This has absolutely ZERO to do with patch problems or viruses or any of that crap.
AutoPatcher was a well known group that provided the exact same stuff Microsoft does. They did what Microsoft could not or would not do - provide Microsoft patches in a form that was usable for bulk update of Windows PCs which are not or for efficiency reasons could not be updated over the Internet.
To suggest that AutoPatcher was some sort of rogue operation that could infect machines with viruses is "a bit on the dishonest side."
Swap prefetch SMB2 flash drive as disk cache hard drive with flash cache (Hybrid Hard Drive) preload application (based on time usage heuristics)
Yeah, the average user really needs all that wonderful Windows kernel goodness...
Sure.
In six months all that will probably be in the next Linux kernel.
Pretty much everything on that comparison site is in the latest kernel.
Nice site - pretty much proves that Linux is nearly 100% totally equivalent to Windows Server - except for the "oh so critical" stuff listed above and a couple equally minor items I didn't bother to post.
Yeah, wire me the money - I'll get it someday when the police aren't looking...
This was a hoax, a prank. Somebody was just having fun jerking people around.
And see how easy it was. Anybody remember the Chinese Fire Drill in the book "Illuminatus?" Act authoritative - or threatening in this case - and spew out some orders, and everybody falls right into line like lemmings.
The first response to the bomb threat should have been, "Fine - set it off. We'll settle up later, asshole."
You want "justice" - stay out of Arizona, Texas and the rest of those "hanging judge" blue states. Not that the rest of the US is all that sharp in that regard...
Should have let Mexico keep 'em - let them enjoy "Mexican justice."
Or you're one of maybe 100 million office workers who play MP3's they have on the workstation with Windows Media Player or Winamp through headphones while they're working on files over the local office network.
I can just understand Microsoft not being aware of that scenario - except you can guarantee that EVERY SINGLE MICROSOFT EMPLOYEE just does that. So nobody thought to test that scenario - that was just dumb of Microsoft.
The real question is why the engineers involved didn't understand the size of the impact on performance. I mean, if you made the mod in order to avoid network performance screwing up media playback, then why didn't they explicitly test the degree of impact on the networking performance AS WELL AS the media playback? They were explicitly degrading network performance in favor of media playback. Why didn't they SEE the performance hit?
So one has to conclude that this is correct: they simply didn't test it. They just tested the media playback - if in fact they tested that at all.
I'm reminded of the post at a Microsoft employee's blog last year where a member of the Vista testing team explicitly said that setting up tests was a nightmare that took most of a week - and then when Vista failed the tests horribly, management would STILL sign off on the components as having passed.
Software as a service won't be viable until the Internet is more reliable and more interactive.
Right now, dealing with company's oversubscribed servers and under subscribed bandwidth makes response time as bad as it used to be when green screen terminals were attached to mainframes.
The rule used to be response time should be no longer than two to four seconds. How often do you wait for considerably more than four seconds for a Web server to respond?
Granted, the four second rule was more or less intended for more "interactive" activities (like data entry) than mere Web browsing. But the whole SaaS and Web 2.0 stuff is intended for exactly that - interaction with applications over the Web.
And right now, Web response time just doesn't cut it.
When the telcos get their head out of their butts - or someone does it for them - and we get 100Mbps or more speed to the desktop AND the people who offer SaaS learn what the words "load balancing" mean, maybe then it will be viable.
Right now, every time I go to Superiorpics.com for my babe picture downloads, I click on a link to Shareavenue, I'm lucky they respond in less than thirty seconds to a minute. And twice this week they've been completely down. Not to mention the WGA outage which started this discussion.
It's ridiculous.
Add to that the mysterious ability of data transmitted over the Net to literally CRASH an application such as a browser. I've never understood that. Most desktop applications read files and other data and have mechanisms in place to treat that data AS data, no matter how malformed it may be. If it's wrong, they complain without crashing (usually - there are numerous exceptions, of course.) But when we go to network apps, somehow all that goes out the window - and crashes are regular. Maybe it's because network protocols have states and when data is lost, the states get corrupted and the network apps aren't coded to deal with that because of the rigidity of the protocol. There's the simple issue of knowing when the next network data packet just isn't coming and how to recover from that. But most network apps seem as fragile as glass to bad data. Firefox just grinds to a halt or bombs immediately when multimedia data coming in isn't as expected.
