Although we tend to take sides, NT or UNIX for example, there is a need for both a specialist and a generalist knowledge of all systems. And no human is smart enough to be both a generalist and a specialist. Many may claim it but in 25 years in this business I have never met nor heard of one person that can claim both. And those that do claim it are generally incompetent fools.
It also depends on where you want to take your career. Which in fact might be your best decision point. You don't see a general practitioner of medicine for a heart bypass. But first you see the general practitioner and get a referral to a cardiovascular specialist. This tech business isn't any freaking different.
A generalist is best at a higher level, perhaps even a manager. Often picking the best solutions without bigotry and FUD running their lives. Vendors only care about the sale, and will FUD bias into their own gain for their products deficiencies. True generalists will look at all the factors including suitability, scalability, reliability, standards, maintainability, security including patching, help desk calls and longevity. Generalists will pick Linux/UNIX as often as NT/Windows judging only by what is best for their situation. And their situation may also depend on the availability of skill sets.
A specialist is one you call for the hard to fix issues requiring expertise in far more detail than is possible for a generalist. They may not even initially know the answer, but have the knowledge and specialization to dig and get the answers to levels much more detailed than a generalist even comprehend. Far to many claim to be secialits but are not.
And a note about above, certifications are from a practical point of view, overrated and transient. From strictly a political point of view, certifications are necessary because of the impersonal nature and commoditization of HR in large organizations. The best people I know, don't subscribe to their certifications although many had them at one time and let them lapse. My attitude is simple, if the organization does not value you for your skills, but values certifications it tells you a lot about the company. As anyone with an memory can puke learn. But understanding comes from experience and initiative.
To become a generalist, a really good generalist you need to become a specialist and and soon as you comfortable move on to something different. That is, in hind sight, start with TRS-DOS, then Windows 2.0, on to XENIX, then to MVS/TSO, a shot at VAX, then Windows 3.0-4.0 and back into UNIX/Linux to replace Minix. Mix in some Cisco and a good dose of TCP/IP including Apache, DNS, sendmail, firewalling and of course NETBIOS and SNA which everyone wants to forget. And if you are so inclinded pic up some C/C++/Java along the way. Note the diversity... bounce around a lot if you want to be a generalist. It takes time.
If organizations really want directors/CIO/CTO people that don't get run over by sales FUD they pick seasoned generalists to promote. But keep the personal people skills up... if you want these rolls and there is not guarantee as the industry is full of b%(($#!t and naïve management often picks hype over fact.
Because it would cost them money to (1) write coherent and complete documentation and (2) review that documentation to make it safe and legal for public consumption. Why would they spend all the extra time and money to do that when it doesn't bring them any more profit?
3Com in it's prior hay day readily gave out the needed information and almost everyone ran 3Com Ethernet cards as a result. You could write you're on driver rather easily. The documentation was simple, not fancy but right to the point. All you had to do is email or call them and they would give you the ftp site to get it for all their ISA cards, or for a nominal fee they would snail mail it. Where I worked they sold some 60000 or more of these cards because of this.
But this is back in the days where Microsoft thought NETBIOS was going to run the world and didn't even officially have a TCP/IP stack for it's Windows 3.0. Microsoft had little interest in NIC driver development at the time as PCs had modems as their NIC. Microsoft didn't write these drivers back then. So what has changed?
Broadcom for example has working micro-Linux kernels running the reference systems for their wireless chipsets yet you can't get the source code. HAL is a fancy term for BIOS to replace harder to manage ROMs and they are nothing but a API interface to the hardware. Yet it is closed.
Might I suggest the obvious... Microsoft has in effect a policy of not supporting open source, and this extends to hardware vendors if they want future support in products like longhorn. If you open source it, you come off our drivers list. This can hurt sales and impede open source development. This is why it is done.
Like bundling the OS with a Dell PC meets the requirements of a anti-trust violation, tactics like this are overlooked by the US government as Microsoft is a US based monopoly. Should Microsoft been a British, German or Japanese company the anti-trust crew would have been all over them by now.
Monopolistic anti-trust behavior kills innovation and competition... this is why the anti-trust laws were created. Although so far, unenforced, lets see how far Microsoft can go before someone stops them.
