The problem is more like often the requirements are physically impossible, unless you want to believe that someone was stuck in a time loop and got 10 years of experience in 4.
E.g., 10 years experience with J2EE is plain impossible. Java itself hasn't been around for 10 years, and J2EE is much newer. E.g., 5 years of experience with Windows 2000 is plain nuts.
Now I'm all for hiring skilled and experienced programmers. (Makes a change from the "bah, it's all typing, so we'll hire the cheapest ex-janitor off the street" attitude.) But at some point you just have to realize that the guy posting the job is just clueless, and will probably just hire the biggest liar.
Others are just highly improbably. E.g., I can believe that someone is efficient in 2-3 computer languages, but people who are efficient and productive in 10 languages _and_ graphics/web design _and_ have marketing skills _and_ extensive business training in that branche, are almost non-existant. (And those extremely few who exist, won't work on a minimum wage.)
Yes, there are a ton of bulshitters claiming that they know everything, from programming to marketting to business analysis to web design to usability to racing formula 1 cars to archeology. But guess what? Typically they're just that: bullshitters. There are only so many hours in a day, and any skill you don't use often enough, you forget. Almost noone can stay in top shape and up to date in several non-related fields.
And it takes a particularly clueless PHB to hire such a bullshitter.
Not only that, but such ads just tell me "Hi, I'm incompetent at doing my job. I don't know how to manage and allocate resources, such as X programmers, Y web designers, Z marketers, etc. I want people who interchangeably fill all roles, so I don't have to bother with actually managing anything." And it's sad for the whole human species that such incompetents actually get management jobs.
And even sadder for the employer, because they'll typically hire interchangeable people all right. People who are equally (and utterly) incompetent across all those fields.
Well, even if you had flags, it still won't mean anything. In a parallel universe, I could actually think that the guy is the coolest person ever born. (E.g., because of his CS scores.) Or for whatever reason. Even the biggest lamers and grief players on MUDs and MMORPGs, actually have whole fan clubs of wannabe lammers and griefers, who think "wow, I wanna be just like Tricky when I grow up." (The name Tricky being just a random name pulled out of the hat basically. With apologies to anyone who had a char named like that.)
The whole "friend of a friend" is ultimately meaningless. You don't know _why_ someone likes that guy, nor whether your personalities match at all, nor whether you'd even have any common interests with any of those people. It's basically just a bunch of random strangers, no better than if you picked random names out of a hat.
Sure, it probably sounds great for an introvert to think "wow, I'm piggybacking on my pals' popularity, and I have a network of 400,000 friends of a friend of a friend". Only in practice, 99% of those couldn't care less if you died tomorrow. Most of them don't even know you exist. That's not friends, it's just a collection of strangers.
I.e., the whole thing is basically a scam. I could just as well tell you that you now have a 400,000 ton asteroid near Alpha Centauri, except you can't go there. It would do you just as much good.
Selecting people based on common interests and stuff might help more if you really want friends.
Would your friends' friends actually want to be pestered by a total stranger? Worse yet, by someone who (no offense) is too socially inept to make his own friends to start with?
E.g., let's start thinking from a real life example.
One guy who'd probably be on my list of "friends", by sheer virtue that he's family, is actually the worst kind of _extrovert_. He can talk for hours on end, but he talks only about his CS games or about what he's done at work in his EJB project. I find him actually _more_ boring than watching paint dry. At least paint shuts the fsck up. I wish he did too.
Do I want him introduced to my other friends? Not if I can help it.
Now let's go further down the chain of "friend of a friend". Half his friends are his clan members. As far as I can tell, to be in that clan, you have to meet two conditions: (1) shoot well, and (2) act like a total retard when in an actual game. Being able to type a good dose of trolling and sexual harrassment while camping on a rooftop seems to be _the_ way to achieving status and recognition in that clan. (Same as in about 90% of the FPS clans, I guess.)
Do I want some social network to start pointing those guys to start pestering me? Worse yet, do I want them to end up pestering my other friends, on account of "but he's a friend of a friend of Moraelin"? Bet your donkey I don't want that.
And if we go further down the chain, we're talking perfect strangers. (In a way, worse than total strangers, considering the credentials of two links down that chain.) Exactly why would I want to pay some "social network" to point them at me? Seems to me like I could just drop into an IRC channel and meet more perfect strangers for free. And at least those on IRC won't come recommended by total retards.
Better yet, those on IRC will already come filtered by the channel's topic. E.g., if I'm in a strategy gaming channel, it's more or less safe to assume that we'll all share some interest in that kind of games. E.g., if I go into a channel for cat owners, it's safe to assume that we all share some interest in cats. Etc.
That's already a gazillion times more meaningful as a filter than "he's a friend of a total stranger who's a friend of a total stranger who's a friend of someone you know." The IRC kind of filter means we'll likely have some common topic, the "friend of a friend" filter means exactly nothing.
Sure, it's fashionable to blame those Ukrainians who do better work for less money, anyway.
But in the end, a DDoS attack couldn't care less what software is on your machine. You just have gazillions of packets per second coming your way. Your firewall probably stops them, yes. That software made in Ukraine probably doesn't even see a single one of those packets. Your outgoing pipe may well be 100% free and not answering to those pings.
But your incoming pipe is still stuffed. Your site _could_ send heaps of pages back, but the client's _requests_ are competing for that stuffed inbound pipe. Maybe one of them gets through every minute. Most don't. Your site is out of commission anyway.
So how's software written by domestic programmers going to help you against that?
Now to be mean: you just proved that you have no clue about what you're talking about. Just another bigotted clueless redneck spewing crap like "thugocratic society." Maybe _that_'s why those companies prefer to outsource to skilled Ukraineans or Indians. Beats paying some local bigotted retard who thinks he doesn't really need any skills to earn 150k a year. Unlike you, those "thugocrats" actually know their job.
Knowing irc on the whole, any broad search across all channels would only return noise anyway. I can just see it:
Search: "+Ximian +gnome"
Top result:
"Ximian: ne1 no how 2 do a garden gnome in The Sims?"
"*** HornyGurl is now known as Gnome"
"Gnome: yeah, do me."
"Ximian: asl?"
Search: "Linux shell back door"
Top result:
"LaraCroft shoves her big strap-on up Tux the Linux penguin's back door."
"Shell: ROFLMAO!!!"
(Continues in descriptive detail over 3 pages.)
One of the most powerful weapons that the Eastern European regimes had against their citizens was the illusion that the state might know what you're saying. Everything you said _might_ have ended up in a nice little dossier somewhere, and come up to bite you in the ass later. Like at some point you _might_ have screwed up your promotion chances because you once said that the Party shouldn't control the industry. So most people preferred to just avoid politically sensitive issues, than have that stuff show up in their file.
Now most people did realize that the low tech communist secret police just didn't have the resources to watch everyone all the time. But even that small chance of being actually watched was enough to keep most of them silent and in line.
Now let's think of this high tech Google version. Everything you've ever posted, everything you've ever said on IRC, and everything you thought you were saying in private on AIM _will_ go on record and available for the next century. Unlike the low tech communist version, this time you can be 100% sure it goes on record.
I don't like this idea. I just don't like it. Whether it's intentional or not, it's nothing short of being the Big Bully who keeps records on everyone. A _lot_ of people will prefer not to say anything controversial on the net (even as little as "my boss is a retard), rather than be associated with that statement for ever.
