Mozilla had a good reason for that. If you remember back around when the 4.0 browsers were released, the most common demos of security flaws were to demo how to access specific files on the user's hard disk.
I'm still not quite sure why this is still there.. presumably the bugs that allow malicious scripts to even access these directories should be fixed (really, it should have been designed so they could never exist in the first place.. but now i'm starting to step on some toes, and to be honest i don't know anything about mozilla development).
One of the good points made on the discussion on bugzilla is that the script kiddies only find this a minor annoyance, and in fact probably enjoy working around it (since they've defeated some security mechanism), while the network administrators find it a big hinderance that causes them to spend time that could be better spent doing other work.
Im tired of all this.blah hidden config files which has no standard formats except tabs. how about using something more structured. like XML
How about a DB file system to the core. A better windowing system, and a better coding architecture its just too archane these days.
So, instead of config files that are easy to modify with just a text editor, or some fairly simple shell scripts, we should switch to a database format that requires all sorts of client libraries to load and modify?
In, for example, a network environment, it can get difficult to automate tasks such as changing program settings. An example is the Outlook Express mail store root. I hate to write a program in delphi to do it, because microsoft decided to store it in a deep location using random unique identifiers as key names. (Though mozilla does the same thing with their directory structure, which annoys me...)
Anyway, config files that are easily changable with simple scripts are a huge benefit. Adding complexity is bad. XML is sort of a step in between. It could have its benefits, as long as there was a 'config file' DTD that meant there could be a standard editor to modify ANY config files. There could also be command-line tools to do the same.
I don't see any point in requiring some sort of database server, though, just for config files. Remember, not everyone uses linux with a GUI. A lot of times it's used in embedded devices with limited memory. Should we start having the text-config-file version of apache for those systems, and the XML or Database-aware version for systems that are bigger and have the database server? That would be a step in the wrong irection, for sure.
Might as well stick with b, if a b/g radio sees a b signal, the speed drops for all. Unless you hard set it to "g-only" then you lose most of your "customers".
I think you're overlooking something here: what is the point of using g? b equipment is cheaper, and since we're talking about shared broadband here - ie. total bandwidth is 1 to 3 mbps - 11mbps is more than enough.
I use only b equipment on my laptop (with a router at home and at the office) and the only times it's not quite enough is when i'm copying large files, or installing a program from the network. These are such rare situations that I can find something else to do while waiting, or I can simply plug in a cat5 cable. To spend an extra few hundred dollars to get g is simply not worth it.
As far as at a coffee shop, these speeds are likely to never be needed. Typically people will be checking email, using IM, and maybe visiting a webpage or two.
Someone else went into it a little bit, but one of the other big incentives for people (and companies) to submit their patches is to get it into the main branch. If you have a private patch, then whenever a new version comes out, you have to apply that patch again, and possibly update it to work with the new version. If it gets accepted into a project, then at worst, you don't have to worry about it anymore. At best, someone else will make it better, or it will lead to new features or other enhancements you never thought of.
I work at a company that installs water treatment systems. Not too long ago, one of our customers came back to us saying that someone (from a company that does insturmentation and automation) was telling him about "magentic softeners", and he thought they were a great idea, and much better than the large tanks we were proposing to put in, espessially since they did this without adding ant salt to the water.
It just so happened that we had a file on these "magnetic softeners". According to the brochure, they work by "changing the angle between the hydrogen atoms" or some such nonsense. We had a report written by a local professor that basically went in depth debunking every claim that these things said they could do, and concluded that it was effectively a box that cost a lot of money and did absolutely nothing.
After reading it, he completely changed his mind.. But this is just another example of what people try to do to trick others by using mysterious, misunderstood forces like magentism, electricity, and anything that with a name that ends with '-o-tron'.
I think it's no exaggeration to say that someone who already installed Windows can safely install e.g. a Mandrake.
I think that the Mandrake and Redhat (8, 9) installs (to get up to a working system) are better than Windows at this point. As long as you have relatively common and supported hardware, it sets everything up for you. I used to think that it was dumb of all the distros to include so many other utilities and applications, but I've changed my views on that now.
Once you install Windows itself, you have to run windowsupdate somewhere between 3 and 8 times (rebooting each time) to get it to the point it won't get infected with a virus in the next few minutes (and always do this behind a firewall). Then you have to go download all the things that you need for day-to-day tasks: winzip, pdf reader.. install usually an office suite, mozilla/firebird/thunderbird (well, at least I do.. but I won't go into a rant about how lacking in features IE/OE are). It takes at least two hours to install a Windows system, and most of the time is spent waiting. (And not just hands-off waiting time, either... Windowsupdate.. wait to download.. click install.. wait to install.. click to reboot.. wait to reboot.. repeat)
Taking redhat as an example.. All the interaction is at the start, selecting paritions (formatted later), selecting what to install, etc. Then you wait for it to install, though you do have to change the CD's once or twice (unless you do a net-install, which is handy). Once it boots up, run up2date -u, probably reboot for the new kernel, and thats it. Everything is up to date and ready to go.