However, your boss isn't going to listen to this. So what you do is find a free help-desk package (if you're using Windows then Liberum is pretty good) and get people to funnel all of their support calls through that. That way at the end of the month you can go to your boss and say "Look, this is the amount of work it takes to keep a network up and running. That's why I haven't got any programming done."
This is a no win. I worked in an environment like this once before and just found out eventually that I had to leave to avoid the 65+ hour work week. Once announced I was leaving they were shocked at my work load and made promises to change it, but I had been around long enough to see how promises are (not) kept. Many managers are not rational and only listen to what they want to hear. If they had logic they would be stuck as programmers. This politicial part of management of technical personnel needs evolution.
The good part, although hard to find, is that there are good environments out there. They would usually insist you are an admin this week, and not a programmer... seperation of duties. This would be in the managers operations manual not leaving much latitude.
This isn't to say quiting is the best option. It could be an opportunitity... that is get involved with it and keep your work hours sane. Environments like this can shrink and grow. If it shrinks they tend to keep the most flexable and knowledgable people. But do manage your managers expectations....
Yep, although not a buffer overflow it is an exploit on the system design that allows executing and installation of programs without the users specific consent. Not much unlike the days when you could email an Active-X control to people and it would automatically execute just by viewing the message.
Users are led to believe these files are safe to open. When in fact they should be viewed as are they safe to execute.
So the bad guys exploited the misperception that (Microsoft) document files are data files safe to "open".
A comparision side by side of the features of all these programmes. Can I handle my 2 Gb of PST files with Evolution and Kontact? If not, then I'm not interested. Can I search pretty quickly? If not, forget it.
I use IMAP files, more portable and easier to back up as it puts everything in my home directory. I have some big files and haven't had searching issues with it even when using Outlook Express. And because it is IMAP based I can also use SquirrelMail for web access. (Ya, I know you can use OWA but I didn't want to buy it and it doesn't run on Solaris, Linux or BSD).
Can I connect to POP3 / IMAP / Exchange / Notes servers?...
I believe the answer is yes. Will know for sure in a month as my next work portable is being ordered with Linux/VMWare. I convinced management instead of giving me a machine for each OS to test software with (Linux, Solaris, W2000, NT4, W2003, XP, XP2, XP/Home) I could use VMWare with Linux instead.
I have heard that a lot of hardware is pretty bad and is mostly fixed with software hacks in the driver. Companies may be not want people to know how broken some of their products are.
I suspect something more cynical. The best explanation I have heard was that Microsoft will not include open source drivers thus not to get excluded in Microsoft OS chip set support the HAL remains closed source.
I have also heard that some chips allow you to increase power to levels above FCC approval but this sounds weak as 1) it can be inexpensively limited in the hardware and 2) the FCC doesn't ban selling transistors because we can exceed FCC limits with them.
And it would be easy also to have the HAL in some ROM on board where you just poke it with a country code in initialization.
The best support for open source drivers will come from more independent type companies in the orient. I stopped buying Broadcom products just because they don't help in getting open source drivers yet use open source on it's reference boards. Sort of hypocritical on their part.
A wise person one said to me the two biggest problems in business in the future is the bandwidth between the ears and the bandwidth of the cable, in that order. So far, 25 years later this still holds true in my books. More "professionals" should read these journals, as say you are an eye surgeon, would you not want to keep up with the latest in ocular implant research if this is what you do? Far too many "pros" think learning ends with university... and all are shocked to learn it is just the beginning or get careers doing something else.
I know your working with windows but when I read this I said yes.
I'm guessing someone out there has done something like this before.
Google has a cluster of machines far larger than you need but their approach was a Linux cluster. Plus, for the amount of writes going on your going to want not to have any burdens on the system that are not needed.
Open source is so good so many companies claim it as their own in their products without credit. How tough is it to say "Built on Open Source with credits to...."? I know of dozens of "appliance like" devices that are like this. When you ask the vendor they say "we wrote it all" and just by the look and field you know Squid/BSD/OpenSSL/SSH are at minimum inside.
Make no mistake, the commercial software industry is the biggest pirate of code there is on the face of this planet. All developers routinely use google to search for code snipits and these programmers are from big companies like Oracle and IBM to little startups of all kinds. At least IBM acknowledges it's involvement and contributes to many like Linux.
