Some PR company hired by one or more of the featured products to be included in that list. Happens all the time with hot software trends. Rarely are feature pieces like that written by real journalists. Most of the time it's some industry or PR writer.
Don't feel bad, half the national stories you see on local news were shot by an industry trade group and in more than a couple cases, our very own government propaganda ministry.
The crank has been moved to the power supply. I liked it better when it was on the machine. With on the power supply it blows my fantasy of annoying the presenter in a software demo by cranking my PC. Then those of us in the meeting could text messages back and forth on our ad hoc mesh network.
Just wouldn't be the same with it on the power supply.
First text message Negroponte sent on the demo to another machine. "John Bolton suxor! Hope they replace him with an adult."
I saw some unusual entries in an Ethereal log one time. It didn't raise any big flags at the time because Windows talks to Castle Redmondore a lot, I thought it was normal. Never bothered to find out exactly what was going on because I don't use Windows any more than necessary.
One more reason not to I guess. Like I needed one.
And spreads 80% more FUD than anyone else. And my numbers are just as supportable as theirs.
Surprisingly, Red Hat Enterprise Linux standard distribution users reported said they experienced 900 minutes of outage per server, per year.
Oh, pl-ease. 900 minutes? That's 15 hours. If it's a software problem why were they trying to run it on an unsupported OS? Operator stupidity doesn't count against uptime. If it was hardware related I could build a new server from parts and re-image in less than four hours, depending on traffic getting back from the computer store. Less if the parts are already on the shelf. What were they doing the other 11 hours?
How are Slashdotters coping with the proliferation of spreadsheets in the face of greater legal accountability and auditing?
I keep trying to warn my business customers, one of which uses linked spreadsheets for their quarterly accounting (backed up by an auditing firm), that linked spreadsheets are not intended as an enterprise application. But do they listen? Tried to get them to look at alternatives but they keep saying, "It does what we need it to do." But it's always breaking, usually at the worst possible time, and the auditors are constantly pointing out errors.
You can only go so far in protecting customers from their own determined stupidity.
What a perfect opportunity
on
Back to the Bunker
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you were a corrupt, failing administration what a perfect cover to launch some type of coup. Speaking hypothetically, of course. Say you were a neo-conservative right wing type, I'm sure you could find a pretext for sweeping aside Congressional oversight and an "activist" judiciary. But when to pull it off? When most government officials were safely out of harms way in "secret" locations. In case any of you liberal types didn't like the idea of a neo-conservative monarchy.
All you'd need to happen with the execs were safely away is some cooked up "terrorist" attack, maybe a series of dirty bombs going off coupled with a financial crisis. Good excuse to roll the military out into the streets.
Nah, couldn't happen here, right? Just because something similar happened...well, several times in the past is no reason to think it could ever happen here.
For this a work environment is great to keep focussed.
If you're the type who needs a work environment to keep focused it would be better not to telecommute, but I bill less when the customer lets me work at home and get more done. It's not that hard to monitor performance in a remote development environment. Either someone is making their milestones or not, closing trouble tickets or not. I can look at their code and tell how long it should have taken vs the actual billing. What I save in clothes, gas and commute time is invaluable. My equipment, my dev environment, my work space at home are all set up for how I work.
A phone list and a speaker phone is all I need for quick consults, fax machine for paperworks, we keep code libraries in common access areas accessible via VPN if I need something. I find interaction at work actually detracts from production more often than helping it. There are times when face to face meetings are unavoidable, like gathering requirements and monitoring user interaction on betas, but other than that I'd say a full 75% of interuptions at the office are at best unproductive and frequently just plain annoying. If I have to forward my office phone, my productivity tanks. If I can check messages a couple times a day that's better.
For people interested in playing politics or needing interaction with other people, an office is necessary. For me the more you leave me alone, the more I'll get done. Sometimes I'll collaborate with other developers...I work with a graphics guy in California regularly. We can work together almost like we're in the same room. We've had three way phone confernces where we've all been hammering away on our part of the app, yapping back and forth on the speaker phone. It was very much like being in an office.