To me, the crucial distinction is, or ought to be, that an engineer makes actual physical objects, whether those objects are airplanes (AE), buildings (CE), cars (ME), or circuits (EE).
But the problem is that more and more things rely on software to do what extensive arrays of electronics used to do. For example, an airplane is now controlled by many computer systems - those systems are vital to the functioning of that aircraft. Why shouldn't that programming be properlly engineered, since the old all-electronic counterpart used to be?
Very often PLC's replace large racks of relays, timers, and miles of cable, that play vital control functions for buildings (fire systems, elevators, water systems,..). It's easier to wire a PLC, since you only have to connect each I/O point into a terminal, the software can be written once (and adapted), and it's faster to write software than it is to wire. If you need to change something, it's a simple download to upgrade the software, with a 2 second downtime on the equipment while it reboots, instead of a few hours while someone rewires it.
Most jurisdictions now recognize "Software Engineering" as a licensed form of engineering (this has happened just in the last couple of years). Just remember that "software" goes far beyond the program you use to browse the web or write a memo to your boss with.
I know the difference between a real engineer and a fake one, but I'm not so sure the average guy on the street understands the distinction.
Well, it's also something that's potentially harmful. There is a reason that universities need to be accredited to offer engineering degrees, and that once you become a professional engineer (PEng) you can lose that license if you don't do your job properly.
A lot of people don't realize that calling yourself an 'engineer' carries the same sort of weight and responsibility as calling yourself a doctor or a lawyer. You have people's lives in your hands (and often on a bigger scale than doctors - when doctors screw up, one patient dies.. when engineers screw up, bridges fall down and many people die). You can have your engineering license revoked for bad pratice. And just like doctors and lawyers, you can get in a lot of trouble for praticing engineering without a license.
I've met a lot of MCSE's that couldn't solve their way out of a cardboard box, and yet, they have the word 'engineer' in their title. And these are the people designing and implementing often mission-critical systems that our society depends on.
The PEO brought Microsoft Canada to court over this issue, and although Microsoft will still use the MSCE title, they (and people holding the title) are only allowed to use the acronym MSCE or full title, and are not allowed to call themselves simply 'engineers'. A lot more information on this can be found at PEO's Software Engineering site.
Basically, Microsoft is not willing to change the title (citing it would cost them too much, and they like the branding it has), and want to continue using the term 'engineer'. The CCPE and the various provincal bodies (PEO, APEGGA, etc) are now talking enforcement, saying anyone that misrepresents themselves is facing $50,000 fines.
Of course, I don't know that there are that many people that pay attention to the paid results, because they're obviously about as reliable as a paid testimony.
If I'm trying to find a product (not searching for a specific brand/model), I often find the paid results to be more useful than the actual results. Searching for industrial controls, for example, often the results are full of people talking about specific issues on forums, maybe a couple datasheets, etc, while the paid results are all people that sell products, which is a good starting place to find information.
Also, since they have to pay, that usually eliminates most spam sites (besides the ones that seem to come up for almost any product name/model number you type in, despite the fact they don't even sell that product half the time).
Nothing, apparently. Not having to type in numbers or sign a receipt are touted as the advantages of the new system. Yet traditional cards could have easily forgone the secondary identification, simply by sacrificing the security we have come to expect.
Sorry, but uptime is not 100% never was, never will be - plan for it, or deal with it when your connection goes down.
The problem with this is most SME's can't afford to spend the money on a service merely as a 'backup', espessially if they don't understand exactly how much they rely on it (and I'd guess there's a lot of PHB's that don't).
That said, I work at a small company, and we do have a router that automatically fails-over to a modem (which is 16.8k or something - the only external I had sitting around.. again, not worth paying for a faster one since we so rarely need to use it) running on our fax line. Of course, our actual servers are offsite, in a co-lo with redundant pipes. And although that is still subject to downtimes, it's rare. The last downtime was a couple hours after the power clicked off;)
And don't even get me started on residential accounts that call in 'I use this for work I need it up now - send someone out today.' And it's Sunday evening... no - you didn't pay for a business account, so you get residential service levels which include 24-72 hour turn around on repairs.