Most companies should not be embarrassed, to me it is a selling point as no one company can do it all.
One un-named company actually had the gall to tell one of my managers they "Invented Spam Assassin". Needless to say I sufficiently set management straight by a few select web pages and suggested if they lie to us now what will the support be like?
Don't deal with companies that lie about the origins of their product.
"We get to find out lots of interesting things -- like how to authenticate against Active Directory, how to run non-Microsoft mail clients with Exchange," and the like, he said.
This isn't thanks to Microsoft. Microsoft routinely writes their stuff with incompatibilities in mind while stealing the protocols, and likely chunks of open source.
But fortunately as a percentage of the world Microsoft's dominance is decaying as many new countries are opting out of the blind following of Microsoft. I think TCO cost and security might have a lot to do with it.
I still predict Microsoft Linux at some future point when market share and mass migration takes place. In the mean time there is too much dollars in selling the old pooch.
In the mean time I will not get sucked into Microsoft is open source friendly as the duality of intent here is obvious.
What are we going to have to do to convince "ordinary users" to visit WindowsUpdate once in a while?"
The answer is actually quite simple, a better OS software is needed and Microsoft seems to be having problems making it.
Would anyone buy a car that needed a repair each week to keep us safe?
Would any of us buy a TV that had to get it's software updated each week or you could not watch your favorite show?
Would you hire a driveway paver when you knew you would have to patch it once a week?
This isn't to say the consumer isn't at fault. The average consumer doesn't care this costs businesses billions of lost bandwidth, repair and productivity. The problem is the consumer isn't realizing the cost. ISPs would rather let it happen than charge the customer a $200 clean up fee. It is sort of like careless compution hurts a lot of people so very little no one cares.
It is now an acceptable loss.
Sorry, but I've a sneaking suspicion the rest of Canada puts more money into Quebec than they're "stealing".
Better still, they send much of what they steal to Quebec.
Maybe all provinces need to learn to stand on their own two feet, Ontario included. Alberta and others have oil, Ontario has auto and lumber/paper and Quebec has James Bay. Heck, each province has their assets. So why do the politicians like to say: We need the fed money! We think Americans suck! Westerners are red necks.
The truth is that Ottawa fosters hate of Americans and westerners to take the eye off of their practices. Much the same way Hitler used the jews.
There is no difference between Americans and Canadians... we live by similar laws (except for Quebec) and we work the same hours and we are often related. And both our governments have similar problems.
There is more in common between Americans and Canadians than any politician would ever have you believe, be it Bush or Martin.
The only way to keep things the way they are is to voice to those in charge that this is the way you like it! Come on canadians dont get lazy on this one.
Actually we are more lucky than lazy in Ottawa. The bickering politicians are in a minority government which is usually good for Canadians. They bicker and grandstand all day and get nothing done which means they haven't found new creative ways to overspend and corrupt with out money. It amazes me that so few in our government are interested in lowering taxes. Liberals don't care, as they get a lot of their money under the tables and MPs don't pay the full rate on what they do declare.
And having a big mouth prime minasster that is at odds with Bush... well... it is politics.. but this could be advantagious, that is Canada could take the sane parts of DMCA and the US can let the beef and lumber flow.
Mind you I am for adding two territories and 9 stars to the red-white-blue and put some North in the America. There is no way either country would loose. Ottawa would be the only looser... and I would pitty them NOT.
I'm a fairly experienced coder, but I don't have any experience with AOP whatever. I don't even know what it is!
I don't think you or I have to worry. It is likely a construct you already use.
What I would really like to know is "depricated" versus "depreciated". I can only guess, but could the API developer that did this not spell? Knowing AOP is about as much value, esoteric at best.
64-bit Windows will handle 16 terabytes of virtual memory, as compared to 4 GB for 32-bit Windows. System cache size jumps from 1 GB to 1 TB, and paging-file size increases from 16 TB to 512 TB."
The real good part about this is for those that buy lots of RAM that windows can now run longer before it crashes from a memory or resource leak.
But why I like it is that after people buy the 8gb RAM modules, it makes it cheaper to get existing RAM for Linux.
I must be getting too old in this business, I remember the day when you could say hello to a user with less that 30 bytes, most programmers can't do this with 10 Mbytes and I guess the race is on to see who can write the biggest "hello" program.
