One might say I overreacted a tad; the product of so many bad experiences, but on reflection, I don't think so. Agreed the router could have exploits, but I *know* my routers thoroughly, where in contrast, I'm never quite sure what Windows firewall is doing, except when it's denying service of some kind that I need...
I think Windows firewall is a very necessary component, and I do keep it turned on (*mostly* turned on -- if you turn on every security feature you can't get anything done) but I don't trust ANY PC that isn't behind a natted firewall. The world in which we could have directly outward facing PCs is long gone.
In the original phone call I had asked her to bring up CMD and do an ipconfig to see what kind of address she was assigned, and it was a class A private network address, so there was NAT going on further upstream. But I have no visibility of the vendor's architecture, don't know if other customers could touch her machine directly or not. It's just safer to provide your own security and be sure you can maintain it.
Which kind-of begs the question, what do mere mortals do? Get pwned, I guess.
>p> > Or give it to someone else, if you do need to upgrade for some reason. Recycling is hugely wasteful when reuse is possible.
Agreed, although giving your old one to others (which I have done under specialized circumstances) sometimes means that they throw away their old phone. Or maybe they give it to someone of even less means, I dunno... it might be like that description of the city of Minas-Trony in Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings. The city was built like a layer cake, so that the rich could throw their garbage over the edge to the next lower class, which threw their garbage over the edge to the next lower, etc. Nobody knew what the bottom layer did with garbage. Some suspected they ate it.
> It always depresses me that we collect glass bottles, smash them, heat them to a high temperature, and then use the result to make... glass bottles.
Remember when... sorry, showing my age here. *I* remember when milk was delivered to your door in glass bottles with paper caps. You set out your empties, which were returned to the outlet which hopefully sterilized them and reused them. No smashing and melting involved. There's a number of reasons we can't do that now, mostly to do with non-standard shapes and brands etched in the glass which would require sorting by make and model, and probably a little bit by overreaction to diseases that we have now that we did not have then. It's sad that we get milk now in cartons that for the most part become landfill.
...so I download a nice photo of a pristine iphone, print it at 1:1 scale, and paste it to the front of my broken phone.
Moreover, I'm thinking it wouldn't necessarily detect the issues with my daughter's last Galaxy S, which had a wonky (but not broken) display, dead compass, dead position sensor, and dead GPS. But still worked as a phone if you could dial blind.
Agreed. Also you're putting a machine out in the wild that has intimate access to all these sources of information. Someone creating false ids would really *need* one 'a' those.
> Sometime in the future, it's quite possible that we will live in a cashless society. Lord knows the Federal Gov want's to tract each and every transaction. It would cut down on violent crime, drug abuse, and prevent tax evasion. It would also save by not having the Treasury create physical currency. It would also allow them to inject more money (inflation) in real-time into the system via a few keystrokes sort of speak.
Um,... good?
The first thing that occurs to me is that the very first thing that will be done after converting to an all cashless society is that a couple hundred ways will be found to game the system. In fact, I can see where it might be *easier* to break a cashless system than is would be to print money that would pass a reasonable check. (Even in these days of high resolution color copiers.)
So let me get this straight -- the machine can verify my driver's license and my credit card and my finger print? Hell with stealing mere cell phones, it's the machine itself that's the real gem.
> Within less than a minute after connecting to the net (routers weren't standard accesories yet, so no NAT) you'd get the fucking restart countdowns [wikipedia.org].
I really don't get it. In some cases (smaller cable and dsl companies in the boonies) they're *still* connecting some poor retiree's PC directly to a modem and hence to the raw internet. My mother in law, for instance, just recently switched from dial-up to DSL (I know I know, DSL is passe now, but that's what was available in her area). She had some questions about the installation so called me. She said the installer wanted to sell her some security package I'd never heard of. I said no, I have my own products that I will install for her.
I asked her to describe the arrangement, and she (being fairly savvy for a grandmother) described the bare-bones DSL modem connected directly to the PC! I said "turn it off! turn it off!". Fortunately it was the weekend. I rifled through my junk box, found an older D-link router, drove the 170 miles to her house, installed same. I checked her computer very carefully, found no infection. She got lucky. I have to wonder how many computers that company has attached to the internet that are now spambots or worse.
Incidentally, I get an "attack log" mailed to me approximately weekly from her router, and man it looks like a war zone. Hundreds of DOS attacks, port probes, login tries a week. Her network gets attacked more often than mine.