I work in the water treatment industry (installing pumps in wells, treatment systems, etc for residential/commercial/industrial clients - we also do SCADA systems, which is where I fit in). We get this same thing. I usually stay at the office a bit later than everyone else (most people leave around 5, I go home anytime between 6 and 9) - much easier to get programming done when people aren't bugging me. Anyway, I'll take phone calls till around 6. We get a lot of irate customers that call up at 5:45 friday evening "I've got no water.. Can you get a crew here now?" and get angry when I tell them there's nothing we can do until Monday.
I mean, I sympathize.. no water would be a pain. But at the same time, most residential systems are $2-3k to install, then a few hundred dollars a year to maintain. Do you think they are going to be happy getting a bill paying our crew (if we can even get people together) overtime? And what happens when something breaks that we don't keep in stock? If our suppliers have it, maybe we can have it Monday.. if not, it's at least Tuesday.
Of course, for our bigger clients, things are different. They can afford it, and we make enough money from them that it's worth it to us to do it.
Anyway, that got really OT, but I felt the need to vent;) But it's not a problem that's specific to ISPs.. I'd imagine any service-oriented business would be in the same boat.
Using a headset does make using your cell phone safer (it frees up a hand) but the real danger...
... is when the phone rings, and you're trying to get the headset out, pull back the little rubber cover, insert the headset adapter into the 2.5mm hole, and put the headset on before the call goes to voicemail.:)
Really though, if I get a call while driving, I check the caller ID first.. if it's one of my friends, then I'll usually answer and have a quick (fairly) mindless conversation ("Whats going on tonight?" "when are you done work?" etc). If it's a work call, or something where I actually have to talk to someone, I'll let it go to voicemail, or pull off to the side and talk.
I find I'm the opposite of most people though.. if I talk on my cell while I drive, it's my conversation that lacks, not my driving. If someone tells me something complex while I'm trying to get through rushhour or whatever, I'm always asking to repeat. Or I'll stop midsentence to express my frustration when someone cuts me off. I guess it's just a matter of priorties: staying alive, or having good phone manners.
But in reality to the end user, it does not matter how many people are developing it, it's the quality of the product that counts, and I think that with recent releases there's nothing that can beat Mozilla in all round usefulness.... The fact is on any platform IE looks like the third rate choice
I have to agree. I've switched to Firebird exclusively for a web browser on both Linux and Windows. Using IE has become a painful experience.
On my home system, some adware program installed some search bar and removed the google bar, and I tried a whole ton of things but could never completly get rid of it. I had to reinstall the googlebar to get it back. At that point, I got fed up, and decided to look at Firebird 0.7 which was just released (I had already been using Mozilla on linux at work). Instantly, I loved it. It amazes me the lack of features IE has.
Over the weekend, I was writing a reverse proxy (of sorts) to access a proprietary SCADA system. Worked great in Firebird. I loaded it up in IE and had a whole ton of problems. One that sticks out is from a http://domain.com session, sending a "Refresh: 1;https://domain.com" header causes IE to ignore (as far as I can tell) the https, as it sits in an infinite reload cycle. I guess version 6 isn't mature enough to have complex bugs like that worked out?
It's kind of funny, because as I was adding in these kludges to make it work in IE, I had this flash of deja-vu.. and realized I used to do the same thing about two years ago, trying to get pages to load properly in NS4 (and no offense to the Netscape guys - espessailly since this article is about them - but NS4 was around for far too long, without supporting fairly simple DHTML things, style sheets (fully), and various other things I can't think of at the moment). NS4 was basically killed off then (yes, I know what MS did. But even me, at the time totally pro-NS anti-IE, switched to IE because it was superior), and now I see the same thing beginning to happen to IE.
I can't even remember using the web and putting up with popups. Or how I ever managed to get work done having 10 IE windows open, instead of one or two Mozilla windows, with tabs. Or seeing an interesting link on a web page, and loading it in a new tab in the background to look at when I'm done with the current site. Or being able to highlight a word/acronym/product name and click "search" and have it load up in google in a tab in the background. I could go on and on..
ATT sells their spam circumvention patents to SCO, who, dying from their fight with IBM, seeks to build a new business providing software tools for the spam community.
I thought SCO only had lawyers on staff, not actual programmers? They could actually continue their current business style, but put it to use where the IT industry would actually applaud them instead of laugh at them, and sue all the spammers using these techniques.
What if, by some freak of nature random chance you actually charge someone?
I do agree that the fruad is bad- however, actually charging someone, while a pain to the person that gets charged, is likely also a pain to the merchant.
Credit card checks are supposed to have safeguards, espessially with card-not-present accounts used on the internet. At the least, the number, expiry, and cardholder name are all supposed to match. If they don't, the auth fails (and the only way to find out why is to call the CC company).