At some point in the project some component might fall under the "this will really suck under VB, and we can tackle it much better by writing this piece in C#" which will let you get a toe-hold on the idea of using a better language.
I have one customer that specs VB.NET for all their apps. After getting comfortable with it there's just no reason for some of the comments here. VB isn't "easier" than C#, just different. If you're a bad VB programmer, switching to C# isn't going to make you a better one.
My opinion is that a lot of bias against VB stretches back to the day when it was not considered a "real" programming language. But it's grown up and turned into a capable language and if that's what the customer wants, there's no need to try to sell them on C#.
Maybe this is better left unsaid, but I think there has to be a change in the way we as Americans react when threatened.
I remember being at a town hall meeting after 9-11. This lady stood up and through tears started asking who was going to protect her. Right before that another gentleman stood up and volunteered to give up all his privacy and civil rights in order to be safe. I found the whole display somewhat sickening. Instead of asking what they could do to help, they demonstrated the root of the problem.
The 9-11 hijackings may not be the best example, but in general you're absolutely correct and it needs to be said. And not just here. Neither one of us is talking about vigilantism, it's about not being so dependent on the government...for anything. This goes beyond self defense, but includes that, too. How many times have you heard a police spokesman say, "If you're confronted with an armed robber, just cooperate." Well, 40% of robbery victims are injured whether they resist or not. So is that really good advice? How many times does the victim get injured if they mount a sudden and devastating counter attack? I don't know, no statistics on that. But I'll take my chances that I can put a double tap center mass before some shitbag drug addict trying to get enough cash for a rock can get a shot off with a piece of crap gun because criminals are also conditioned to people just cooperating. But that's just me. That might not be right for someone else.
There aren't any easy answers. All I know is we didn't become the country we are by depending on the government. And we're not going to get where we want to be with a gutless bunch of incompetent frat boy Republicans running the country.
Cheney accuses those he disagrees with of hoping our oceans defend us against terrorism, yet this bungling administration picks technologies that are both invasive to the innocent and ineffective in locating the guilty. We're spending billions on efforts that, at best, won't work and at worst will draw resources away from things that will be effective.
There was a local news story about a terrorism suspect who was picked up locally because of a tip from a flight school. Not from monitoring his phone calls, not by fingerprinting him when he came into the country, not by spy plane, satellite or any other whiz bang technology. Just a clerk at a airport counter in the middle of bf nowhere. And that's the sensor net that offers the best hope we have of combating terrorism. The clerk at the store, the landlord they rent from, the agent at the ticket counter, the hotel clerk, rental car company, bell hops, and neighbors. It's not depending on the government to keep us safe because they can't. Government is too big and too slow to respond to a ever changing threat landscape. Had we not spent the last five years alienating the muslim and mid-eastern communities in this country and abusing the few Arab allies we have in the mid-east, we might have been able to develop a community network that would have been effective and inexpensive (in relative terms).
No one seriously believes oceans can defend us, just like no one can seriously believe all the invasive technology being loosed on the people paying the bills is going to be any more effective.
Anyone tried both Ubuntu and Xandros? I'd be curious as to how they compare. I've had very few problems with Xandros. It would be nice if the media support on the paid copies was a little better, other than that no complaints.
One of Dennis Leary's great comedy routines is about coffee being adulterated with other flavors, particularly maple, as an example of what's wrong with the world. Those of us in the I Want My Cellphone To Make F'ing Phone Calls crowd feel the same way about cell service. I'd rather have a phone that will find and hold a signal almost anywhere than one that plays music or otherwise tries to do many things badly instead of one thing well.
Although it is kind of handy having a camera sometimes, I'd still trade that for clearer phone calls.
Short of unplugging the machine and locking it in a vault. SSH may not be perfect but it's pretty darn good. And if getting your credentials depends on someone else have administrator rights on one of your nodes, that's not exactly a fatal flaw unless your security demands are extremely high.