The big difference is two processor cores share the same die as opposed to having two seperate processors with an external interconnect. From the software perspective it varies little.
Since dual cores share I/O and memory bus the dual cores should in theory be slower due to increased memory and I/O contention. On the flip, the interconnect speeds can be higher and power consumption might be lower. And in theory, dual cores should be less expensive to build than two distinct processors.
But in performance terms, they should be similar. Alot better than the HT hype. With HT, the software sees two processors but really winds down in performance when both threads of execution need memory access and I/O access.
Dual core, or a dual processor is better. Both increase performance in a similar way. I figure it will not be long before we see Apple use the dual core and dual processor together.
WinXP isn't designed for MP? At least MS has had some practice with MP, preemptive multitasking and virtual memory. BSD isn't famous for its MP support.
I would put BSD multitasking and memory management up against ANY Microsoft product. There is nothing pre-emptive in Windows other than hardware interupt processing and that is why it is so chunky when a process hangs. And if a driver hickups it is crash and burn.
While BSD is not the best for MP support when compared to Linux, Solaris and others, it sure smokes Windows of any variety.
So what? It's the performance that matters.
Yep, performance maters. But so does reliability and security. And RISC GHz is not the same as CISC GHz. If all you want to rank speeds of computers is Hz then connect your microwave to a processor and you will have more hertz.
And with a G5, there isn't a 2GB or 4GB memory barrier of 32 bit computing.
Pricing is out? How, on Apples web site store $2999 gets a dual G5 at 2.5GHz. Dell's offering is $2999 no?
I do agree about AMD, a dual Operton does also look attractive in price and performance. But my main point here is a $2999 dual core Dell is not earth shatering and Intel is just catching up with Apple, AMD and Sun and others.
You complain that Dell is over priced while singing the praises of Apple in the same breath? How very amusing! I can't believe you even presume to be serious about this.
At $2999 for the Dell, and $2999 for a dual G5 2.5GHz from Apple, I would say Apple has the value here. But if you rather, you can buy the Dell... I am saving my pennies for the Apple.
Some government employees aren't the brightest when it comes to computing. I wonder what sort of problems having them learn to use linux would cause?
I bet government employees know how to load spyware and fun back doors on their computers just like anyone else. And like most political environments it is uncontrolled.
Linux allows admins to easily prevent this. It isn't that Microsoft Windows can't do it, but I have met very few NT admin that knew how to set policies let alone get support to set them correctly. And setting windows policies is a pain. With Linux, or an appliance based system you can reduce this economically. Simply put the users home path in a non-executionable mount point and don't give them root access. Then all they can execute is what is supported. A real big gain for security and a serious sign that security just isn't a buzz word.
Now Apple already has a dual processor system in the marketplace. Just took a look at a dual 2.5GHz G5 model the other day. It was obvious it is a quality machine as it was quiet and smoking hot fast. And runs a stable OS with all the features one could want.
Nothing wrong with Dell systems, but they are over priced... The Apple has an OS designed for MP and is RISC based, and I suspect much faster than say a dual Intel Xeon at twice the price.
Imagine what a dual core, dual processor (G5 970MP) systems will be like!!! You might want to keep any eye on Apple for this.
Windows, love it or hate it, makes it very easy to secure your data on a laptop
I am not sure Windows has anything to do with it as any OS supports crypto, the question is why did an application designed to hold social security numbers on a insecure PC not encrypt the data store?
Users will not do anything they do not have to. An encrypting/decrypting files leave copies of data un-encrypted on the disk. So blaming the user is not it either.
I would blame whomever aquired and authorized the use of the software (even if it is the user). This application was not designed for this type of use. And how did the data get on the laptop? Likely unencrypted ftp or perhaps a insecure CIFS share where the passwords are routinely cracked.
And how much spyware did the use load on the system?
Far too few are really too interested in security. For many it is lip service as they continue to practice careless computing.
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Although we tend to take sides, NT or UNIX for example, there is a need for both a specialist and a generalist knowledge of all systems. And no human is smart enough to be both a generalist and a specialist. Many may claim it but in 25 years in this business I have never met nor heard of one person that can claim both. And those that do claim it are generally incompetent fools.