Even better is to use CVV2 (the 3 digit number on the back, that's not stored electronically anywhere), and address verification. All of these checks happen on the CC processing side - all the merchant gets is a "yes" or "no".
Now, if a random card gets past these checks, likely that means the merchant is not doing their job properly, and will probably get crap from the CC company, or even their merchant account revoked. Plus, if the charges are reversed, the merchant has to pay for it. That said, the CC company will still likely try to track down who put in the false card information in the first place and charge them with fraud.
As I was just finishing up a major project I've been working on for the past few months, I decided it's about time to look into moving my NT4 PDC to Samba, which I've been intending to do for a year. Just last night I was looking at samba.org, and saw this book, and was wondering if it was worth buying;)
I wrote this really amusing application a time ago, it listened to the ports used for MS win msg, and if it received a valid message, it replied once every 5 seconds, 600 times with the same message + the text "\nQuit spamming ffs!". Quite efficient.
I actually wrote something similar, but not quite as annoying, for IRC quite a while ago. Every time someone would spam (channel-wide notice, or one of those obviously infected-with-a-trojan messsages), it would send that IP a net msg saying "Your computer is infected with a virus, please download an anti-virus tool and fix it"..
I don't really know if it was effective or not, and likely a lot of people couldn't recieve it anyways (behind firewall, going offline before it could complete, etc), but at the least, it would annoy them a little bit and hopefully make them look into it, at least.
I actually read the article entitled 'Why suing college students for music downloading is right'
As did I. How does such bad journalism make it to cnn.com..
Was it not for copyright's ability to build fences around intangible goods such as lyrics and melodies, a performer like Loretta Lynn would not have been able to leave Butcher Holler, Kentucky, and share her gifts with the world.Was it not for copyright's ability to build fences around intangible goods such as lyrics and melodies, a performer like Loretta Lynn would not have been able to leave Butcher Holler, Kentucky, and share her gifts with the world.
So without copyright, they never would have made it. Oh, ok. I guess I'll just take your word for it, since you didn't provide any reasoning or proof behind that statement - which the rest of the article is based on, I might add.
You have to hit, like Shift-F8 to agree with the license, and partition/format the harddrive (I'm not complaining about the ability to partition/format here, I'm just pointing out it's not as easy as people think), and then install the OS. You are not guaranteed that everything will "just work" when you boot up.
This is such a minor point, you have to do similar things to this in any distro as well. The thing that really bothers me now, when I install windows, is the fact that it does absolutely nothing when it boots. It's venurable to viruses until you spend about 2 hours doing windows update, download, reboot, repeat (at least 4 or 5 times). It can't even open zip files. You still need to download a ton of other utilities to make it useful (winamp, pdf reader..).
It takes longer to install (blank harddrive, to functional desktop system) a Windows system than it does to install most mainstream Linux distros (gentoo comes to mind as one that's not included in that statement;) ).
I've installed Redhat on the most systems, and it's been pretty decent at detecting hardware, provided it's fairly common. In my experience, if it detects, you're set and don't need to do anything else.. but if not, then you're probably in for a bit of work (more than when Windows doesn't detect it, anyways).
The areas I see lacking are: common open and print dialogs (espessially print: I want to be able to change printer settings - color/bw, quality, duplex, etc - without having to make seperate printer objects for each combination. Copy and paste: two seperate buffers, that are treated the same by some programs, is incredibly confusing. I've been using it on my desktop at work 100% for the last 6 months, and I am STILL not used to this. I'm sure theres tons of others, but basically all minor issues, that make a huge difference. I realize even these two things are fairly complex problems to fix - but it needs to be done.
My experience has indicated that while the data and technology is available to allow for more targeted marketing, people in the industry feel that the indiscriminate "bulk approach" is more productive.
It is probably cheaper to just pay a telemarketing firm a flat fee to call their big list of phone numbers than it is to do research, collect data, analyze it, assemble that into a list, and finally hand that over to the telemarketing firm.
This would be consistent with the realization that we are becoming more and more desensitized to suggestion, and more suggestion and promotional invasion is needed to transmit the same message nowadays.
Ironically, the reason we're becoming desensitized to suggestion is because there is more and more suggestion and promotional invasion all the time.
I rarely even notice things like billboards, they just blur into the background with the rest of the signage. Banner ads on webpages, I definately don't even notice those (in fact, that's so bad that my brain will skip over headlines, if they're fancy graphics or look considerably different. I've often been looking around on a webpage for a long time, then suddenly I notice the "downloads" button or whatever I was looking for was right in front of me all the time. If it's designed in some slightly ad-looking style, my brain just subconsciously filters it out).