Actually, while IRC rooms might be borderline, what they say in the article about making AIM conversations searchable is not. The AIM conversations were one-to-one talks, and letting everyone look through them is extremely bad taste.
Even if it wasn't any "cybersex" or anything illegal involved, there might be little secrets that those people never wanted made public. E.g., even something as benign as that you once called in sick to stay home and play the newly released Diablo 2, you probably don't want plastered all over the web. You don't want your boss, or worse yet the HR droid interviewing you for your next job, to start reading that.
It's like I'm walking through the park talking to somone. I'm aware that someone might overhear bits of it, and that's OK. But if you start actually following me around to hear it all, that's already at best lack of manners. And if you then go and post all my conversations on the web, in an easily searchable format, that _is_ an invasion of privacy.
At any rate, such corporate stunts are starting to annoy me. Even if there wasn't a guarantee of privacy on the IRC or AIM, it's still _extremely_ bad taste to publish other people's private conversations.
And for what? For a cheap corporate publicity stunt. I doubt that the signal to noise ratio is worth it for anyone except perverts looking to snoop into erotic talk. If you actually search for actually useful information, good luck wading through all that "a/s/l?" and "r u a girl?" talk.
Well, don't laugh, but _the_ game which got me sold on a graphics card feature, was... The Sims. Not even really 3D, but it did have the option to turn (edge) anti-aliasing on and off. All that hype from 3dfx fans and counter-hype from nVidia fans was good and nice, but seeing first hand that 800x600 anti-aliased looked _much_ better than 1024x768 aliased, was just the kind of definitive first-hand proof that I needed. Next thing I was buying a Voodoo 5, and haven't played a 3d game without anti-aliasing on ever since.
Hmm... Unreal was already mentioned, and a beautiful game it was indeed.
But older "whoa, it's beautiful" moments would include stuff like Might and Magic 3. Those pre-rendered marble walls with reflection effects, now that looked great. In 320x200 with a whole 256 colours too. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, it was basically a turn based RPG, somewhat like the Eye of the Beholder series.)
Or does anyone remember Dark Seed? It was the first adventure game I've played which ran in 640x480, instead of 320x200. Whoa. I thought it looked great.
But just for the record... you know what? The games I remember fondly typically aren't the ones with the flashiest graphics, though. It's the ones who were fun to play, and/or brought some innovation to the table. Often they were fun in _spite_ of the graphics, not because of them.
The problem you still can't avoid is: everything's relative.
Movies and books have often just one "super-hero", or at most a very small number, often with different "specializations". (E.g., in the Discworld books, Cohen's expertise doesn't overlap with Granny's, and Rincewind specialty is IMHO basically having blind luck, so again it doesn't overlap with either.)
What makes them such great heroes is precisely the comparison with everyone else. If everyone was as good at everything as Superman is, he'd be nothing special. If everyone could climb walls and shoot webs, Spider Man would be just another average guy.
I.e., it's easy to say "just make everyone a jedi" or "just let everyone be like Neo", but at that point you just ruined the comparison I was mentioning. At that point, jedis or Neo clones are the new Joe Average in that universe.
I.e., there's no way to translate "you're one of the 4 jedis alive" into "oh, we have 100,000 players, and every single one of them runs around with light sabers". Nor is it easy to translate "you're the chosen one" into "oh, we have 100,000 players and they all dodge bullets and do funky kung-fu moves."
Actually, here's my reasons why I don't think an iPod is worth my money. Just off the top of my head, no trying hard:
1. The price. Either way I want to look at it, I'd feel just stupid to pay that kind of money on a glorified Walkman. I do have the money, but I also have better stuff to spend it on. Or, hey, leaving it in the bank to bring interest isn't that bad a choice, either, you know.
2. I don't give a flying fsck about iTunes, or any other online music store based on DRM. If I buy an album, I like to actually own it, not to be tied to a single proprietary DRM-ed platform. I don't care if it's Apple's or Microsoft's proprietary DRM'ed solution. I just don't want it. So I'll stick to buying those funny plastic discs.
(And no, solutions like "convert it back to WAV (e.g., by burning it on CDR) and then rip it back to MP3" don't even start to cut it. If I wanted it to sound like crap, I'd record it off radio for free.)
3. I don't really need a hard drive in it. The ability to pack tens of gigabytes on it sounds nifty, until you realize that there's no way in heck to have enough time in a day to listen to all that. Yeah, there is some convenience factor in having it all in there, but is it worth the price premium for that?
4. The whole "but CD-based players skip" point is completely bogus, unless you use one while working a jackhammer or skipping rope. CD based players too have a very large memory buffer in them. Mine never skipped on the way to work, nor on the bus, and even less so while just sitting at the computer. And if (ad absurdum) it skipped once a day, it still wouldn't be reason enough to pay hundreds of bucks on a solution to that.
5. _If_ skipping did bother me, I'd get a solid state device instead. Yes, they don't have tens of gigabytes capacity, but see point 3.
Well, you also have to remember that a lot of people have no clue that a world even exists outside their borders, or what that world is like. And when they have some vague notion, it's what Hollywood spoon-fed them.
What I'm saying is: probably 90% of the people outside Nigeria or its borders, don't even have a clue where it is on the map. Some 80% probably not even on which continent.
(Gratuitious troll: make that more like 99% among the kind of rednecks who've been raised to think, "we're Americans, we don't have to give a fsck about the rest of the world. All them euro-trash and arabiacs are all the same anyway. Just a bunch of tribal heathens running around some totem pole. Some of them can't even speak English like me an' you, Billy Joe Bob. Like grandpaw always said, bomb the lot of them and let God sort 'em." Mind you, I don't mean all americans. I mean just the few and the proud who just have to plaster their inculture and prejudice all over the Net.)
So what does this mean? Well, it means that your average spammer can't even think up a different country name. Nigeria already is in the category of "uh, some forn country, god knows where" to them and their intended low-IQ victims, so might as well stick to it. Coming up with another third world country name would imply, you know, opening a geography book and reading stuff. Horribly complicated stuff, really;)
Now I'm all for reading anthropology explanations. I'm not anthropologist, but I like reading anthropology books, for example.
However, regardless of how you wish to explain it, in the end advertising today still boils down to "a bunch of greedy f**ks are all for annoying the hell out of everyone, if it makes them a buck."
And now those people who had to put up with enduring pop-ups, pop-unders, flash or applet ads that use 100% of the CPU power and make the machine crawl, fake UI ads, etc, is basically fighting back. Basically Joe Average says, "f**k you, I don't want to become a computer expert, I just want never to see a fake windows error message ever again."
If we're talking anthropology, you may notice how most societies, including the most primitive tribes, do have laws or rules or customs to enable everyone to live with everyone else with a minimum of effort. No society has ever said yet, "you have to be an expert in agriculture _and_ hunting _and_ warfare _and_ building _and_ everything else. If you fail to be an expert in any given field, and someone scammed you, more power to them."
Basically claiming that "users are stupid", and that computer education should solve this is not only a stupid solution, it's an incredibly arrogant and egotistical solution. CS is merely one expertise field, among many others. Saying that a marketing expert or a skilled artist or a good lawyer are stupid if they aren't also computer experts, is nothing less than insulting their own profession and the years they've put into learning that profession.