It also depends on where you want to take your career. Which in fact might be your best decision point. You don't see a general practitioner of medicine for a heart bypass. But first you see the general practitioner and get a referral to a cardiovascular specialist. This tech business isn't any freaking different.
A generalist is best at a higher level, perhaps even a manager. Often picking the best solutions without bigotry and FUD running their lives. Vendors only care about the sale, and will FUD bias into their own gain for their products deficiencies. True generalists will look at all the factors including suitability, scalability, reliability, standards, maintainability, security including patching, help desk calls and longevity. Generalists will pick Linux/UNIX as often as NT/Windows judging only by what is best for their situation. And their situation may also depend on the availability of skill sets.
A specialist is one you call for the hard to fix issues requiring expertise in far more detail than is possible for a generalist. They may not even initially know the answer, but have the knowledge and specialization to dig and get the answers to levels much more detailed than a generalist even comprehend. Far to many claim to be secialits but are not.
And a note about above, certifications are from a practical point of view, overrated and transient. From strictly a political point of view, certifications are necessary because of the impersonal nature and commoditization of HR in large organizations. The best people I know, don't subscribe to their certifications although many had them at one time and let them lapse. My attitude is simple, if the organization does not value you for your skills, but values certifications it tells you a lot about the company. As anyone with an memory can puke learn. But understanding comes from experience and initiative.
To become a generalist, a really good generalist you need to become a specialist and and soon as you comfortable move on to something different. That is, in hind sight, start with TRS-DOS, then Windows 2.0, on to XENIX, then to MVS/TSO, a shot at VAX, then Windows 3.0-4.0 and back into UNIX/Linux to replace Minix. Mix in some Cisco and a good dose of TCP/IP including Apache, DNS, sendmail, firewalling and of course NETBIOS and SNA which everyone wants to forget. And if you are so inclinded pic up some C/C++/Java along the way. Note the diversity... bounce around a lot if you want to be a generalist. It takes time.
If organizations really want directors/CIO/CTO people that don't get run over by sales FUD they pick seasoned generalists to promote. But keep the personal people skills up... if you want these rolls and there is not guarantee as the industry is full of b%(($#!t and naïve management often picks hype over fact.
Because it would cost them money to (1) write coherent and complete documentation and (2) review that documentation to make it safe and legal for public consumption. Why would they spend all the extra time and money to do that when it doesn't bring them any more profit?
3Com in it's prior hay day readily gave out the needed information and almost everyone ran 3Com Ethernet cards as a result. You could write you're on driver rather easily. The documentation was simple, not fancy but right to the point. All you had to do is email or call them and they would give you the ftp site to get it for all their ISA cards, or for a nominal fee they would snail mail it. Where I worked they sold some 60000 or more of these cards because of this.
But this is back in the days where Microsoft thought NETBIOS was going to run the world and didn't even officially have a TCP/IP stack for it's Windows 3.0. Microsoft had little interest in NIC driver development at the time as PCs had modems as their NIC. Microsoft didn't write these drivers back then. So what has changed?
Broadcom for example has working micro-Linux kernels running the reference systems for their wireless chipsets yet you can't get the source code. HAL is a fancy term for BIOS to replace harder to manage ROMs and they are nothing but a API interface to the hardware. Yet it is closed.
Might I suggest the obvious... Microsoft has in effect a policy of not supporting open source, and this extends to hardware vendors if they want future support in products like longhorn. If you open source it, you come off our drivers list. This can hurt sales and impede open source development. This is why it is done.
Like bundling the OS with a Dell PC meets the requirements of a anti-trust violation, tactics like this are overlooked by the US government as Microsoft is a US based monopoly. Should Microsoft been a British, German or Japanese company the anti-trust crew would have been all over them by now.
Monopolistic anti-trust behavior kills innovation and competition... this is why the anti-trust laws were created. Although so far, unenforced, lets see how far Microsoft can go before someone stops them.
However, your boss isn't going to listen to this. So what you do is find a free help-desk package (if you're using Windows then Liberum is pretty good) and get people to funnel all of their support calls through that. That way at the end of the month you can go to your boss and say "Look, this is the amount of work it takes to keep a network up and running. That's why I haven't got any programming done."