When are we going to get back to coding and stop being license cops?
Get a clue. The license does not matter. The attitude matters.
All the OSS licenses in the world will not help if the attitude about contributing is wrong.
This was inevitable. As soon as you believe in "intellectual property", it becomes a zero-sum game in which you HAVE to WIN over someone else and control their behavior. And this inevitably leads to a proliferation of legal maneuvers until the rate of return drops to zero, with everyone spending more time interpreting the legalities than coding.
Drop the licenses completely, STFU and get back to coding.
starting with Linux Format (always good, and the DVDs are a quick way to get a reasonably recent major distro ready to boot), and Linux User. These two have both tutorials, news (usually old news by the time it hits print) and more in-depth articles than you get from most Linux Web sites. There are articles for novices and more advanced pieces for Linux geeks.
Rarely get Linux Journal because most of their articles are usually focused on something I'm not interested in. They have the same problem as Sys Admin - way too narrow a focus per issue - and I expect they will eventually go away as well.
Many of the IT industry mags are going Web only. Network World is gone, InfoWorld is gone. There just isn't much point in print magazines for the industry - everybody gets their news from either RSS, email news feeds, or Web surfing. The lead times of a print magazine just can't handle it.
As for PC magazines in general, I download mine from Usenet and haven't bought one in years. And most of the time, I don't have time to even browse the downloaded ones, which is unfortunate since the bigger mags still do have useful articles.
Send them Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. That should stop it.
Also reminds me of Andrea Corr's comment when she was filming the movie "Broken Thread" in the Himalayas. She said there were bold monkeys up there that will sneak into your room and "steal your computer."
So the next problem we're gonna have is monkeys posting on/,!
it's a wonder any company can get anything done with Windows.
Corporations need to realize that making Bill the richest guy in the world is not the most effective use of their IT capital. Just imagine if all those license fees, the cost of downtime for malware attacks, the cost of license following, the cost of unnecessary servers due to lack of scalability, etc., ad nauseum, had been diverted to open source development. Microsoft would be out of business now.
Every single Microsoft OS ever released sucked more than the last one (allowing for bug fixes and completely rewritten stuff like moving from 16-bit to 32-bit). More complexity, more insecurity, less scalability, more unreliability (arguably Windows 2000 and XP were more reliable than Windows 98 - wow, big frickin' deal! They still suck on a day to day basis.)
Email me in twenty years - if we still have email - and let me know how it went.
Just because Microsoft has been around - and dominant - for the last twenty years doesn't mean they will continue to do so for the next 20. Technology is changing too fast to make decades long pronouncements about who's going to be on top. I read somewhere that of most of the top IT companies in the early '80's, most of them went out of business or were bought out by somebody else. Do you remember Borland, or even older, Ashton-Tate? Who owns Lotus now? Where is the guy who started Lotus working now?
Nothing stays the same. IBM amazed me by not collapsing in the 80's amd 90's. They reinvented themselves as first a PC company, then a services company, and even managed to renovate the mainframe market which was collapsing all through the '80's and '90's until AIX and Linux came along.
Microsoft COULD do the same - but it will require a major shakeup in management - namely, dumping Bill and Ballmer and the rest of that lot who are dinosaurs dragging the company into the ground.
Your entire argument boils down to: no matter how many people get bothered, if it stops one person, it's good.
This is the old "if it saves one person, it's good" bullshit.
No, it's not.
Like it or not, cost/benefit analysis applies here as it does everywhere in human behavior. There is no situation which requires infinite effort to prevent an unlikely result.
There wasn't anything in it that wasn't pure speculation.
The best he can say is that this massive organization and the massive inconvenience it has developed as well as the massive incompetence it has shown has "the potential" to stop a few terrorists.
When the tests show that 90% of the time this organization can NOT stop people from getting weapons on board, I'd say that was giving them one hell of a lot of credit.