So IMHO there _has_ to be a better way than just requiring that everyone get a college degree in CS. Whether that better way is technology or simply making deceptive or annoying marketing a hanging offense, that's another discussion.
And here's another interesting thought, if we talk anthropology: A long long time ago, long before computers or even electronics, merchants were discovering that quality and honesty actually pay. Those merchants were betting their business on their reputation. And it paid to have a good reputation.
However, in the days of the Internet all that went right out the window. Now every single crook, scammer or annoying retard wants to pop fake UI screens at you, install spyware or diallers on your machine, and whatnot. The bigger the scam the better.
Or is it more like it's the Apple users who are used to this kind of treatment. Obviously they thrive on it, or they'd have ditched Apple a long time ago.
You only have one program, or sometimes none, for each task you might actually need, and even that one is often a half-arsed Apple implementation. If none is available, you're supposed to believe that, hey, the Mac has a good graphics editor. (Which the PC has too.) So go edit graphics instead of whatever unrelated thing it was that you wanted to do.
I suppose once you catter to people who are confused by more than one mouse button, or by stuff like "each program has its own menu bar", there's no point in torturing their mental skills by making them (*gasp*) choose between programs.
You're also supposed to believe that any crap that Apple sells is pure gold. Such as paying big bucks for 100 MB of storage on.Mac. Sorry, an old 100 MB Zip drive _and_ a whole pack of 100 MB disks costs less. Or you could just learn to burn a CD or DVD.
Oh wait, I forget that we're talking about people who can't right click. Sorry, folks. I forgot that dragging stuff into a CD burner program and clicking on the "Burn" button is too complicated. Go on.
You also get maybe one game per year. Two if it was a particularly good year. None of that "Microsoft fanboy" mental torture of going into a shop with a whole aisle per genre of Windows games, and wondering which of all those to buy. On a Mac, you're lucky if your favourite genre got a game in the last decade, so you know which one to buy. (No, not all of us play Warcraft and FPS only.)
And you're used to Apple pulling stunts as to which hardware works and which doesn't any more. (See all those people with external drives who lost all their data in the Panther upgrade. Sorry, no worm has done anything of that scale to anyone I know, in the Windows world. "Just works" my ass.)
So, yeah, I'd say it's a brilliant move by Apple. Get people used to the idea that Apple decides which software and hardware they're allowed to use. Once you get them off that nasty addiction on using their brains, they might even go and switch to Macs.
SysKoll, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Microsoft and everyone else shouldn't have higher security standards. Yes, they should.
However, in your bridge analogy, it's not some drunkard accidentally stumbling upon the bridge and causing it to fall down. (I don't think anyone accidentally caused an RPC exploit packet storm, e.g., because their cat walked on the keyboard.)
It's vandals who come there with the explicit intention of collapsing the bridge at all cost. In fact, with the intention of collapsing as many bridges as they possibly can. If they can't collapse it with a wet noodle, they'll try with TNT. (IRL, for example, a DDoS attack which puts a site out of commission, regardless of how well it was patched. Or damaging a company's reputation with forged "From:" lines in spam. Or whatever.)
So what I'm saying is: IRL these vandals would get thrown behind bars, not considered "k3wl hax0rz" or "security experts". And noone would start proclaiming that "collapsing bridges == good". Its about time the same happened in cyberspace.
This doesn't preclude also investigating the bridge builder. (Or back to the real world: Microsoft.) Nor viceversa. It's not an "exclusive or" situation. One can do both.
I'll appreciate someone trying to crack _my_ code, and in fact at the previous workplace we actually had someone trying to do just that.
System admins are a different issue. I'm sure many of you appreciate the job security, but I'm not sure that your _employer_ appreciates having to spend the extra money. All this worm frenzy _is_ costing the economy real money. Including the money to hire a good helping of extra network admins.
I do not, however, appreciate someone unilaterally deciding for millions of people that everyone must dedicate time and money into securing their systems. If you really think that putting the millions of average Tom, Dick and Harry through all this nightmare is just a small price to pay in the anti-Microsoft crusade, then you have a reality check problem.
The thing is, from the point of view of how the rest of the world works, this is the most absurd and idiotic system possible. In the rest of the world model, Tom, Dick and Harry already _know_ that the lock on their front door _can_ be picked. They _know_ that if someone really wanted to steal their car, that's very much possible too. Etc.
But they also know that if someone actually does, the law will sooner or later catch the thief and throw them into jail. And they know that if someone broke at night into the company and had a look at the paper based financial records, they wouldn't have "but I just wanted to help them secure their system" as an excuse.
The real world does not work by the idea that "lock vendors must produce a 100% non-lockpickable lock". It works more by the idea that the lock is a token. It helps if it can keep away the non-determined nosy neighbour or their cat, or maybe a drunk teenager, but it is _not_ supposed to be a 100% secure anti-theft device. It's main value is as a marker which says, "if we catch you beyond this line, we'll throw your criminal ass into jail." That's their real value, and that's the real deterrent.
Just in case you were wondering why regular people can't comprehend the idea of needing to check the Microsoft update page every few minutes, and configuring sophisticated firewalls: it's because their normal lives happen in this completely other security model. The model where your main defense is the law, not having to have a 100% unbreakable titanium bunker door and a 100% non-pickable lock.
So when they go on the Internet, they assume the same implied protection and deterrent. Not that they enter a "Wild West" kind of world, where if someone can lockpick your door and shoot your dog, then it's fair game. And hey, now that someone's so k3wl and l33t, because they had downloaded a "lockpick door and shoot dog" script.
And maybe it's about damn time that it actually started to work like in the real world.
Causing millions of people millions of hours worth of unneeded trouble, is _not_ some cool way of promoting security. It's just the IT version of vandals throwing stones through home windows. Only now they can throw millions of stones per second. (See the packet storms caused by RPC worms.)
And maybe it's about damn time someone figured out a way of putting those vandals behind bars. Just so the rest of the world can spend their time and money in a better way than constantly patching, and constantly upgrading firewalls.
- throwing stones through people's windows is good. It encourages them to buy bullet-proof glasses before a real thief breaks through that window.
- lockpicking into someone's house and spray-painting their walls is good. It encourages them to buy better locks, giving a real thief less opportunity to steal stuff.
- poisoning the neighbour's dog is good. It encourages him to get a dog which won't wag its tail when a (potential) thief throws him a piece of meat.
- keying random people's cars is good. It encourages them to park those cars in proper park houses, where presumably a real thief would have a harder time getting away with their car.
And so on, and so forth. I'm sure you get the idea by now.
Basically, no, there is no proper excuse for vandalism. Neither in the proper world, nor in the IT world. And just as any judge would probably just have a laugh if someone pulled the retarded excuse "but the lock wasn't 100% secure, so it's not my fault" in a break-and-enter trial, the same should apply to breaking-and-entering someone's computer.
And if you do go around keying cars or flooding the net with RPC exploit packets, no matter how well intentioned you are, I do hope they throw you in a nice jail cell, with two convicted anal rapists as cell-mates. Yes, that same heartfelt wish goes to whoever thought that an RPC patching worm is a good idea.
It won't fix Windows security, that's for sure, and noone claims that it will.