Anyone with the time and resources is going to find a way into your network. Many times security does not have to be bullet proof. Don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the large majority of other networks. Unless there's something really compelling on your system, they're likely to pick an easier target.
I use my home network as an example. I have one copy of XP on my system. What I consider the weak link in the security chain. It's on a NAT'd segment, I don't surf the internet with it and anything sensitive is on a TrueCrypt partition that I only mount when needed. Hardly bullet proof but not bad for Windows.
The fact is that computers are not biological organisms and "viruses" don't work the same way.
I'd argue that in Windows World the virus model in biological organisms is fairly accurate. An infected cell starts producing more virus that in turn infect other hosts. And that model is unique to Windows, unless your Linux boxes are really poorly configured.
Computers are tools in the sense they are machines but you won't see my chainsaw pick up a virus then go off on a tagent and try to infect the lawn mower.
Suggesting the monoculture model is more efficient from a management standpoint is one of those ideas that seems true but doesn't really hold up in real life. The fatal flaw being it assumes all elements in a mixed OS system require the same amount of administrative oversight and that's simply not the case. I have LAMP stack applications that will run for months at a time without any administrator oversight.
Those evil Republicans! Except, wait... wasn't it the Clinton Administration that launched a 3-year criminal investigation of Phil Zimmerman in 1993?
Still trying to justify the evil of your own party by blaming Clinton. You people are nothing if not consistent. I don't remember anyone suggesting Clinton was conducting wholesale monitoring of innocent Americans. Can't seem to recall him trying to undermine the Constitution in the name of executive power or lying us into a war costing billions in treasure and thousands of wasted lives, then painting anyone disagreeing as unAmerican.
Convenient how you manage to overlooked a mountain of lies and hypocricy while pointing back to an ant hill Clinton left behind. I am ashamed of the 30% of you still supporting Bush. You are angry, ugly, vile and ungodly people. Someone remind me why secession would be such a bad thing?
And throw Gonzales in jail. Then turn that domestic spying apparatus on the Federalist Society and root out that whole nest.
I think everyone who voted for Bush should have to pay extra to help pay off the budget deficit. Why should the rest of be saddled with the debt of your bad choices?
It's not bad enough to ship data on millions of Americans to places with vastly different privacy regulations, now we're going to open up our networks and let them manage desktops and net ops. Match up your surfing habits, personnel data, credit card purchases and medical history. Just think of the coorelation fun they could have with all that data.
This is freaking IN-SANE! These people are not all our friends and assumes we will always be allies. Imagine the opening shot in a future conflict being data networks and phones at thousands of businesses shutting down at once. All your web searches being re-routed because the corporate fucktards at Bellsouth decided to save a few pennies letting Indian support centers handle large chunks of their network maintenance.
I'm not saying Indian admins are reckless or incompetent. I'm saying that it's a bad idea to turn over too much control of our information resources over to a foreign country, just like it's a bad idea to depend on a fragile line of oil tankers connecting us to a bunch of wild-eyed goat herders for our transportation fuel and trusting the Chinese and Koreans with all our manufacturing capability. If push comes to shove they'll do what their government tells them to do. This is all going to come around to bite us in the ass one of these days.
Whew! Those of us on this side of the pond are breathing a giant sigh of relief that, for once, we're not the over-reaching government, privacy invading asshats of the world!
Okay, you got us on that secret prisons in soviet bloc countries thing, but with moves like this one you'll catch up in no time. Good show!
If you are a reporter, and you're exchanging calls with anyone on the "list" suspected of leaks why shouldn't the government take a peek.
Because the administration claims to want to track down leakers...until it turns out the leak originated with Cheney, then it's okay. That's the working definition of a hypocrite. Do as I say not as I do.
This smacks of journalists pompously elevating their self-importance to levels higher than they deserve.
It smacks of hypocricy and corruption. It smacks of an out of control administration desperately trying to hide their criminal misdeeds from public scrutiny.
The terrorists know we monitor telecom. It's not news to them. Funny that it is to us.
Claims by some Linux publishers that anybody can easily switch to Linux from Windows seem totally oversold.