Active Directory ties you exclusively to Windows on the server, Samba aside. Unfortunately Samba cannot be a full AD controller because of Microsoft's bastardized idea of LDAP support. Doing group policies on Win 2000 is a nightmare - things suddenly just don't work, especially for ordinary users. As a stop gap measure you have to log people on as Power Users or Admins, which completely negates the concept of security! I never thought printing would be such a bloody nightmare! And no, I don't want to have to go through all of that Knowledge Base crap because I shouldn't have to. There's a lot of stuff in Win 2000 where you think "Ooo, great." but once you try to get it all working, on a day to day basis, on the ground, it falls well, well short.
Wow, right on the money.
If you use the technology fully you have to have Windows servers and buy yet more Microsoft software. That's not acceptable to SMEs, a market Microsoft thinks it's going to get into.
In a business where the people doing purchasing decisions know NOTHING about the computer, it's hard to say "we need to pay $5000 for this server (hardware and software) to maybe get protected from certain viruses we might get".
That reminds me of a speech to text program that my friend had in the 90s. After saying thousands of words into a database, he rubbed his hands over the mic. The output? "Vanilla Milliseconds"
I remember doing about 3 1/2 hour training sessions with Dragon speech-to-text or whatever it was called. I had it working fairly decently, it would get *most* words. I also had it set up to do some simple commands ("open wordperfect" etc).
Maybe a couple weeks after that, my hard drive crashed. That was the end of my experiments with speech recognition. Training that program was about the most boring thing I've ever used a computer for.
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What's wrong with running a stable OS on a bank machine?
Hm, ok, makes sense. Upon looking further, I discovered a FAQ about it, and a discussion about making it nicer.
I'm still not quite sure why this is still there.. presumably the bugs that allow malicious scripts to even access these directories should be fixed (really, it should have been designed so they could never exist in the first place.. but now i'm starting to step on some toes, and to be honest i don't know anything about mozilla development).
One of the good points made on the discussion on bugzilla is that the script kiddies only find this a minor annoyance, and in fact probably enjoy working around it (since they've defeated some security mechanism), while the network administrators find it a big hinderance that causes them to spend time that could be better spent doing other work.
How about a DB file system to the core. A better windowing system, and a better coding architecture its just too archane these days.
So, instead of config files that are easy to modify with just a text editor, or some fairly simple shell scripts, we should switch to a database format that requires all sorts of client libraries to load and modify?
In, for example, a network environment, it can get difficult to automate tasks such as changing program settings. An example is the Outlook Express mail store root. I hate to write a program in delphi to do it, because microsoft decided to store it in a deep location using random unique identifiers as key names. (Though mozilla does the same thing with their directory structure, which annoys me...)
Anyway, config files that are easily changable with simple scripts are a huge benefit. Adding complexity is bad. XML is sort of a step in between. It could have its benefits, as long as there was a 'config file' DTD that meant there could be a standard editor to modify ANY config files. There could also be command-line tools to do the same.
I don't see any point in requiring some sort of database server, though, just for config files. Remember, not everyone uses linux with a GUI. A lot of times it's used in embedded devices with limited memory. Should we start having the text-config-file version of apache for those systems, and the XML or Database-aware version for systems that are bigger and have the database server? That would be a step in the wrong irection, for sure.
It's not like it took a huge dive this week or anything.
I think you're overlooking something here: what is the point of using g? b equipment is cheaper, and since we're talking about shared broadband here - ie. total bandwidth is 1 to 3 mbps - 11mbps is more than enough.
I use only b equipment on my laptop (with a router at home and at the office) and the only times it's not quite enough is when i'm copying large files, or installing a program from the network. These are such rare situations that I can find something else to do while waiting, or I can simply plug in a cat5 cable. To spend an extra few hundred dollars to get g is simply not worth it.
As far as at a coffee shop, these speeds are likely to never be needed. Typically people will be checking email, using IM, and maybe visiting a webpage or two.
Someone else went into it a little bit, but one of the other big incentives for people (and companies) to submit their patches is to get it into the main branch. If you have a private patch, then whenever a new version comes out, you have to apply that patch again, and possibly update it to work with the new version. If it gets accepted into a project, then at worst, you don't have to worry about it anymore. At best, someone else will make it better, or it will lead to new features or other enhancements you never thought of.
It just so happened that we had a file on these "magnetic softeners". According to the brochure, they work by "changing the angle between the hydrogen atoms" or some such nonsense. We had a report written by a local professor that basically went in depth debunking every claim that these things said they could do, and concluded that it was effectively a box that cost a lot of money and did absolutely nothing.