The only thing that has prevented a repeat of 9/11 is not the TSA - it is the relative incompetence of ninety five percent of the terrorists in the world. And the only reason we had the original 9/11 is the relative incompetence of the law enforcement and intelligence communities under the Bush administration - and possibly a little assistance at the top in that operation, probably by making sure nobody was allowed to be competent.
However, other leading causes of death differed depending on countries' incomes. Here is the list for high-income countries:
1. Heart disease
2. Stroke
3. Lung cancer
4. Lower respiratory infections
5. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
6. Colon and rectum cancers
7. Alzheimer's disease and other dementias
8. Type 2 diabetes
9. Breast cancer
10. Stomach cancer
Here is the list for low- and middle-income countries:
Slashdot Mirror
This has absolutely ZERO to do with patch problems or viruses or any of that crap.
AutoPatcher was a well known group that provided the exact same stuff Microsoft does. They did what Microsoft could not or would not do - provide Microsoft patches in a form that was usable for bulk update of Windows PCs which are not or for efficiency reasons could not be updated over the Internet.
To suggest that AutoPatcher was some sort of rogue operation that could infect machines with viruses is "a bit on the dishonest side."
Swap prefetch
SMB2
flash drive as disk cache
hard drive with flash cache (Hybrid Hard Drive)
preload application (based on time usage heuristics)
Yeah, the average user really needs all that wonderful Windows kernel goodness...
Sure.
In six months all that will probably be in the next Linux kernel.
Pretty much everything on that comparison site is in the latest kernel.
Nice site - pretty much proves that Linux is nearly 100% totally equivalent to Windows Server - except for the "oh so critical" stuff listed above and a couple equally minor items I didn't bother to post.
WSUS? Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1
Which makes it useless for those clients of mine who don't have 2003 Server on the premises.
And you think Windows Update isn't buggy? Their servers frequently slow as molasses?
You think slipstreaming patches into an install CD is easy when you have to use the install CD that came with the machine on a client site?
Get a clue. Autopatcher was valuable for support techs needing to do updates on a client site, not just admins with access to 2003 Server.
I just went to WinDizUpdate to see what that was about - morons detected my openSUSE 10.2 version of Firefox 2.0.0.5 as an "unsupported browser".
Useless site - you can't even find out much about it unless you're using a "supported browser".
Nitwits.
Yeah, wire me the money - I'll get it someday when the police aren't looking...
This was a hoax, a prank. Somebody was just having fun jerking people around.
And see how easy it was. Anybody remember the Chinese Fire Drill in the book "Illuminatus?" Act authoritative - or threatening in this case - and spew out some orders, and everybody falls right into line like lemmings.
The first response to the bomb threat should have been, "Fine - set it off. We'll settle up later, asshole."
right here in the US - or even put spies in Seagate's tech development department - and get the stuff anyway.
This is just stupid shit intended to talk up the "huge threat" China is to the US economically and militarily.
Sure, you don't want to give China our tiny nuclear warhead plans. That's about it for "technology transfer" as a security threat.
The rest is bullshit. You don't become a strategic threat to somebody by having the same technology they do.
The home of Sheriff Arpaio.
'Nuff said.
You want "justice" - stay out of Arizona, Texas and the rest of those "hanging judge" blue states. Not that the rest of the US is all that sharp in that regard...
Should have let Mexico keep 'em - let them enjoy "Mexican justice."
Or you're one of maybe 100 million office workers who play MP3's they have on the workstation with Windows Media Player or Winamp through headphones while they're working on files over the local office network.
I can just understand Microsoft not being aware of that scenario - except you can guarantee that EVERY SINGLE MICROSOFT EMPLOYEE just does that. So nobody thought to test that scenario - that was just dumb of Microsoft.
The real question is why the engineers involved didn't understand the size of the impact on performance. I mean, if you made the mod in order to avoid network performance screwing up media playback, then why didn't they explicitly test the degree of impact on the networking performance AS WELL AS the media playback? They were explicitly degrading network performance in favor of media playback. Why didn't they SEE the performance hit?
So one has to conclude that this is correct: they simply didn't test it. They just tested the media playback - if in fact they tested that at all.