This is a no win. I worked in an environment like this once before and just found out eventually that I had to leave to avoid the 65+ hour work week. Once announced I was leaving they were shocked at my work load and made promises to change it, but I had been around long enough to see how promises are (not) kept. Many managers are not rational and only listen to what they want to hear. If they had logic they would be stuck as programmers. This politicial part of management of technical personnel needs evolution.
The good part, although hard to find, is that there are good environments out there. They would usually insist you are an admin this week, and not a programmer... seperation of duties. This would be in the managers operations manual not leaving much latitude.
This isn't to say quiting is the best option. It could be an opportunitity... that is get involved with it and keep your work hours sane. Environments like this can shrink and grow. If it shrinks they tend to keep the most flexable and knowledgable people. But do manage your managers expectations....
Did it involve an exploit?
Yep, although not a buffer overflow it is an exploit on the system design that allows executing and installation of programs without the users specific consent. Not much unlike the days when you could email an Active-X control to people and it would automatically execute just by viewing the message.
Users are led to believe these files are safe to open. When in fact they should be viewed as are they safe to execute.
So the bad guys exploited the misperception that (Microsoft) document files are data files safe to "open".
A comparision side by side of the features of all these programmes. Can I handle my 2 Gb of PST files with Evolution and Kontact? If not, then I'm not interested. Can I search pretty quickly? If not, forget it.
I use IMAP files, more portable and easier to back up as it puts everything in my home directory. I have some big files and haven't had searching issues with it even when using Outlook Express. And because it is IMAP based I can also use SquirrelMail for web access. (Ya, I know you can use OWA but I didn't want to buy it and it doesn't run on Solaris, Linux or BSD).
Can I connect to POP3 / IMAP / Exchange / Notes servers? ...
I believe the answer is yes. Will know for sure in a month as my next work portable is being ordered with Linux/VMWare. I convinced management instead of giving me a machine for each OS to test software with (Linux, Solaris, W2000, NT4, W2003, XP, XP2, XP/Home) I could use VMWare with Linux instead.
I have heard that a lot of hardware is pretty bad and is mostly fixed with software hacks in the driver. Companies may be not want people to know how broken some of their products are.
I suspect something more cynical. The best explanation I have heard was that Microsoft will not include open source drivers thus not to get excluded in Microsoft OS chip set support the HAL remains closed source.
I have also heard that some chips allow you to increase power to levels above FCC approval but this sounds weak as 1) it can be inexpensively limited in the hardware and 2) the FCC doesn't ban selling transistors because we can exceed FCC limits with them.
And it would be easy also to have the HAL in some ROM on board where you just poke it with a country code in initialization.
The best support for open source drivers will come from more independent type companies in the orient. I stopped buying Broadcom products just because they don't help in getting open source drivers yet use open source on it's reference boards. Sort of hypocritical on their part.
Patching open source is easy and does not need to be done as often. And the patches for Linux are often more stable. We all know that...
So is this more foder for CIOs to reject open source because they have Microsoft stock in their portfolios?
Good to see the Microsoft FUD machine is still working.
A wise person one said to me the two biggest problems in business in the future is the bandwidth between the ears and the bandwidth of the cable, in that order. So far, 25 years later this still holds true in my books. More "professionals" should read these journals, as say you are an eye surgeon, would you not want to keep up with the latest in ocular implant research if this is what you do? Far too many "pros" think learning ends with university... and all are shocked to learn it is just the beginning or get careers doing something else.
I know your working with windows but when I read this I said yes.
I'm guessing someone out there has done something like this before.
Google has a cluster of machines far larger than you need but their approach was a Linux cluster. Plus, for the amount of writes going on your going to want not to have any burdens on the system that are not needed.
Open source is so good so many companies claim it as their own in their products without credit. How tough is it to say "Built on Open Source with credits to...."? I know of dozens of "appliance like" devices that are like this. When you ask the vendor they say "we wrote it all" and just by the look and field you know Squid/BSD/OpenSSL/SSH are at minimum inside.
Make no mistake, the commercial software industry is the biggest pirate of code there is on the face of this planet. All developers routinely use google to search for code snipits and these programmers are from big companies like Oracle and IBM to little startups of all kinds. At least IBM acknowledges it's involvement and contributes to many like Linux.
Most companies should not be embarrassed, to me it is a selling point as no one company can do it all.