Anyone can do it. I have and so have many others. Is it easy? Perhaps that's where we run into difficulty. How do we define easy? Easy for who? I found switching to Linux very hard at first. Over time it got much easier, but there was a transition zone that was rocky. Now, after working at home in a Linux environment, I go out to a customer site with Windows and it's like running in sand. Windows is far more difficult to me now, it's just so...ponderous.
One area I do agree with him is multimedia support. I'm not blaming Linux for not being able to play every media format out of the box. Multimedia is a mine field of proprietary formats and patent issues. If there was one site you could go to collect the codecs and binary only components that might take some of the sting out of the transition. Go here to get multimedia support and here for other binary components. That way Linux distros could focus on those and point users to one place for add-on components that can't be included for licensing reasons. As inconvenient as that seems it's better that way because Linux boxes can be configured for so many different uses. Windows, at least in the home setting, hauls all that garbage around whether you need it or not. And it's definitely not clear to new Linux users WHY multimedia has to be handled as an add-on service.
As far as the spreadsheet and word doc compatibility go, I've never experienced the problems he references. Occaisionally some doc will have a weird font or some minor format problem but overall the translation is pretty good. I swap docs with coporate customers routinely and still manage without really noticing much difference.
I was hoping that there would be a way to open firefox and have it remember all the tabs you had open when you closed it. Or at least be able to have it open to a set number of addresses. So I could open it up and have my five favorite tabs appear.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't feel bad, half the national stories you see on local news were shot by an industry trade group and in more than a couple cases, our very own government propaganda ministry.
Just wouldn't be the same with it on the power supply.
First text message Negroponte sent on the demo to another machine. "John Bolton suxor! Hope they replace him with an adult."
One more reason not to I guess. Like I needed one.
Surprisingly, Red Hat Enterprise Linux standard distribution users reported said they experienced 900 minutes of outage per server, per year.
Oh, pl-ease. 900 minutes? That's 15 hours. If it's a software problem why were they trying to run it on an unsupported OS? Operator stupidity doesn't count against uptime. If it was hardware related I could build a new server from parts and re-image in less than four hours, depending on traffic getting back from the computer store. Less if the parts are already on the shelf. What were they doing the other 11 hours?
Or maybe I don't want to know...
Either way it's total fucking PR blather.
I keep trying to warn my business customers, one of which uses linked spreadsheets for their quarterly accounting (backed up by an auditing firm), that linked spreadsheets are not intended as an enterprise application. But do they listen? Tried to get them to look at alternatives but they keep saying, "It does what we need it to do." But it's always breaking, usually at the worst possible time, and the auditors are constantly pointing out errors.
You can only go so far in protecting customers from their own determined stupidity.
All you'd need to happen with the execs were safely away is some cooked up "terrorist" attack, maybe a series of dirty bombs going off coupled with a financial crisis. Good excuse to roll the military out into the streets.
Nah, couldn't happen here, right? Just because something similar happened...well, several times in the past is no reason to think it could ever happen here.
If you're the type who needs a work environment to keep focused it would be better not to telecommute, but I bill less when the customer lets me work at home and get more done. It's not that hard to monitor performance in a remote development environment. Either someone is making their milestones or not, closing trouble tickets or not. I can look at their code and tell how long it should have taken vs the actual billing. What I save in clothes, gas and commute time is invaluable. My equipment, my dev environment, my work space at home are all set up for how I work.
A phone list and a speaker phone is all I need for quick consults, fax machine for paperworks, we keep code libraries in common access areas accessible via VPN if I need something. I find interaction at work actually detracts from production more often than helping it. There are times when face to face meetings are unavoidable, like gathering requirements and monitoring user interaction on betas, but other than that I'd say a full 75% of interuptions at the office are at best unproductive and frequently just plain annoying. If I have to forward my office phone, my productivity tanks. If I can check messages a couple times a day that's better.