After reading it, he completely changed his mind.. But this is just another example of what people try to do to trick others by using mysterious, misunderstood forces like magentism, electricity, and anything that with a name that ends with '-o-tron'.
I think that the Mandrake and Redhat (8, 9) installs (to get up to a working system) are better than Windows at this point. As long as you have relatively common and supported hardware, it sets everything up for you. I used to think that it was dumb of all the distros to include so many other utilities and applications, but I've changed my views on that now.
Once you install Windows itself, you have to run windowsupdate somewhere between 3 and 8 times (rebooting each time) to get it to the point it won't get infected with a virus in the next few minutes (and always do this behind a firewall). Then you have to go download all the things that you need for day-to-day tasks: winzip, pdf reader.. install usually an office suite, mozilla/firebird/thunderbird (well, at least I do.. but I won't go into a rant about how lacking in features IE/OE are). It takes at least two hours to install a Windows system, and most of the time is spent waiting. (And not just hands-off waiting time, either... Windowsupdate .. wait to download.. click install.. wait to install.. click to reboot .. wait to reboot.. repeat)
Taking redhat as an example.. All the interaction is at the start, selecting paritions (formatted later), selecting what to install, etc. Then you wait for it to install, though you do have to change the CD's once or twice (unless you do a net-install, which is handy). Once it boots up, run up2date -u, probably reboot for the new kernel, and thats it. Everything is up to date and ready to go.
But the problem is that more and more things rely on software to do what extensive arrays of electronics used to do. For example, an airplane is now controlled by many computer systems - those systems are vital to the functioning of that aircraft. Why shouldn't that programming be properlly engineered, since the old all-electronic counterpart used to be?
Very often PLC's replace large racks of relays, timers, and miles of cable, that play vital control functions for buildings (fire systems, elevators, water systems, ..). It's easier to wire a PLC, since you only have to connect each I/O point into a terminal, the software can be written once (and adapted), and it's faster to write software than it is to wire. If you need to change something, it's a simple download to upgrade the software, with a 2 second downtime on the equipment while it reboots, instead of a few hours while someone rewires it.
Most jurisdictions now recognize "Software Engineering" as a licensed form of engineering (this has happened just in the last couple of years). Just remember that "software" goes far beyond the program you use to browse the web or write a memo to your boss with.
Well, it's also something that's potentially harmful. There is a reason that universities need to be accredited to offer engineering degrees, and that once you become a professional engineer (PEng) you can lose that license if you don't do your job properly.
A lot of people don't realize that calling yourself an 'engineer' carries the same sort of weight and responsibility as calling yourself a doctor or a lawyer. You have people's lives in your hands (and often on a bigger scale than doctors - when doctors screw up, one patient dies.. when engineers screw up, bridges fall down and many people die). You can have your engineering license revoked for bad pratice. And just like doctors and lawyers, you can get in a lot of trouble for praticing engineering without a license.
I've met a lot of MCSE's that couldn't solve their way out of a cardboard box, and yet, they have the word 'engineer' in their title. And these are the people designing and implementing often mission-critical systems that our society depends on.
The PEO brought Microsoft Canada to court over this issue, and although Microsoft will still use the MSCE title, they (and people holding the title) are only allowed to use the acronym MSCE or full title, and are not allowed to call themselves simply 'engineers'. A lot more information on this can be found at PEO's Software Engineering site.
Basically, Microsoft is not willing to change the title (citing it would cost them too much, and they like the branding it has), and want to continue using the term 'engineer'. The CCPE and the various provincal bodies (PEO, APEGGA, etc) are now talking enforcement, saying anyone that misrepresents themselves is facing $50,000 fines.
If I'm trying to find a product (not searching for a specific brand/model), I often find the paid results to be more useful than the actual results. Searching for industrial controls, for example, often the results are full of people talking about specific issues on forums, maybe a couple datasheets, etc, while the paid results are all people that sell products, which is a good starting place to find information.
Also, since they have to pay, that usually eliminates most spam sites (besides the ones that seem to come up for almost any product name/model number you type in, despite the fact they don't even sell that product half the time).
Well, you have to remember:
Security = 1/Usability
The problem with this is most SME's can't afford to spend the money on a service merely as a 'backup', espessially if they don't understand exactly how much they rely on it (and I'd guess there's a lot of PHB's that don't).