One un-named company actually had the gall to tell one of my managers they "Invented Spam Assassin". Needless to say I sufficiently set management straight by a few select web pages and suggested if they lie to us now what will the support be like?
Don't deal with companies that lie about the origins of their product.
"We get to find out lots of interesting things -- like how to authenticate against Active Directory, how to run non-Microsoft mail clients with Exchange," and the like, he said.
This isn't thanks to Microsoft. Microsoft routinely writes their stuff with incompatibilities in mind while stealing the protocols, and likely chunks of open source.
But fortunately as a percentage of the world Microsoft's dominance is decaying as many new countries are opting out of the blind following of Microsoft. I think TCO cost and security might have a lot to do with it.
I still predict Microsoft Linux at some future point when market share and mass migration takes place. In the mean time there is too much dollars in selling the old pooch.
In the mean time I will not get sucked into Microsoft is open source friendly as the duality of intent here is obvious.
What are we going to have to do to convince "ordinary users" to visit WindowsUpdate once in a while?"
The answer is actually quite simple, a better OS software is needed and Microsoft seems to be having problems making it.
Would anyone buy a car that needed a repair each week to keep us safe?
Would any of us buy a TV that had to get it's software updated each week or you could not watch your favorite show?
Would you hire a driveway paver when you knew you would have to patch it once a week?
This isn't to say the consumer isn't at fault. The average consumer doesn't care this costs businesses billions of lost bandwidth, repair and productivity. The problem is the consumer isn't realizing the cost. ISPs would rather let it happen than charge the customer a $200 clean up fee. It is sort of like careless compution hurts a lot of people so very little no one cares. It is now an acceptable loss.
Sorry, but I've a sneaking suspicion the rest of Canada puts more money into Quebec than they're "stealing".
Better still, they send much of what they steal to Quebec.
Maybe all provinces need to learn to stand on their own two feet, Ontario included. Alberta and others have oil, Ontario has auto and lumber/paper and Quebec has James Bay. Heck, each province has their assets. So why do the politicians like to say: We need the fed money! We think Americans suck! Westerners are red necks.
The truth is that Ottawa fosters hate of Americans and westerners to take the eye off of their practices. Much the same way Hitler used the jews.
There is no difference between Americans and Canadians... we live by similar laws (except for Quebec) and we work the same hours and we are often related. And both our governments have similar problems.
There is more in common between Americans and Canadians than any politician would ever have you believe, be it Bush or Martin.
The only way to keep things the way they are is to voice to those in charge that this is the way you like it! Come on canadians dont get lazy on this one.
Actually we are more lucky than lazy in Ottawa. The bickering politicians are in a minority government which is usually good for Canadians. They bicker and grandstand all day and get nothing done which means they haven't found new creative ways to overspend and corrupt with out money. It amazes me that so few in our government are interested in lowering taxes. Liberals don't care, as they get a lot of their money under the tables and MPs don't pay the full rate on what they do declare.
And having a big mouth prime minasster that is at odds with Bush... well... it is politics .. but this could be advantagious, that is Canada could take the sane parts of DMCA and the US can let the beef and lumber flow.
Mind you I am for adding two territories and 9 stars to the red-white-blue and put some North in the America. There is no way either country would loose. Ottawa would be the only looser... and I would pitty them NOT.
I think the 90k comes afte 5-10 years experience if you get good at what you do.
I'm a fairly experienced coder, but I don't have any experience with AOP whatever. I don't even know what it is!
I don't think you or I have to worry. It is likely a construct you already use.
What I would really like to know is "depricated" versus "depreciated". I can only guess, but could the API developer that did this not spell? Knowing AOP is about as much value, esoteric at best.
For anything else I shun goto.
Goto is NEVER required. There are aways structured ways around using it even in your example.
64-bit Windows will handle 16 terabytes of virtual memory, as compared to 4 GB for 32-bit Windows. System cache size jumps from 1 GB to 1 TB, and paging-file size increases from 16 TB to 512 TB."
The real good part about this is for those that buy lots of RAM that windows can now run longer before it crashes from a memory or resource leak.
But why I like it is that after people buy the 8gb RAM modules, it makes it cheaper to get existing RAM for Linux.
I must be getting too old in this business, I remember the day when you could say hello to a user with less that 30 bytes, most programmers can't do this with 10 Mbytes and I guess the race is on to see who can write the biggest "hello" program.