I think we're getting wrapped up in orders of magnitude here. A cloud of satellites is definitely not necessary, just a few in geo or pole-to-pole orbits, and as Adams so famously said, "space is big", even the space immediately around a planet, compared to the size of a communications satellite. No reasonable danger of a hazard, especially on a frontier planet, unless we're talking decades of dumping junk into orbits that don't decay in a reasonable amount of time. One could even imagine recalling satellites on departure. Might actually stipulate it, to avoid inadvertently sharing advanced tech with non-members.
Yes I know we have that problem here -- see "dumping junk into orbit for decades".
I've said this in other threads, but what I'm observing is that even corporations are getting tired of the merry-go-round. For instance, the company I work for allows people to requisition mac laptops instead of winders. Servers are roughly equally divided between winders and linux. And resources that used to be squarely in the winders field, like file shares, are being taken over by appliances (incidentally running linux, although admins don't necessarily see that). And there would be a general revolt amongst the execs if the cellular department tried to take their blackberries and iphones away from them and substitute windows 7 mobile. Microsoft is visibly losing steam in the corporate world, which makes this current issue a desperation move that will probably backfire. Incidentally, Windows 7 has been out for what, two years now? We're still running XP on corporate PCs. Vista? Gave it a miss.
The thing is, by the time an OS is ten years old, we've gotten up on the flat part of the bugfix curve *and* the security hole curve. So M$ says "xp has reached end of support" and enough corporations or a significant number of individuals say "we're not going through the churn to switch from a perfectly good operating system" [1] and either M$ will blink or we will just make do. Both scenarios of which have happened -- XP EOL was extended at least twice, and... say, have you ever seen one of those bottle deposit machines reboot? I did just last November. You know they're still running Windows 95? It was EOL... I think 1997 or 1998. In cases where the OS is just there for a specific purpose, like loading an application and communicating with a printer, it doesn't really matter whether you could call M$ for support anymore.
[1] which is a bit like jumping out of a perfectly good airplane
> Don't fall into the trap of assuming everyone's wants and needs are the same as yours:)
Wow, not even close. I recently retired a Mac G4 and replaced it with a Windows 7 box. I use Adobe products daily, and was concerned with this pissing match between Adobe and Apple. So when it was time to upgrade, I crossed over to Windows. Now that I think of it, I'm using Windows precisely because there is an app I need that runs on Windows, so I guess I do fit the "have to" category.
I don't do iOS partly because I don't like the walled garden, but also partly (confession here... this is not necessarily reasonable, I understand) because I don't want to be associated with the embarrassingly intense iphone fanbois around me. There's a guy in planning meetings... constantly fondles his 4s... it's creepy.
I'm not saying the aphorism is 100% accurate, and I certainly didn't coin it. But I think that it is true generally that of the people using Windows products, more are doing it because there's something they have to do that requires it, (ex: Microsoft Office, Communicator, Outlook) and of people using Apple products, more are doing it because they like Apple products, and are willing to work out the compatibility issues (which are getting fewer) to use that platform.
I don't believe Microsoft is in a position anymore to dictate that kind of locked architecture and actually get away with it. For reasons you described so well, we have other choices now. If Microsoft commissions a device and it only garners 7% market share, any device manufacturer with any intelligence at all will offer alternatives. Oh wait, that happened, this century.
I understand your point. I think Microsoft really *is* trying strategies left over from the nineties, and I think they have even less chance of working now.
They are both dead to me. I understand they are completely different things. I think I covered reasons why I won't be touching either the PC version (7 is good enough; there's no compelling reason to go to 8, and even releases tend to suck) or the ARM/tablet version, and waste money on a device that's utterly locked into an OS. Had I wanted that, I'd have bought an iPad. If you're going to get locked into an OS, it might as well be one that does touch well. (I don't own an iPad either, for other reasons.)
It's been said, people use iOS and OSX because they *want* to. People use Windows because they *have* to.
Since then, we can add Android to the mix -- people use Android, generally, because they want to. There are a lot of choices out there, and the numbers don't lie -- huge adoption of iOS and Android, single digits for Windows Phone 7. (And I wonder how many of those are corporate employees who weren't given a choice.)
The thing that is slowly but inevitably changing, is the "people use Windows because they have to" side of the equation. Put simply, it's becoming less and less true, even on PCs, Microsoft's meat-and-potatoes. I'm wondering how much is sheer inertia at this point.
The solution is simple: Don't buy from corporations that do this. When their profits fall off, they'll either change their tune, or go under. Either way, it's a win.