For people interested in playing politics or needing interaction with other people, an office is necessary. For me the more you leave me alone, the more I'll get done. Sometimes I'll collaborate with other developers...I work with a graphics guy in California regularly. We can work together almost like we're in the same room. We've had three way phone confernces where we've all been hammering away on our part of the app, yapping back and forth on the speaker phone. It was very much like being in an office.
I have one customer that specs VB.NET for all their apps. After getting comfortable with it there's just no reason for some of the comments here. VB isn't "easier" than C#, just different. If you're a bad VB programmer, switching to C# isn't going to make you a better one.
My opinion is that a lot of bias against VB stretches back to the day when it was not considered a "real" programming language. But it's grown up and turned into a capable language and if that's what the customer wants, there's no need to try to sell them on C#.
I remember being at a town hall meeting after 9-11. This lady stood up and through tears started asking who was going to protect her. Right before that another gentleman stood up and volunteered to give up all his privacy and civil rights in order to be safe. I found the whole display somewhat sickening. Instead of asking what they could do to help, they demonstrated the root of the problem.
The 9-11 hijackings may not be the best example, but in general you're absolutely correct and it needs to be said. And not just here. Neither one of us is talking about vigilantism, it's about not being so dependent on the government...for anything. This goes beyond self defense, but includes that, too. How many times have you heard a police spokesman say, "If you're confronted with an armed robber, just cooperate." Well, 40% of robbery victims are injured whether they resist or not. So is that really good advice? How many times does the victim get injured if they mount a sudden and devastating counter attack? I don't know, no statistics on that. But I'll take my chances that I can put a double tap center mass before some shitbag drug addict trying to get enough cash for a rock can get a shot off with a piece of crap gun because criminals are also conditioned to people just cooperating. But that's just me. That might not be right for someone else.
There aren't any easy answers. All I know is we didn't become the country we are by depending on the government. And we're not going to get where we want to be with a gutless bunch of incompetent frat boy Republicans running the country.
There was a local news story about a terrorism suspect who was picked up locally because of a tip from a flight school. Not from monitoring his phone calls, not by fingerprinting him when he came into the country, not by spy plane, satellite or any other whiz bang technology. Just a clerk at a airport counter in the middle of bf nowhere. And that's the sensor net that offers the best hope we have of combating terrorism. The clerk at the store, the landlord they rent from, the agent at the ticket counter, the hotel clerk, rental car company, bell hops, and neighbors. It's not depending on the government to keep us safe because they can't. Government is too big and too slow to respond to a ever changing threat landscape. Had we not spent the last five years alienating the muslim and mid-eastern communities in this country and abusing the few Arab allies we have in the mid-east, we might have been able to develop a community network that would have been effective and inexpensive (in relative terms).
No one seriously believes oceans can defend us, just like no one can seriously believe all the invasive technology being loosed on the people paying the bills is going to be any more effective.
It's all really quite insane.
Anyone tried both Ubuntu and Xandros? I'd be curious as to how they compare. I've had very few problems with Xandros. It would be nice if the media support on the paid copies was a little better, other than that no complaints.
Although it is kind of handy having a camera sometimes, I'd still trade that for clearer phone calls.
Anyone with the time and resources is going to find a way into your network. Many times security does not have to be bullet proof. Don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the large majority of other networks. Unless there's something really compelling on your system, they're likely to pick an easier target.
I use my home network as an example. I have one copy of XP on my system. What I consider the weak link in the security chain. It's on a NAT'd segment, I don't surf the internet with it and anything sensitive is on a TrueCrypt partition that I only mount when needed. Hardly bullet proof but not bad for Windows.
BWAHAHAHAHA! I've been waiting for a chance to use that line for years. ;)
I'd argue that in Windows World the virus model in biological organisms is fairly accurate. An infected cell starts producing more virus that in turn infect other hosts. And that model is unique to Windows, unless your Linux boxes are really poorly configured.
Computers are tools in the sense they are machines but you won't see my chainsaw pick up a virus then go off on a tagent and try to infect the lawn mower.