That said, I work at a small company, and we do have a router that automatically fails-over to a modem (which is 16.8k or something - the only external I had sitting around.. again, not worth paying for a faster one since we so rarely need to use it) running on our fax line. Of course, our actual servers are offsite, in a co-lo with redundant pipes. And although that is still subject to downtimes, it's rare. The last downtime was a couple hours after the power clicked off ;)
And don't even get me started on residential accounts that call in 'I use this for work I need it up now - send someone out today.' And it's Sunday evening... no - you didn't pay for a business account, so you get residential service levels which include 24-72 hour turn around on repairs.
I work in the water treatment industry (installing pumps in wells, treatment systems, etc for residential/commercial/industrial clients - we also do SCADA systems, which is where I fit in). We get this same thing. I usually stay at the office a bit later than everyone else (most people leave around 5, I go home anytime between 6 and 9) - much easier to get programming done when people aren't bugging me. Anyway, I'll take phone calls till around 6. We get a lot of irate customers that call up at 5:45 friday evening "I've got no water.. Can you get a crew here now?" and get angry when I tell them there's nothing we can do until Monday.
I mean, I sympathize.. no water would be a pain. But at the same time, most residential systems are $2-3k to install, then a few hundred dollars a year to maintain. Do you think they are going to be happy getting a bill paying our crew (if we can even get people together) overtime? And what happens when something breaks that we don't keep in stock? If our suppliers have it, maybe we can have it Monday.. if not, it's at least Tuesday.
Of course, for our bigger clients, things are different. They can afford it, and we make enough money from them that it's worth it to us to do it.
Anyway, that got really OT, but I felt the need to vent ;) But it's not a problem that's specific to ISPs .. I'd imagine any service-oriented business would be in the same boat.
Really though, if I get a call while driving, I check the caller ID first.. if it's one of my friends, then I'll usually answer and have a quick (fairly) mindless conversation ("Whats going on tonight?" "when are you done work?" etc). If it's a work call, or something where I actually have to talk to someone, I'll let it go to voicemail, or pull off to the side and talk.
I find I'm the opposite of most people though.. if I talk on my cell while I drive, it's my conversation that lacks, not my driving. If someone tells me something complex while I'm trying to get through rushhour or whatever, I'm always asking to repeat. Or I'll stop midsentence to express my frustration when someone cuts me off. I guess it's just a matter of priorties: staying alive, or having good phone manners.
But in reality to the end user, it does not matter how many people are developing it, it's the quality of the product that counts, and I think that with recent releases there's nothing that can beat Mozilla in all round usefulness. ... The fact is on any platform IE looks like the third rate choice
I have to agree. I've switched to Firebird exclusively for a web browser on both Linux and Windows. Using IE has become a painful experience.
On my home system, some adware program installed some search bar and removed the google bar, and I tried a whole ton of things but could never completly get rid of it. I had to reinstall the googlebar to get it back. At that point, I got fed up, and decided to look at Firebird 0.7 which was just released (I had already been using Mozilla on linux at work). Instantly, I loved it. It amazes me the lack of features IE has.
Over the weekend, I was writing a reverse proxy (of sorts) to access a proprietary SCADA system. Worked great in Firebird. I loaded it up in IE and had a whole ton of problems. One that sticks out is from a http://domain.com session, sending a "Refresh: 1;https://domain.com" header causes IE to ignore (as far as I can tell) the https, as it sits in an infinite reload cycle. I guess version 6 isn't mature enough to have complex bugs like that worked out?
It's kind of funny, because as I was adding in these kludges to make it work in IE, I had this flash of deja-vu.. and realized I used to do the same thing about two years ago, trying to get pages to load properly in NS4 (and no offense to the Netscape guys - espessailly since this article is about them - but NS4 was around for far too long, without supporting fairly simple DHTML things, style sheets (fully), and various other things I can't think of at the moment). NS4 was basically killed off then (yes, I know what MS did. But even me, at the time totally pro-NS anti-IE, switched to IE because it was superior), and now I see the same thing beginning to happen to IE.
I can't even remember using the web and putting up with popups. Or how I ever managed to get work done having 10 IE windows open, instead of one or two Mozilla windows, with tabs. Or seeing an interesting link on a web page, and loading it in a new tab in the background to look at when I'm done with the current site. Or being able to highlight a word/acronym/product name and click "search" and have it load up in google in a tab in the background. I could go on and on..
ATT sells their spam circumvention patents to SCO, who, dying from their fight with IBM, seeks to build a new business providing software tools for the spam community.
I thought SCO only had lawyers on staff, not actual programmers? They could actually continue their current business style, but put it to use where the IT industry would actually applaud them instead of laugh at them, and sue all the spammers using these techniques.
I do agree that the fruad is bad- however, actually charging someone, while a pain to the person that gets charged, is likely also a pain to the merchant.