I'm pretty much decided at this point. Consider: (a) Windows 7 Touch was pretty much a bust, no real reason (despite the marketing) to believe Windows 8 touch features will be any better. (b) Conventional Windows 7 works fine with KVM machines for applications that require Windows, and will probably last me as long as XP did (I'm still doing useful things with XP on several machines, ten years after release.) (c) Even releases usually suck. (d) and now, I learn that if I buy a Windows 8 device, it will forever to the end of time run Windows and there's nothing I can do about it.
So screw it. I'll glance at 9 when it comes out, see if Microsoft has gotten any more sane, but more and more I can do my stuff on Android, and I'm just -) (- this close to switching completely.
If Microsoft thinks they can still throw what's left of their weight around with vendors and hammer in exclusivity, I wish them the best of luck. I choose not to participate.
> Do any of you comment bug fixes as you do them in the code itself (rather than separate documentation such as developer's change log), and what procedures do you use if you do?
Whenever I do a potential bug fix, I always add a comment describing briefly what it's supposed to fix, my initials, the current date, and the string TEST TEST TEST. That way I can easily find and revert the change if it didn't fix the problem. After testing, if everything is ok, I do one more pass through the code and remove all the TEST strings, leaving the description, my initials, and the date.
Going back through the code later is a lot like reading through your older postings in Facebook. Sometimes illuminating, sometimes entertaining, sometimes embarrassing.
Perhaps not, just relating my own experiences. About that time I bought a software firewall, and about a year later a hardware firewall, which mostly fixed the problem.
I don't slaver over every new version of Winders the company craps out; didn't switch to XP until SP1. Is that the version that included the firewall?
I remember when I first got cable modem. (I was the first one in my neighborhood.) I fired up my Windows 98 box and before I could even connect to microsoft.com to download security updates, my machine was pwned. It could be worse. It could be like back in the old days.
Mind you, I would like to see M$ go bankrupt in a way that forever ruined the careers of all involved, took all their money, burned their homes, sowed their land with salt, and insured that they never again could show their faces in the tech community. But even I have to admit, security is better now than it was. One could argue that this was not a hard target to hit, but there you go.
Right, that was kind-of my point. All we as users want is a stable environment in which to work. At some point we need to get off the upgrade merry-go-round.
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One might say I overreacted a tad; the product of so many bad experiences, but on reflection, I don't think so. Agreed the router could have exploits, but I *know* my routers thoroughly, where in contrast, I'm never quite sure what Windows firewall is doing, except when it's denying service of some kind that I need...
I think Windows firewall is a very necessary component, and I do keep it turned on (*mostly* turned on -- if you turn on every security feature you can't get anything done) but I don't trust ANY PC that isn't behind a natted firewall. The world in which we could have directly outward facing PCs is long gone.
In the original phone call I had asked her to bring up CMD and do an ipconfig to see what kind of address she was assigned, and it was a class A private network address, so there was NAT going on further upstream. But I have no visibility of the vendor's architecture, don't know if other customers could touch her machine directly or not. It's just safer to provide your own security and be sure you can maintain it.
Which kind-of begs the question, what do mere mortals do? Get pwned, I guess.
>p>
> Or give it to someone else, if you do need to upgrade for some reason. Recycling is hugely wasteful when reuse is possible.
Agreed, although giving your old one to others (which I have done under specialized circumstances) sometimes means that they throw away their old phone. Or maybe they give it to someone of even less means, I dunno... it might be like that description of the city of Minas-Trony in Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings. The city was built like a layer cake, so that the rich could throw their garbage over the edge to the next lower class, which threw their garbage over the edge to the next lower, etc. Nobody knew what the bottom layer did with garbage. Some suspected they ate it.
> It always depresses me that we collect glass bottles, smash them, heat them to a high temperature, and then use the result to make... glass bottles.
Remember when... sorry, showing my age here. *I* remember when milk was delivered to your door in glass bottles with paper caps. You set out your empties, which were returned to the outlet which hopefully sterilized them and reused them. No smashing and melting involved. There's a number of reasons we can't do that now, mostly to do with non-standard shapes and brands etched in the glass which would require sorting by make and model, and probably a little bit by overreaction to diseases that we have now that we did not have then. It's sad that we get milk now in cartons that for the most part become landfill.
Moreover, I'm thinking it wouldn't necessarily detect the issues with my daughter's last Galaxy S, which had a wonky (but not broken) display, dead compass, dead position sensor, and dead GPS. But still worked as a phone if you could dial blind.
Agreed. Also you're putting a machine out in the wild that has intimate access to all these sources of information. Someone creating false ids would really *need* one 'a' those.