On the other hand, I think it's about damn time all those retarded script kids started paying the price.
If someone broke into my house, I'd want to see them thrown behind bars. It doesn't matter if my locks were not 100% secure, it doesn't matter if my house door wasn't built to withstand a nuke, and it doesn't matter even if my house wasn't even locked at all. You just have no business breaking into it. Plain and simple.
I'd like to see the same idea applied to computers. And if Microsoft wants to offer some money to get the ball rolling, hey, I'm all for it.
Think of how the term "hacker" was corrupted in the first place.
What makes you think the same won't happen with the logo. I can just see the same steps happening:
1. A couple of script kiddies, who don't even understand what those downloaded rootkits do, start placing the logo on defaced websites and such. Or placing it all over some warez sites, in between porn popups and l33t text.
2. A few retarded and clueless journalists clamp on the "hacking is evil, and this is the logo of these evil people" idea. You know, writing an article about a _real_ hacker won't rake in the readers. It's just a guy working long shifts to make some complicated program. Not many people want to read about that. Whereas doom and gloom journalism about these evil 'hackers', who'll bring our cyber-civilization to its knees, those sell.
3. Your average PHB clamps onto the journalists' definition. It's easier him to understand stuff like "wow, these guys are motivated by evil goals" than "whoa, someone actually likes computers and spends his/her free time learning and experimenting".
So anyway, think about it this way. Would you tell a random client nowadays that you're a hacker, or that you sympathize with hackers? Want to be that they'll instantly understand "cyber-terrorist" by that? You can try to educate them all you want, they'll just fall back to the definition that the media feeds them.
Now take the logo. Do you have any doubt that in a couple of years wearing that logo on a t-shirt will have the same effect? And what do you think will happen after the company loses a few contracts because the client saw you wearing that evil symbol? I can just see it banned at work.
Well, the point is really the: "So for those who have been waiting to ditch MS Windows because of these two apps, now is your chance." (Right the front page.)
Basically I doubt that _that_ many people were just dying to switch, and those two apps were _all_ that was holding them back. I doubt that that many people were running Dreamweaver MX at home to start with. Or that those who were, now will suddenly miss no other Windows app, and are ready to go Linux full time. That's all.
Yes, wisely noted. For the common user, computers are still too much stress. They crash too often, they apparently become slower every month (or rather: the applications require more and more resources to run anywhere near acceptably), they're an endless source of unneeded trouble (e.g., spam and worms), they require entirely too much configuration, they require entirely too much reading dialog boxex (hence the clicking without reading, which installs that spyware), 90% of the programs he buys (e.g., PC games) are a sad excuse for a buggy beta, etc.
Yep, you're perfectly right. For the average user, today's state of computing is still a nightmare. And a lot of them do hate their computer, OS, whatever.
And I never claimed otherwise.
But I still maintain that said average user isn't anywhere near the "Windows is bad, Linux is good" state of mind, as you seem to assume. He still doesn't really care exactly what OS is on that computer, he just cares about running his apps with a minimum of fuss.
He's also not half as in an experimenting state of mind as you seem to assume. In fact, IMHO you seem to be mis-interpreting the phenomenon entirely.
A. Would he install a small app which claims to efortlessly save him some trouble (e.g., remember his passwords)? Damn right.
B. Would he go through the effort to install a whole new OS and learn a whole new set of apps? Not in your dreams.
What's the difference between the two? The difference is that A promises to let him use the same apps with a lot less hassle, while B promises to be more hassle.
The difference is that option A will still let him hang around the exact same Java chatrooms or ActiveX game sites, view the exact same web pages as before, use the exact same text editor that he hated learning to use in the first place, etc.
Option A promises to be a very small and very well defined change, that he thinks he understands. Usually one that requires learning no new skills, or very little in the way of new skills. Basically:
A. "Click here and we'll automatically store your passwords for you" is a small enough change to be pallatable, and it's conceptually easy to understand.
B. "Learn a whole new OS, a whole new browser and a whole new set of office apps" is not. It's already beyond the threshold where "change" means "trauma".
Actually, if I had any mod points left, I'd mod him up.
Why? Because sometimes it's necessary that someone comes and rains on one's parade, just to remind one that reality is that-a-way. Otherwise, if all posts are along the lines of "woohoo, now we emulate Mini-Notepad-Lite v0.01, so Linux is ready for the desktop", some people might actually start believing it.
The reality, however, is more complex than that.
For the vast majority of people, an OS is just a funky loader for the applications they need. The _only_ reason to have an OS at all, or to have a computer at all, is to run those apps. That's all.
Real users (including corporate users) are really never Windows fans or Linux fans. They just have needs along the lines of "but I need a spreadsheet which can run all those macros and stylesheets we already have". (Something where, incidentally, OpenOffice fails miserably.) Or "but I need something which still runs all those ActiveX and Flash games on the MSN site." Or whatever.
Having Windows or Linux or OS/2 or even SCO Unix on their machine is _not_ their goal. Being able to keep hanging around with their buddies in EverQuest or with their ActiveX Backgammon buddies on Microsoft's site, on the other hand, might just be.
Normal users also don't like to learn new stuff or experiment. "Change" almost means "trauma" for the normal user. You have to give them a damn good reason to go through it. "You sorta can run some of your old apps" isn't even starting to cut it. They can run their apps without switching, too. Now if you gave them a killer app that they _can't_ run without switching, _that_ might count.
The normal user sees no thrill in experimenting. They don't want to try a car with the pedals in completely different position every week, and sometimes with a joystick or gamepad instead of a steering wheel. Same here. Ideally they'll want to learn once where the buttons are, and then find them in the exact same position in every single app, from now until doomsday.
I.e., again, you have to give them a damn good reason to switch to another OS.
Incidentally, it's another reason why Linux is still utterly unfit for Joe Average's desktop. Each app coming with a different set of widgets, and its own completely original interface, is _not_ what Joe Average wants. You can talk about the greatness of the Bazaar model and the advantages of free experimenting with new ideas all you want, for normal users all that's just unneeded stress. But that's a whole other topic.
Incidentally, the same applies to the browser flame wars. Same as Joe Average doesn't really care about the OS, only about the apps, he also doesn't care about the browser. He cares about the web sites. The browser is just a window to see the web through. It's just a tool, like his TV. And just like his TV, he'll not switch to another one, as long as the old one works reasonably well. But that's again another topic.
Basically all I'm saying is that the Real World (TM) works by completely other rules than the code-centric "woohoo, look at what cool gimmicks we've coded" view that's rampant on Slashdot. And sometimes someone has to come and rain on your parade. Call it trolling if you will. Personally I call it a "reality check."
Of course, that's not to say that I don't admire the work of the Wine coders. Damn impressive achievement, from a coder point of view. But also far from the point where it'll get Joe Average to switch. That's all I'm saying.
I'm not perceiving the sound as a threat, I'm perceiving it as:
1. First and foremost: just that. Noise. It's a simple signal-to-noise-ratio problem. Too much noise drowns the useful signal.
If I try watching a DVD together with someone (as opposed to alone, using headphones), I have to crank the volume _way_ up to just be able to understand what they're saying in the movie.
If I'm talking to the phone, I often find myself walking over to the kitchen, to get away from the PC which indeed sounds "like F15s during take-of". It wasn't even a conscious decision. I just suddenly started noticing "why am I always talking on the phone in the kitchen?"
