from Canada, but it also gives RIM the ability to read all that confidential information - as if they themselves are the exact type of vulnerability this white paper discusses.
I realize that they did it most likely to keep customers locked into paying for service, but the potential for abuse by rogue employees there is huge.