> Sometime in the future, it's quite possible that we will live in a cashless society. Lord knows the Federal Gov want's to tract each and every transaction. It would cut down on violent crime, drug abuse, and prevent tax evasion. It would also save by not having the Treasury create physical currency. It would also allow them to inject more money (inflation) in real-time into the system via a few keystrokes sort of speak.
Um, ... good?
The first thing that occurs to me is that the very first thing that will be done after converting to an all cashless society is that a couple hundred ways will be found to game the system. In fact, I can see where it might be *easier* to break a cashless system than is would be to print money that would pass a reasonable check. (Even in these days of high resolution color copiers.)
So let me get this straight -- the machine can verify my driver's license and my credit card and my finger print? Hell with stealing mere cell phones, it's the machine itself that's the real gem.
> Interestingly it was also one of the reasons why people initially hated Vista.
Initially?
> Within less than a minute after connecting to the net (routers weren't standard accesories yet, so no NAT) you'd get the fucking restart countdowns [wikipedia.org].
I really don't get it. In some cases (smaller cable and dsl companies in the boonies) they're *still* connecting some poor retiree's PC directly to a modem and hence to the raw internet. My mother in law, for instance, just recently switched from dial-up to DSL (I know I know, DSL is passe now, but that's what was available in her area). She had some questions about the installation so called me. She said the installer wanted to sell her some security package I'd never heard of. I said no, I have my own products that I will install for her.
I asked her to describe the arrangement, and she (being fairly savvy for a grandmother) described the bare-bones DSL modem connected directly to the PC! I said "turn it off! turn it off!". Fortunately it was the weekend. I rifled through my junk box, found an older D-link router, drove the 170 miles to her house, installed same. I checked her computer very carefully, found no infection. She got lucky. I have to wonder how many computers that company has attached to the internet that are now spambots or worse.
Incidentally, I get an "attack log" mailed to me approximately weekly from her router, and man it looks like a war zone. Hundreds of DOS attacks, port probes, login tries a week. Her network gets attacked more often than mine.
Keep your old phone.
I think we're getting wrapped up in orders of magnitude here. A cloud of satellites is definitely not necessary, just a few in geo or pole-to-pole orbits, and as Adams so famously said, "space is big", even the space immediately around a planet, compared to the size of a communications satellite. No reasonable danger of a hazard, especially on a frontier planet, unless we're talking decades of dumping junk into orbits that don't decay in a reasonable amount of time. One could even imagine recalling satellites on departure. Might actually stipulate it, to avoid inadvertently sharing advanced tech with non-members.
Yes I know we have that problem here -- see "dumping junk into orbit for decades".
I've said this in other threads, but what I'm observing is that even corporations are getting tired of the merry-go-round. For instance, the company I work for allows people to requisition mac laptops instead of winders. Servers are roughly equally divided between winders and linux. And resources that used to be squarely in the winders field, like file shares, are being taken over by appliances (incidentally running linux, although admins don't necessarily see that). And there would be a general revolt amongst the execs if the cellular department tried to take their blackberries and iphones away from them and substitute windows 7 mobile. Microsoft is visibly losing steam in the corporate world, which makes this current issue a desperation move that will probably backfire. Incidentally, Windows 7 has been out for what, two years now? We're still running XP on corporate PCs. Vista? Gave it a miss.
Not to mention about fifty different version of Unix.
The thing is, by the time an OS is ten years old, we've gotten up on the flat part of the bugfix curve *and* the security hole curve. So M$ says "xp has reached end of support" and enough corporations or a significant number of individuals say "we're not going through the churn to switch from a perfectly good operating system" [1] and either M$ will blink or we will just make do. Both scenarios of which have happened -- XP EOL was extended at least twice, and ... say, have you ever seen one of those bottle deposit machines reboot? I did just last November. You know they're still running Windows 95? It was EOL... I think 1997 or 1998. In cases where the OS is just there for a specific purpose, like loading an application and communicating with a printer, it doesn't really matter whether you could call M$ for support anymore.
[1] which is a bit like jumping out of a perfectly good airplane
> Don't fall into the trap of assuming everyone's wants and needs are the same as yours :)
Wow, not even close. I recently retired a Mac G4 and replaced it with a Windows 7 box. I use Adobe products daily, and was concerned with this pissing match between Adobe and Apple. So when it was time to upgrade, I crossed over to Windows. Now that I think of it, I'm using Windows precisely because there is an app I need that runs on Windows, so I guess I do fit the "have to" category.