And when gaming or listening to music, I have to use headphones _and_ crank the volume up just to keep the sound from being drowned in white noise. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that CD quality music was supposed to be mixed with the noise of a jet engine.
2. As added inconvenience. Having to wear headphones can get old, annoying or uncomfortable, at times. Much as I'd probably use them anyway to avoid waking up the neighbours at midnight, it would be nice to be able to do without them at other times.
3. As stress. No, not on the same level as, say, death of a relative or having to find a new job. But nevertheless, I'd feel more relaxed in a less noisy environment.
You seem to mis-understand what the whole "terrorism" is all about. Far as I know, those people are not just a bunch of Beavis and Butthead clones, who just like to see stuff explode.
They're nutcases, yes. Definitely. Pathological nutcases, even. But they still need to be motivated by something.
Before going any further, please remember: I'm _not_ advocating terrorism. Just trying to understand how a sick mind works.
They picture themselves as freedom fighters. They picture themselves as fighting against some supreme evil. An evil that, in their sick mind, needs to be stopped at all cost.
Think about it: you don't risk your life just because you like the abstract idea of "fear". You don't fly a plane into a building, killing yourself in the resulting flames, just because you dislike modern society.
I.e., these nutcases have to _believe_ in something. And I mean _really_ _believe_.
They don't want to end modern society, they think they're doing the world some supreme service. One that warrants loss of one's own life.
Now think about Linux and some of it's zealots.
No, don't get me wrong. I know that the vast majority of Linux users and advocates are normal, balanced people. Leading normal, balanced lives.
But then there also are some rare nutcases who view it all as some Holy Battle against the Great Satan. (Microsoft or SCO, of course.) Who see their role in life as freeing the People from some Great Tyranny.
Heck just look at Sun's management, and you have the prime example of such frothing at the mouth. (Not pro-Linux, but frothing at the mouth against Microsoft anyway.)
And that way lies terrorism. Precisely the same psycho mentality of "at all cost, we must bring down the tyranny of the Great Satan" (in their sick mind, the USA) is what motivated those people to fly a plane into a building.
Now would a Linux psycho fly a plane into a building? Well, no. Or at least none has, yet. But they could do a lot of harm nevertheless, like DDOS attacks and spreading viruses. See for example the DDOS attack on SCO.
And stuff like that is a big PR damage to the whole Open Source community.
... Because the base config for a PE 1600sc is lower than the PE 1750 base config? If you configure both to the exact same config as the Sun, the PE 1750 is actually cheaper.
You know, I would expect someone on a troll^H^H^H^H crusade against "Slashdot idiots making invalid comparisons", you'd have at least the minimal mental skills to configure something on Dell's site and read the resulting price. No, really. It's easy.
But then, hey, maybe we've identified the ideal niche market for Sun: People who can't even figure out how to configure something on Dell's site. Hey, maybe Sun's gonna make a big profit, after all;)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is more like often the requirements are physically impossible, unless you want to believe that someone was stuck in a time loop and got 10 years of experience in 4.
E.g., 10 years experience with J2EE is plain impossible. Java itself hasn't been around for 10 years, and J2EE is much newer. E.g., 5 years of experience with Windows 2000 is plain nuts.
Now I'm all for hiring skilled and experienced programmers. (Makes a change from the "bah, it's all typing, so we'll hire the cheapest ex-janitor off the street" attitude.) But at some point you just have to realize that the guy posting the job is just clueless, and will probably just hire the biggest liar.
Others are just highly improbably. E.g., I can believe that someone is efficient in 2-3 computer languages, but people who are efficient and productive in 10 languages _and_ graphics/web design _and_ have marketing skills _and_ extensive business training in that branche, are almost non-existant. (And those extremely few who exist, won't work on a minimum wage.)
Yes, there are a ton of bulshitters claiming that they know everything, from programming to marketting to business analysis to web design to usability to racing formula 1 cars to archeology. But guess what? Typically they're just that: bullshitters. There are only so many hours in a day, and any skill you don't use often enough, you forget. Almost noone can stay in top shape and up to date in several non-related fields.
And it takes a particularly clueless PHB to hire such a bullshitter.
Not only that, but such ads just tell me "Hi, I'm incompetent at doing my job. I don't know how to manage and allocate resources, such as X programmers, Y web designers, Z marketers, etc. I want people who interchangeably fill all roles, so I don't have to bother with actually managing anything." And it's sad for the whole human species that such incompetents actually get management jobs.
And even sadder for the employer, because they'll typically hire interchangeable people all right. People who are equally (and utterly) incompetent across all those fields.
Well, even if you had flags, it still won't mean anything. In a parallel universe, I could actually think that the guy is the coolest person ever born. (E.g., because of his CS scores.) Or for whatever reason. Even the biggest lamers and grief players on MUDs and MMORPGs, actually have whole fan clubs of wannabe lammers and griefers, who think "wow, I wanna be just like Tricky when I grow up." (The name Tricky being just a random name pulled out of the hat basically. With apologies to anyone who had a char named like that.)
The whole "friend of a friend" is ultimately meaningless. You don't know _why_ someone likes that guy, nor whether your personalities match at all, nor whether you'd even have any common interests with any of those people. It's basically just a bunch of random strangers, no better than if you picked random names out of a hat.
Sure, it probably sounds great for an introvert to think "wow, I'm piggybacking on my pals' popularity, and I have a network of 400,000 friends of a friend of a friend". Only in practice, 99% of those couldn't care less if you died tomorrow. Most of them don't even know you exist. That's not friends, it's just a collection of strangers.
I.e., the whole thing is basically a scam. I could just as well tell you that you now have a 400,000 ton asteroid near Alpha Centauri, except you can't go there. It would do you just as much good.
Selecting people based on common interests and stuff might help more if you really want friends.
Would your friends' friends actually want to be pestered by a total stranger? Worse yet, by someone who (no offense) is too socially inept to make his own friends to start with?
E.g., let's start thinking from a real life example.
One guy who'd probably be on my list of "friends", by sheer virtue that he's family, is actually the worst kind of _extrovert_. He can talk for hours on end, but he talks only about his CS games or about what he's done at work in his EJB project. I find him actually _more_ boring than watching paint dry. At least paint shuts the fsck up. I wish he did too.
Do I want him introduced to my other friends? Not if I can help it.
Now let's go further down the chain of "friend of a friend". Half his friends are his clan members. As far as I can tell, to be in that clan, you have to meet two conditions: (1) shoot well, and (2) act like a total retard when in an actual game. Being able to type a good dose of trolling and sexual harrassment while camping on a rooftop seems to be _the_ way to achieving status and recognition in that clan. (Same as in about 90% of the FPS clans, I guess.)
Do I want some social network to start pointing those guys to start pestering me? Worse yet, do I want them to end up pestering my other friends, on account of "but he's a friend of a friend of Moraelin"? Bet your donkey I don't want that.
And if we go further down the chain, we're talking perfect strangers. (In a way, worse than total strangers, considering the credentials of two links down that chain.) Exactly why would I want to pay some "social network" to point them at me? Seems to me like I could just drop into an IRC channel and meet more perfect strangers for free. And at least those on IRC won't come recommended by total retards.