Credit card checks are supposed to have safeguards, espessially with card-not-present accounts used on the internet. At the least, the number, expiry, and cardholder name are all supposed to match. If they don't, the auth fails (and the only way to find out why is to call the CC company).
Even better is to use CVV2 (the 3 digit number on the back, that's not stored electronically anywhere), and address verification. All of these checks happen on the CC processing side - all the merchant gets is a "yes" or "no".
Now, if a random card gets past these checks, likely that means the merchant is not doing their job properly, and will probably get crap from the CC company, or even their merchant account revoked. Plus, if the charges are reversed, the merchant has to pay for it. That said, the CC company will still likely try to track down who put in the false card information in the first place and charge them with fraud.
Personally, I wouldn't use this method ;)
Uh... you're definately posting to the wrong place to find that audience..
As I was just finishing up a major project I've been working on for the past few months, I decided it's about time to look into moving my NT4 PDC to Samba, which I've been intending to do for a year. Just last night I was looking at samba.org, and saw this book, and was wondering if it was worth buying ;)
I actually wrote something similar, but not quite as annoying, for IRC quite a while ago. Every time someone would spam (channel-wide notice, or one of those obviously infected-with-a-trojan messsages), it would send that IP a net msg saying "Your computer is infected with a virus, please download an anti-virus tool and fix it"..
I don't really know if it was effective or not, and likely a lot of people couldn't recieve it anyways (behind firewall, going offline before it could complete, etc), but at the least, it would annoy them a little bit and hopefully make them look into it, at least.
As did I. How does such bad journalism make it to cnn.com..
So without copyright, they never would have made it. Oh, ok. I guess I'll just take your word for it, since you didn't provide any reasoning or proof behind that statement - which the rest of the article is based on, I might add.
This is such a minor point, you have to do similar things to this in any distro as well. The thing that really bothers me now, when I install windows, is the fact that it does absolutely nothing when it boots. It's venurable to viruses until you spend about 2 hours doing windows update, download, reboot, repeat (at least 4 or 5 times). It can't even open zip files. You still need to download a ton of other utilities to make it useful (winamp, pdf reader..).
It takes longer to install (blank harddrive, to functional desktop system) a Windows system than it does to install most mainstream Linux distros (gentoo comes to mind as one that's not included in that statement ;) ).
I've installed Redhat on the most systems, and it's been pretty decent at detecting hardware, provided it's fairly common. In my experience, if it detects, you're set and don't need to do anything else.. but if not, then you're probably in for a bit of work (more than when Windows doesn't detect it, anyways).
The areas I see lacking are: common open and print dialogs (espessially print: I want to be able to change printer settings - color/bw, quality, duplex, etc - without having to make seperate printer objects for each combination. Copy and paste: two seperate buffers, that are treated the same by some programs, is incredibly confusing. I've been using it on my desktop at work 100% for the last 6 months, and I am STILL not used to this. I'm sure theres tons of others, but basically all minor issues, that make a huge difference. I realize even these two things are fairly complex problems to fix - but it needs to be done.
It is probably cheaper to just pay a telemarketing firm a flat fee to call their big list of phone numbers than it is to do research, collect data, analyze it, assemble that into a list, and finally hand that over to the telemarketing firm.
This would be consistent with the realization that we are becoming more and more desensitized to suggestion, and more suggestion and promotional invasion is needed to transmit the same message nowadays.
Ironically, the reason we're becoming desensitized to suggestion is because there is more and more suggestion and promotional invasion all the time.
I rarely even notice things like billboards, they just blur into the background with the rest of the signage. Banner ads on webpages, I definately don't even notice those (in fact, that's so bad that my brain will skip over headlines, if they're fancy graphics or look considerably different. I've often been looking around on a webpage for a long time, then suddenly I notice the "downloads" button or whatever I was looking for was right in front of me all the time. If it's designed in some slightly ad-looking style, my brain just subconsciously filters it out).
Wow, right on the money.
If you use the technology fully you have to have Windows servers and buy yet more Microsoft software. That's not acceptable to SMEs, a market Microsoft thinks it's going to get into.
In a business where the people doing purchasing decisions know NOTHING about the computer, it's hard to say "we need to pay $5000 for this server (hardware and software) to maybe get protected from certain viruses we might get".
I remember doing about 3 1/2 hour training sessions with Dragon speech-to-text or whatever it was called. I had it working fairly decently, it would get *most* words. I also had it set up to do some simple commands ("open wordperfect" etc).
Maybe a couple weeks after that, my hard drive crashed. That was the end of my experiments with speech recognition. Training that program was about the most boring thing I've ever used a computer for.