I don't do iOS partly because I don't like the walled garden, but also partly (confession here... this is not necessarily reasonable, I understand) because I don't want to be associated with the embarrassingly intense iphone fanbois around me. There's a guy in planning meetings... constantly fondles his 4s... it's creepy.
I'm not saying the aphorism is 100% accurate, and I certainly didn't coin it. But I think that it is true generally that of the people using Windows products, more are doing it because there's something they have to do that requires it, (ex: Microsoft Office, Communicator, Outlook) and of people using Apple products, more are doing it because they like Apple products, and are willing to work out the compatibility issues (which are getting fewer) to use that platform.
This isn't the nineties.
I don't believe Microsoft is in a position anymore to dictate that kind of locked architecture and actually get away with it. For reasons you described so well, we have other choices now. If Microsoft commissions a device and it only garners 7% market share, any device manufacturer with any intelligence at all will offer alternatives. Oh wait, that happened, this century.
I understand your point. I think Microsoft really *is* trying strategies left over from the nineties, and I think they have even less chance of working now.
They are both dead to me. I understand they are completely different things. I think I covered reasons why I won't be touching either the PC version (7 is good enough; there's no compelling reason to go to 8, and even releases tend to suck) or the ARM/tablet version, and waste money on a device that's utterly locked into an OS. Had I wanted that, I'd have bought an iPad. If you're going to get locked into an OS, it might as well be one that does touch well. (I don't own an iPad either, for other reasons.)
It's been said, people use iOS and OSX because they *want* to. People use Windows because they *have* to.
Since then, we can add Android to the mix -- people use Android, generally, because they want to. There are a lot of choices out there, and the numbers don't lie -- huge adoption of iOS and Android, single digits for Windows Phone 7. (And I wonder how many of those are corporate employees who weren't given a choice.)
The thing that is slowly but inevitably changing, is the "people use Windows because they have to" side of the equation. Put simply, it's becoming less and less true, even on PCs, Microsoft's meat-and-potatoes. I'm wondering how much is sheer inertia at this point.
Fortunately that won't be the case.
The solution is simple: Don't buy from corporations that do this. When their profits fall off, they'll either change their tune, or go under. Either way, it's a win.
Exactly. If you don't want Windows, don't buy a Windows device. There will be other choices.
I'm pretty much decided at this point. Consider: (a) Windows 7 Touch was pretty much a bust, no real reason (despite the marketing) to believe Windows 8 touch features will be any better. (b) Conventional Windows 7 works fine with KVM machines for applications that require Windows, and will probably last me as long as XP did (I'm still doing useful things with XP on several machines, ten years after release.) (c) Even releases usually suck. (d) and now, I learn that if I buy a Windows 8 device, it will forever to the end of time run Windows and there's nothing I can do about it.
So screw it. I'll glance at 9 when it comes out, see if Microsoft has gotten any more sane, but more and more I can do my stuff on Android, and I'm just -) (- this close to switching completely.
If Microsoft thinks they can still throw what's left of their weight around with vendors and hammer in exclusivity, I wish them the best of luck. I choose not to participate.
> Do any of you comment bug fixes as you do them in the code itself (rather than separate documentation such as developer's change log), and what procedures do you use if you do?
Whenever I do a potential bug fix, I always add a comment describing briefly what it's supposed to fix, my initials, the current date, and the string TEST TEST TEST. That way I can easily find and revert the change if it didn't fix the problem. After testing, if everything is ok, I do one more pass through the code and remove all the TEST strings, leaving the description, my initials, and the date.
Going back through the code later is a lot like reading through your older postings in Facebook. Sometimes illuminating, sometimes entertaining, sometimes embarrassing.
Perhaps not, just relating my own experiences. About that time I bought a software firewall, and about a year later a hardware firewall, which mostly fixed the problem.
I don't slaver over every new version of Winders the company craps out; didn't switch to XP until SP1. Is that the version that included the firewall?
I remember when I first got cable modem. (I was the first one in my neighborhood.) I fired up my Windows 98 box and before I could even connect to microsoft.com to download security updates, my machine was pwned. It could be worse. It could be like back in the old days.
Mind you, I would like to see M$ go bankrupt in a way that forever ruined the careers of all involved, took all their money, burned their homes, sowed their land with salt, and insured that they never again could show their faces in the tech community. But even I have to admit, security is better now than it was. One could argue that this was not a hard target to hit, but there you go.
Right, that was kind-of my point. All we as users want is a stable environment in which to work. At some point we need to get off the upgrade merry-go-round.