Better yet, those on IRC will already come filtered by the channel's topic. E.g., if I'm in a strategy gaming channel, it's more or less safe to assume that we'll all share some interest in that kind of games. E.g., if I go into a channel for cat owners, it's safe to assume that we all share some interest in cats. Etc.
That's already a gazillion times more meaningful as a filter than "he's a friend of a total stranger who's a friend of a total stranger who's a friend of someone you know." The IRC kind of filter means we'll likely have some common topic, the "friend of a friend" filter means exactly nothing.
Sure, it's fashionable to blame those Ukrainians who do better work for less money, anyway.
But in the end, a DDoS attack couldn't care less what software is on your machine. You just have gazillions of packets per second coming your way. Your firewall probably stops them, yes. That software made in Ukraine probably doesn't even see a single one of those packets. Your outgoing pipe may well be 100% free and not answering to those pings.
But your incoming pipe is still stuffed. Your site _could_ send heaps of pages back, but the client's _requests_ are competing for that stuffed inbound pipe. Maybe one of them gets through every minute. Most don't. Your site is out of commission anyway.
So how's software written by domestic programmers going to help you against that?
Now to be mean: you just proved that you have no clue about what you're talking about. Just another bigotted clueless redneck spewing crap like "thugocratic society." Maybe _that_'s why those companies prefer to outsource to skilled Ukraineans or Indians. Beats paying some local bigotted retard who thinks he doesn't really need any skills to earn 150k a year. Unlike you, those "thugocrats" actually know their job.
Knowing irc on the whole, any broad search across all channels would only return noise anyway. I can just see it: Search: "+Ximian +gnome" Top result: "Ximian: ne1 no how 2 do a garden gnome in The Sims?" "*** HornyGurl is now known as Gnome" "Gnome: yeah, do me." "Ximian: asl?" Search: "Linux shell back door" Top result: "LaraCroft shoves her big strap-on up Tux the Linux penguin's back door." "Shell: ROFLMAO!!!" (Continues in descriptive detail over 3 pages.)
One of the most powerful weapons that the Eastern European regimes had against their citizens was the illusion that the state might know what you're saying. Everything you said _might_ have ended up in a nice little dossier somewhere, and come up to bite you in the ass later. Like at some point you _might_ have screwed up your promotion chances because you once said that the Party shouldn't control the industry. So most people preferred to just avoid politically sensitive issues, than have that stuff show up in their file.
Now most people did realize that the low tech communist secret police just didn't have the resources to watch everyone all the time. But even that small chance of being actually watched was enough to keep most of them silent and in line.
Now let's think of this high tech Google version. Everything you've ever posted, everything you've ever said on IRC, and everything you thought you were saying in private on AIM _will_ go on record and available for the next century. Unlike the low tech communist version, this time you can be 100% sure it goes on record.
I don't like this idea. I just don't like it. Whether it's intentional or not, it's nothing short of being the Big Bully who keeps records on everyone. A _lot_ of people will prefer not to say anything controversial on the net (even as little as "my boss is a retard), rather than be associated with that statement for ever.
Actually, while IRC rooms might be borderline, what they say in the article about making AIM conversations searchable is not. The AIM conversations were one-to-one talks, and letting everyone look through them is extremely bad taste.
Even if it wasn't any "cybersex" or anything illegal involved, there might be little secrets that those people never wanted made public. E.g., even something as benign as that you once called in sick to stay home and play the newly released Diablo 2, you probably don't want plastered all over the web. You don't want your boss, or worse yet the HR droid interviewing you for your next job, to start reading that.
It's like I'm walking through the park talking to somone. I'm aware that someone might overhear bits of it, and that's OK. But if you start actually following me around to hear it all, that's already at best lack of manners. And if you then go and post all my conversations on the web, in an easily searchable format, that _is_ an invasion of privacy.
At any rate, such corporate stunts are starting to annoy me. Even if there wasn't a guarantee of privacy on the IRC or AIM, it's still _extremely_ bad taste to publish other people's private conversations.
And for what? For a cheap corporate publicity stunt. I doubt that the signal to noise ratio is worth it for anyone except perverts looking to snoop into erotic talk. If you actually search for actually useful information, good luck wading through all that "a/s/l?" and "r u a girl?" talk.
Well, don't laugh, but _the_ game which got me sold on a graphics card feature, was... The Sims. Not even really 3D, but it did have the option to turn (edge) anti-aliasing on and off. All that hype from 3dfx fans and counter-hype from nVidia fans was good and nice, but seeing first hand that 800x600 anti-aliased looked _much_ better than 1024x768 aliased, was just the kind of definitive first-hand proof that I needed. Next thing I was buying a Voodoo 5, and haven't played a 3d game without anti-aliasing on ever since.
Hmm... Unreal was already mentioned, and a beautiful game it was indeed.
But older "whoa, it's beautiful" moments would include stuff like Might and Magic 3. Those pre-rendered marble walls with reflection effects, now that looked great. In 320x200 with a whole 256 colours too. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, it was basically a turn based RPG, somewhat like the Eye of the Beholder series.)
Or does anyone remember Dark Seed? It was the first adventure game I've played which ran in 640x480, instead of 320x200. Whoa. I thought it looked great.
But just for the record... you know what? The games I remember fondly typically aren't the ones with the flashiest graphics, though. It's the ones who were fun to play, and/or brought some innovation to the table. Often they were fun in _spite_ of the graphics, not because of them.
The problem you still can't avoid is: everything's relative.
Movies and books have often just one "super-hero", or at most a very small number, often with different "specializations". (E.g., in the Discworld books, Cohen's expertise doesn't overlap with Granny's, and Rincewind specialty is IMHO basically having blind luck, so again it doesn't overlap with either.)
What makes them such great heroes is precisely the comparison with everyone else. If everyone was as good at everything as Superman is, he'd be nothing special. If everyone could climb walls and shoot webs, Spider Man would be just another average guy.
I.e., it's easy to say "just make everyone a jedi" or "just let everyone be like Neo", but at that point you just ruined the comparison I was mentioning. At that point, jedis or Neo clones are the new Joe Average in that universe.
I.e., there's no way to translate "you're one of the 4 jedis alive" into "oh, we have 100,000 players, and every single one of them runs around with light sabers". Nor is it easy to translate "you're the chosen one" into "oh, we have 100,000 players and they all dodge bullets and do funky kung-fu moves."
Actually, here's my reasons why I don't think an iPod is worth my money. Just off the top of my head, no trying hard:
1. The price. Either way I want to look at it, I'd feel just stupid to pay that kind of money on a glorified Walkman. I do have the money, but I also have better stuff to spend it on. Or, hey, leaving it in the bank to bring interest isn't that bad a choice, either, you know.
2. I don't give a flying fsck about iTunes, or any other online music store based on DRM. If I buy an album, I like to actually own it, not to be tied to a single proprietary DRM-ed platform. I don't care if it's Apple's or Microsoft's proprietary DRM'ed solution. I just don't want it. So I'll stick to buying those funny plastic discs.
(And no, solutions like "convert it back to WAV (e.g., by burning it on CDR) and then rip it back to MP3" don't even start to cut it. If I wanted it to sound like crap, I'd record it off radio for free.)