I'm reminded of the post at a Microsoft employee's blog last year where a member of the Vista testing team explicitly said that setting up tests was a nightmare that took most of a week - and then when Vista failed the tests horribly, management would STILL sign off on the components as having passed.
And this is the obvious result of that process.
Software as a service won't be viable until the Internet is more reliable and more interactive.
Right now, dealing with company's oversubscribed servers and under subscribed bandwidth makes response time as bad as it used to be when green screen terminals were attached to mainframes.
The rule used to be response time should be no longer than two to four seconds. How often do you wait for considerably more than four seconds for a Web server to respond?
Granted, the four second rule was more or less intended for more "interactive" activities (like data entry) than mere Web browsing. But the whole SaaS and Web 2.0 stuff is intended for exactly that - interaction with applications over the Web.
And right now, Web response time just doesn't cut it.
When the telcos get their head out of their butts - or someone does it for them - and we get 100Mbps or more speed to the desktop AND the people who offer SaaS learn what the words "load balancing" mean, maybe then it will be viable.
Right now, every time I go to Superiorpics.com for my babe picture downloads, I click on a link to Shareavenue, I'm lucky they respond in less than thirty seconds to a minute. And twice this week they've been completely down. Not to mention the WGA outage which started this discussion.
It's ridiculous.
Add to that the mysterious ability of data transmitted over the Net to literally CRASH an application such as a browser. I've never understood that. Most desktop applications read files and other data and have mechanisms in place to treat that data AS data, no matter how malformed it may be. If it's wrong, they complain without crashing (usually - there are numerous exceptions, of course.) But when we go to network apps, somehow all that goes out the window - and crashes are regular. Maybe it's because network protocols have states and when data is lost, the states get corrupted and the network apps aren't coded to deal with that because of the rigidity of the protocol. There's the simple issue of knowing when the next network data packet just isn't coming and how to recover from that. But most network apps seem as fragile as glass to bad data. Firefox just grinds to a halt or bombs immediately when multimedia data coming in isn't as expected.
The reliability just isn't there.
If Windows performs at all, it's performing "better than expected."
If it boots, it's performing "better than expected."
Don't bother counting the lights.
Only realize the truth: there are no lights.
Then you will see that it is only you who are blinking.
When are we going to get back to coding and stop being license cops?
Get a clue. The license does not matter. The attitude matters.
All the OSS licenses in the world will not help if the attitude about contributing is wrong.
This was inevitable. As soon as you believe in "intellectual property", it becomes a zero-sum game in which you HAVE to WIN over someone else and control their behavior. And this inevitably leads to a proliferation of legal maneuvers until the rate of return drops to zero, with everyone spending more time interpreting the legalities than coding.
Drop the licenses completely, STFU and get back to coding.
starting with Linux Format (always good, and the DVDs are a quick way to get a reasonably recent major distro ready to boot), and Linux User. These two have both tutorials, news (usually old news by the time it hits print) and more in-depth articles than you get from most Linux Web sites. There are articles for novices and more advanced pieces for Linux geeks.
Rarely get Linux Journal because most of their articles are usually focused on something I'm not interested in. They have the same problem as Sys Admin - way too narrow a focus per issue - and I expect they will eventually go away as well.
Many of the IT industry mags are going Web only. Network World is gone, InfoWorld is gone. There just isn't much point in print magazines for the industry - everybody gets their news from either RSS, email news feeds, or Web surfing. The lead times of a print magazine just can't handle it.
As for PC magazines in general, I download mine from Usenet and haven't bought one in years. And most of the time, I don't have time to even browse the downloaded ones, which is unfortunate since the bigger mags still do have useful articles.
Send them Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. That should stop it.
/,!
Also reminds me of Andrea Corr's comment when she was filming the movie "Broken Thread" in the Himalayas. She said there were bold monkeys up there that will sneak into your room and "steal your computer."
So the next problem we're gonna have is monkeys posting on
Of course, they'll all be using Windows...
Instead of coding open source projects, now we're coding projects to detect license violations.
Next, the Open Source Business Software Alliance and raids by the Secret Service...
When is the last time we read anything about open source that wasn't about licensing?
When did it stop being about the code and the value?
it's a wonder any company can get anything done with Windows.