Dual core != Dual Processor
It might be better to state:
Dual core ~= Dual Processor
The big difference is two processor cores share the same die as opposed to having two seperate processors with an external interconnect. From the software perspective it varies little.
Since dual cores share I/O and memory bus the dual cores should in theory be slower due to increased memory and I/O contention. On the flip, the interconnect speeds can be higher and power consumption might be lower. And in theory, dual cores should be less expensive to build than two distinct processors.
But in performance terms, they should be similar. Alot better than the HT hype. With HT, the software sees two processors but really winds down in performance when both threads of execution need memory access and I/O access.
Dual core, or a dual processor is better. Both increase performance in a similar way. I figure it will not be long before we see Apple use the dual core and dual processor together.
WinXP isn't designed for MP? At least MS has had some practice with MP, preemptive multitasking and virtual memory. BSD isn't famous for its MP support.
I would put BSD multitasking and memory management up against ANY Microsoft product. There is nothing pre-emptive in Windows other than hardware interupt processing and that is why it is so chunky when a process hangs. And if a driver hickups it is crash and burn.
While BSD is not the best for MP support when compared to Linux, Solaris and others, it sure smokes Windows of any variety.
So what? It's the performance that matters.
Yep, performance maters. But so does reliability and security. And RISC GHz is not the same as CISC GHz. If all you want to rank speeds of computers is Hz then connect your microwave to a processor and you will have more hertz.
And with a G5, there isn't a 2GB or 4GB memory barrier of 32 bit computing.
Pricing is out? How, on Apples web site store $2999 gets a dual G5 at 2.5GHz. Dell's offering is $2999 no?
I do agree about AMD, a dual Operton does also look attractive in price and performance. But my main point here is a $2999 dual core Dell is not earth shatering and Intel is just catching up with Apple, AMD and Sun and others.
You complain that Dell is over priced while singing the praises of Apple in the same breath? How very amusing! I can't believe you even presume to be serious about this.
At $2999 for the Dell, and $2999 for a dual G5 2.5GHz from Apple, I would say Apple has the value here. But if you rather, you can buy the Dell... I am saving my pennies for the Apple.
Some government employees aren't the brightest when it comes to computing. I wonder what sort of problems having them learn to use linux would cause?
I bet government employees know how to load spyware and fun back doors on their computers just like anyone else. And like most political environments it is uncontrolled.
Linux allows admins to easily prevent this. It isn't that Microsoft Windows can't do it, but I have met very few NT admin that knew how to set policies let alone get support to set them correctly. And setting windows policies is a pain. With Linux, or an appliance based system you can reduce this economically. Simply put the users home path in a non-executionable mount point and don't give them root access. Then all they can execute is what is supported. A real big gain for security and a serious sign that security just isn't a buzz word.
But makes too much sense and doesn't cost enough.
Dimension XPS desktop, which start at $2,999
Now Apple already has a dual processor system in the marketplace. Just took a look at a dual 2.5GHz G5 model the other day. It was obvious it is a quality machine as it was quiet and smoking hot fast. And runs a stable OS with all the features one could want.
Nothing wrong with Dell systems, but they are over priced... The Apple has an OS designed for MP and is RISC based, and I suspect much faster than say a dual Intel Xeon at twice the price.
Imagine what a dual core, dual processor (G5 970MP) systems will be like!!! You might want to keep any eye on Apple for this.
Windows, love it or hate it, makes it very easy to secure your data on a laptop
I am not sure Windows has anything to do with it as any OS supports crypto, the question is why did an application designed to hold social security numbers on a insecure PC not encrypt the data store?
Users will not do anything they do not have to. An encrypting/decrypting files leave copies of data un-encrypted on the disk. So blaming the user is not it either.
I would blame whomever aquired and authorized the use of the software (even if it is the user). This application was not designed for this type of use. And how did the data get on the laptop? Likely unencrypted ftp or perhaps a insecure CIFS share where the passwords are routinely cracked.
And how much spyware did the use load on the system?
Far too few are really too interested in security. For many it is lip service as they continue to practice careless computing.
Likely copyleft music. But I really got a kick out of reading this:
The copyright-protected code has not been licensed for use on Hatch's website.
So maybe his web site should be destroyed.