3. I don't really need a hard drive in it. The ability to pack tens of gigabytes on it sounds nifty, until you realize that there's no way in heck to have enough time in a day to listen to all that. Yeah, there is some convenience factor in having it all in there, but is it worth the price premium for that?
4. The whole "but CD-based players skip" point is completely bogus, unless you use one while working a jackhammer or skipping rope. CD based players too have a very large memory buffer in them. Mine never skipped on the way to work, nor on the bus, and even less so while just sitting at the computer. And if (ad absurdum) it skipped once a day, it still wouldn't be reason enough to pay hundreds of bucks on a solution to that.
5. _If_ skipping did bother me, I'd get a solid state device instead. Yes, they don't have tens of gigabytes capacity, but see point 3.
Well, you also have to remember that a lot of people have no clue that a world even exists outside their borders, or what that world is like. And when they have some vague notion, it's what Hollywood spoon-fed them.
;)
What I'm saying is: probably 90% of the people outside Nigeria or its borders, don't even have a clue where it is on the map. Some 80% probably not even on which continent.
(Gratuitious troll: make that more like 99% among the kind of rednecks who've been raised to think, "we're Americans, we don't have to give a fsck about the rest of the world. All them euro-trash and arabiacs are all the same anyway. Just a bunch of tribal heathens running around some totem pole. Some of them can't even speak English like me an' you, Billy Joe Bob. Like grandpaw always said, bomb the lot of them and let God sort 'em." Mind you, I don't mean all americans. I mean just the few and the proud who just have to plaster their inculture and prejudice all over the Net.)
So what does this mean? Well, it means that your average spammer can't even think up a different country name. Nigeria already is in the category of "uh, some forn country, god knows where" to them and their intended low-IQ victims, so might as well stick to it. Coming up with another third world country name would imply, you know, opening a geography book and reading stuff. Horribly complicated stuff, really
Now I'm all for reading anthropology explanations. I'm not anthropologist, but I like reading anthropology books, for example.
However, regardless of how you wish to explain it, in the end advertising today still boils down to "a bunch of greedy f**ks are all for annoying the hell out of everyone, if it makes them a buck."
And now those people who had to put up with enduring pop-ups, pop-unders, flash or applet ads that use 100% of the CPU power and make the machine crawl, fake UI ads, etc, is basically fighting back. Basically Joe Average says, "f**k you, I don't want to become a computer expert, I just want never to see a fake windows error message ever again."
If we're talking anthropology, you may notice how most societies, including the most primitive tribes, do have laws or rules or customs to enable everyone to live with everyone else with a minimum of effort. No society has ever said yet, "you have to be an expert in agriculture _and_ hunting _and_ warfare _and_ building _and_ everything else. If you fail to be an expert in any given field, and someone scammed you, more power to them."
Basically claiming that "users are stupid", and that computer education should solve this is not only a stupid solution, it's an incredibly arrogant and egotistical solution. CS is merely one expertise field, among many others. Saying that a marketing expert or a skilled artist or a good lawyer are stupid if they aren't also computer experts, is nothing less than insulting their own profession and the years they've put into learning that profession.
So IMHO there _has_ to be a better way than just requiring that everyone get a college degree in CS. Whether that better way is technology or simply making deceptive or annoying marketing a hanging offense, that's another discussion.
And here's another interesting thought, if we talk anthropology: A long long time ago, long before computers or even electronics, merchants were discovering that quality and honesty actually pay. Those merchants were betting their business on their reputation. And it paid to have a good reputation.
However, in the days of the Internet all that went right out the window. Now every single crook, scammer or annoying retard wants to pop fake UI screens at you, install spyware or diallers on your machine, and whatnot. The bigger the scam the better.
You only have one program, or sometimes none, for each task you might actually need, and even that one is often a half-arsed Apple implementation. If none is available, you're supposed to believe that, hey, the Mac has a good graphics editor. (Which the PC has too.) So go edit graphics instead of whatever unrelated thing it was that you wanted to do.
I suppose once you catter to people who are confused by more than one mouse button, or by stuff like "each program has its own menu bar", there's no point in torturing their mental skills by making them (*gasp*) choose between programs.
You're also supposed to believe that any crap that Apple sells is pure gold. Such as paying big bucks for 100 MB of storage on .Mac. Sorry, an old 100 MB Zip drive _and_ a whole pack of 100 MB disks costs less. Or you could just learn to burn a CD or DVD.
Oh wait, I forget that we're talking about people who can't right click. Sorry, folks. I forgot that dragging stuff into a CD burner program and clicking on the "Burn" button is too complicated. Go on.
You also get maybe one game per year. Two if it was a particularly good year. None of that "Microsoft fanboy" mental torture of going into a shop with a whole aisle per genre of Windows games, and wondering which of all those to buy. On a Mac, you're lucky if your favourite genre got a game in the last decade, so you know which one to buy. (No, not all of us play Warcraft and FPS only.)
And you're used to Apple pulling stunts as to which hardware works and which doesn't any more. (See all those people with external drives who lost all their data in the Panther upgrade. Sorry, no worm has done anything of that scale to anyone I know, in the Windows world. "Just works" my ass.)
So, yeah, I'd say it's a brilliant move by Apple. Get people used to the idea that Apple decides which software and hardware they're allowed to use. Once you get them off that nasty addiction on using their brains, they might even go and switch to Macs.
SysKoll, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Microsoft and everyone else shouldn't have higher security standards. Yes, they should.
However, in your bridge analogy, it's not some drunkard accidentally stumbling upon the bridge and causing it to fall down. (I don't think anyone accidentally caused an RPC exploit packet storm, e.g., because their cat walked on the keyboard.)
It's vandals who come there with the explicit intention of collapsing the bridge at all cost. In fact, with the intention of collapsing as many bridges as they possibly can. If they can't collapse it with a wet noodle, they'll try with TNT. (IRL, for example, a DDoS attack which puts a site out of commission, regardless of how well it was patched. Or damaging a company's reputation with forged "From:" lines in spam. Or whatever.)
So what I'm saying is: IRL these vandals would get thrown behind bars, not considered "k3wl hax0rz" or "security experts". And noone would start proclaiming that "collapsing bridges == good". Its about time the same happened in cyberspace.
This doesn't preclude also investigating the bridge builder. (Or back to the real world: Microsoft.) Nor viceversa. It's not an "exclusive or" situation. One can do both.
I'll appreciate someone trying to crack _my_ code, and in fact at the previous workplace we actually had someone trying to do just that.
System admins are a different issue. I'm sure many of you appreciate the job security, but I'm not sure that your _employer_ appreciates having to spend the extra money. All this worm frenzy _is_ costing the economy real money. Including the money to hire a good helping of extra network admins.
I do not, however, appreciate someone unilaterally deciding for millions of people that everyone must dedicate time and money into securing their systems. If you really think that putting the millions of average Tom, Dick and Harry through all this nightmare is just a small price to pay in the anti-Microsoft crusade, then you have a reality check problem.
The thing is, from the point of view of how the rest of the world works, this is the most absurd and idiotic system possible. In the rest of the world model, Tom, Dick and Harry already _know_ that the lock on their front door _can_ be picked. They _know_ that if someone really wanted to steal their car, that's very much possible too. Etc.
But they also know that if someone actually does, the law will sooner or later catch the thief and throw them into jail. And they know that if someone broke at night into the company and had a look at the paper based financial records, they wouldn't have "but I just wanted to help them secure their system" as an excuse.