Suggesting the monoculture model is more efficient from a management standpoint is one of those ideas that seems true but doesn't really hold up in real life. The fatal flaw being it assumes all elements in a mixed OS system require the same amount of administrative oversight and that's simply not the case. I have LAMP stack applications that will run for months at a time without any administrator oversight.
Put that in your TCO pipe and smoke it. ;)
Still trying to justify the evil of your own party by blaming Clinton. You people are nothing if not consistent. I don't remember anyone suggesting Clinton was conducting wholesale monitoring of innocent Americans. Can't seem to recall him trying to undermine the Constitution in the name of executive power or lying us into a war costing billions in treasure and thousands of wasted lives, then painting anyone disagreeing as unAmerican.
Convenient how you manage to overlooked a mountain of lies and hypocricy while pointing back to an ant hill Clinton left behind. I am ashamed of the 30% of you still supporting Bush. You are angry, ugly, vile and ungodly people. Someone remind me why secession would be such a bad thing?
wink-wink;
nudge-nudge;
RETURN 0;
I think everyone who voted for Bush should have to pay extra to help pay off the budget deficit. Why should the rest of be saddled with the debt of your bad choices?
This is freaking IN-SANE! These people are not all our friends and assumes we will always be allies. Imagine the opening shot in a future conflict being data networks and phones at thousands of businesses shutting down at once. All your web searches being re-routed because the corporate fucktards at Bellsouth decided to save a few pennies letting Indian support centers handle large chunks of their network maintenance.
I'm not saying Indian admins are reckless or incompetent. I'm saying that it's a bad idea to turn over too much control of our information resources over to a foreign country, just like it's a bad idea to depend on a fragile line of oil tankers connecting us to a bunch of wild-eyed goat herders for our transportation fuel and trusting the Chinese and Koreans with all our manufacturing capability. If push comes to shove they'll do what their government tells them to do. This is all going to come around to bite us in the ass one of these days.
Okay, you got us on that secret prisons in soviet bloc countries thing, but with moves like this one you'll catch up in no time. Good show!
And open source slaps Microsoft and throws a drink in its face and tells it in no uncertain terms to keep its grubby mits to itself.
Because the administration claims to want to track down leakers...until it turns out the leak originated with Cheney, then it's okay. That's the working definition of a hypocrite. Do as I say not as I do.
This smacks of journalists pompously elevating their self-importance to levels higher than they deserve.
It smacks of hypocricy and corruption. It smacks of an out of control administration desperately trying to hide their criminal misdeeds from public scrutiny.
The terrorists know we monitor telecom. It's not news to them. Funny that it is to us.
Anyone can do it. I have and so have many others. Is it easy? Perhaps that's where we run into difficulty. How do we define easy? Easy for who? I found switching to Linux very hard at first. Over time it got much easier, but there was a transition zone that was rocky. Now, after working at home in a Linux environment, I go out to a customer site with Windows and it's like running in sand. Windows is far more difficult to me now, it's just so...ponderous.
One area I do agree with him is multimedia support. I'm not blaming Linux for not being able to play every media format out of the box. Multimedia is a mine field of proprietary formats and patent issues. If there was one site you could go to collect the codecs and binary only components that might take some of the sting out of the transition. Go here to get multimedia support and here for other binary components. That way Linux distros could focus on those and point users to one place for add-on components that can't be included for licensing reasons. As inconvenient as that seems it's better that way because Linux boxes can be configured for so many different uses. Windows, at least in the home setting, hauls all that garbage around whether you need it or not. And it's definitely not clear to new Linux users WHY multimedia has to be handled as an add-on service.
As far as the spreadsheet and word doc compatibility go, I've never experienced the problems he references. Occaisionally some doc will have a weird font or some minor format problem but overall the translation is pretty good. I swap docs with coporate customers routinely and still manage without really noticing much difference.
It works. That is so handy. Thank you!
I was hoping that there would be a way to open firefox and have it remember all the tabs you had open when you closed it. Or at least be able to have it open to a set number of addresses. So I could open it up and have my five favorite tabs appear.