Corporations need to realize that making Bill the richest guy in the world is not the most effective use of their IT capital. Just imagine if all those license fees, the cost of downtime for malware attacks, the cost of license following, the cost of unnecessary servers due to lack of scalability, etc., ad nauseum, had been diverted to open source development. Microsoft would be out of business now.
For those masters of innovation at Microsoft!
Fuzzy dice - a Bill Gates invention!
60 million sold in the first six months!
Fuzzy Dice Service Pack 1 will soon be released!
Meanwhile, Secunia released a study today that says Fuzzy Dice can be "pwned" in seconds...
Vista sucks.
Yawn...We know, dudes, we know.
Every single Microsoft OS ever released sucked more than the last one (allowing for bug fixes and completely rewritten stuff like moving from 16-bit to 32-bit). More complexity, more insecurity, less scalability, more unreliability (arguably Windows 2000 and XP were more reliable than Windows 98 - wow, big frickin' deal! They still suck on a day to day basis.)
"It hasn't come to pass yet"
The operative word here is "yet".
Email me in twenty years - if we still have email - and let me know how it went.
Just because Microsoft has been around - and dominant - for the last twenty years doesn't mean they will continue to do so for the next 20. Technology is changing too fast to make decades long pronouncements about who's going to be on top. I read somewhere that of most of the top IT companies in the early '80's, most of them went out of business or were bought out by somebody else. Do you remember Borland, or even older, Ashton-Tate? Who owns Lotus now? Where is the guy who started Lotus working now?
Nothing stays the same. IBM amazed me by not collapsing in the 80's amd 90's. They reinvented themselves as first a PC company, then a services company, and even managed to renovate the mainframe market which was collapsing all through the '80's and '90's until AIX and Linux came along.
Microsoft COULD do the same - but it will require a major shakeup in management - namely, dumping Bill and Ballmer and the rest of that lot who are dinosaurs dragging the company into the ground.
There are scores of download sites, maybe hundreds. Why assume they'll ALL trustworthy? Anybody can put up a download site.
I try to deal only with names that have been around a while - MajorGeeks, etc.
Did he submit to the known, recognized sites. Doesn't say so in TFA.
Your entire argument boils down to: no matter how many people get bothered, if it stops one person, it's good.
This is the old "if it saves one person, it's good" bullshit.
No, it's not.
Like it or not, cost/benefit analysis applies here as it does everywhere in human behavior. There is no situation which requires infinite effort to prevent an unlikely result.
Life is risky. Deal with it.
Mod this +5 Funny.
Well, *I* thought it was funny. Fuck you if you didn't.
How did this get modded "informative"?
There wasn't anything in it that wasn't pure speculation.
The best he can say is that this massive organization and the massive inconvenience it has developed as well as the massive incompetence it has shown has "the potential" to stop a few terrorists.
When the tests show that 90% of the time this organization can NOT stop people from getting weapons on board, I'd say that was giving them one hell of a lot of credit.
The only thing that has prevented a repeat of 9/11 is not the TSA - it is the relative incompetence of ninety five percent of the terrorists in the world. And the only reason we had the original 9/11 is the relative incompetence of the law enforcement and intelligence communities under the Bush administration - and possibly a little assistance at the top in that operation, probably by making sure nobody was allowed to be competent.
I'm still trying to figure out how he was going to pack $7 million worth of gold bars into the laundromat machine...
The spin cycle would have been interesting to watch.
Google is your friend.
t iclekey=62218
Top 10 Causes of Death Worldwide
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?ar
However, other leading causes of death differed depending on countries' incomes. Here is the list for high-income countries:
1. Heart disease
2. Stroke
3. Lung cancer
4. Lower respiratory infections
5. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
6. Colon and rectum cancers
7. Alzheimer's disease and other dementias
8. Type 2 diabetes
9. Breast cancer
10. Stomach cancer
Here is the list for low- and middle-income countries:
1. Heart disease
2. Stroke
3. Lower respiratory infections
4. HIV/AIDS
5. Fetus/newborn (perinatal) conditions
6. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
7. Diarrhea
8. Tuberculosis
9. Malaria
10. Road traffic accidents