The real world does not work by the idea that "lock vendors must produce a 100% non-lockpickable lock". It works more by the idea that the lock is a token. It helps if it can keep away the non-determined nosy neighbour or their cat, or maybe a drunk teenager, but it is _not_ supposed to be a 100% secure anti-theft device. It's main value is as a marker which says, "if we catch you beyond this line, we'll throw your criminal ass into jail." That's their real value, and that's the real deterrent.
Just in case you were wondering why regular people can't comprehend the idea of needing to check the Microsoft update page every few minutes, and configuring sophisticated firewalls: it's because their normal lives happen in this completely other security model. The model where your main defense is the law, not having to have a 100% unbreakable titanium bunker door and a 100% non-pickable lock.
So when they go on the Internet, they assume the same implied protection and deterrent. Not that they enter a "Wild West" kind of world, where if someone can lockpick your door and shoot your dog, then it's fair game. And hey, now that someone's so k3wl and l33t, because they had downloaded a "lockpick door and shoot dog" script.
And maybe it's about damn time that it actually started to work like in the real world.
Causing millions of people millions of hours worth of unneeded trouble, is _not_ some cool way of promoting security. It's just the IT version of vandals throwing stones through home windows. Only now they can throw millions of stones per second. (See the packet storms caused by RPC worms.)
And maybe it's about damn time someone figured out a way of putting those vandals behind bars. Just so the rest of the world can spend their time and money in a better way than constantly patching, and constantly upgrading firewalls.
This idea is about as retarded as saying that:
- throwing stones through people's windows is good. It encourages them to buy bullet-proof glasses before a real thief breaks through that window.
- lockpicking into someone's house and spray-painting their walls is good. It encourages them to buy better locks, giving a real thief less opportunity to steal stuff.
- poisoning the neighbour's dog is good. It encourages him to get a dog which won't wag its tail when a (potential) thief throws him a piece of meat.
- keying random people's cars is good. It encourages them to park those cars in proper park houses, where presumably a real thief would have a harder time getting away with their car.
And so on, and so forth. I'm sure you get the idea by now.
Basically, no, there is no proper excuse for vandalism. Neither in the proper world, nor in the IT world. And just as any judge would probably just have a laugh if someone pulled the retarded excuse "but the lock wasn't 100% secure, so it's not my fault" in a break-and-enter trial, the same should apply to breaking-and-entering someone's computer.
And if you do go around keying cars or flooding the net with RPC exploit packets, no matter how well intentioned you are, I do hope they throw you in a nice jail cell, with two convicted anal rapists as cell-mates. Yes, that same heartfelt wish goes to whoever thought that an RPC patching worm is a good idea.
It won't fix Windows security, that's for sure, and noone claims that it will. On the other hand, I think it's about damn time all those retarded script kids started paying the price. If someone broke into my house, I'd want to see them thrown behind bars. It doesn't matter if my locks were not 100% secure, it doesn't matter if my house door wasn't built to withstand a nuke, and it doesn't matter even if my house wasn't even locked at all. You just have no business breaking into it. Plain and simple. I'd like to see the same idea applied to computers. And if Microsoft wants to offer some money to get the ball rolling, hey, I'm all for it.
Think of how the term "hacker" was corrupted in the first place.
What makes you think the same won't happen with the logo. I can just see the same steps happening:
1. A couple of script kiddies, who don't even understand what those downloaded rootkits do, start placing the logo on defaced websites and such. Or placing it all over some warez sites, in between porn popups and l33t text.
2. A few retarded and clueless journalists clamp on the "hacking is evil, and this is the logo of these evil people" idea. You know, writing an article about a _real_ hacker won't rake in the readers. It's just a guy working long shifts to make some complicated program. Not many people want to read about that. Whereas doom and gloom journalism about these evil 'hackers', who'll bring our cyber-civilization to its knees, those sell.
3. Your average PHB clamps onto the journalists' definition. It's easier him to understand stuff like "wow, these guys are motivated by evil goals" than "whoa, someone actually likes computers and spends his/her free time learning and experimenting".
So anyway, think about it this way. Would you tell a random client nowadays that you're a hacker, or that you sympathize with hackers? Want to be that they'll instantly understand "cyber-terrorist" by that? You can try to educate them all you want, they'll just fall back to the definition that the media feeds them.
Now take the logo. Do you have any doubt that in a couple of years wearing that logo on a t-shirt will have the same effect? And what do you think will happen after the company loses a few contracts because the client saw you wearing that evil symbol? I can just see it banned at work.
Basically I doubt that _that_ many people were just dying to switch, and those two apps were _all_ that was holding them back. I doubt that that many people were running Dreamweaver MX at home to start with. Or that those who were, now will suddenly miss no other Windows app, and are ready to go Linux full time. That's all.
Still, I guess it's an improvement.
What makes you think I don't know about that?
Yes, wisely noted. For the common user, computers are still too much stress. They crash too often, they apparently become slower every month (or rather: the applications require more and more resources to run anywhere near acceptably), they're an endless source of unneeded trouble (e.g., spam and worms), they require entirely too much configuration, they require entirely too much reading dialog boxex (hence the clicking without reading, which installs that spyware), 90% of the programs he buys (e.g., PC games) are a sad excuse for a buggy beta, etc.
Yep, you're perfectly right. For the average user, today's state of computing is still a nightmare. And a lot of them do hate their computer, OS, whatever.
And I never claimed otherwise.
But I still maintain that said average user isn't anywhere near the "Windows is bad, Linux is good" state of mind, as you seem to assume. He still doesn't really care exactly what OS is on that computer, he just cares about running his apps with a minimum of fuss.
He's also not half as in an experimenting state of mind as you seem to assume. In fact, IMHO you seem to be mis-interpreting the phenomenon entirely.
A. Would he install a small app which claims to efortlessly save him some trouble (e.g., remember his passwords)? Damn right.
B. Would he go through the effort to install a whole new OS and learn a whole new set of apps? Not in your dreams.
What's the difference between the two? The difference is that A promises to let him use the same apps with a lot less hassle, while B promises to be more hassle.
The difference is that option A will still let him hang around the exact same Java chatrooms or ActiveX game sites, view the exact same web pages as before, use the exact same text editor that he hated learning to use in the first place, etc.
Option A promises to be a very small and very well defined change, that he thinks he understands. Usually one that requires learning no new skills, or very little in the way of new skills. Basically:
A. "Click here and we'll automatically store your passwords for you" is a small enough change to be pallatable, and it's conceptually easy to understand.
B. "Learn a whole new OS, a whole new browser and a whole new set of office apps" is not. It's already beyond the threshold where "change" means "trauma".
Actually, if I had any mod points left, I'd mod him up.
Why? Because sometimes it's necessary that someone comes and rains on one's parade, just to remind one that reality is that-a-way. Otherwise, if all posts are along the lines of "woohoo, now we emulate Mini-Notepad-Lite v0.01, so Linux is ready for the desktop", some people might actually start believing it.
The reality, however, is more complex than that.
For the vast majority of people, an OS is just a funky loader for the applications they need. The _only_ reason to have an OS at all, or to have a computer at all, is to run those apps. That's all.
Real users (including corporate users) are really never Windows fans or Linux fans. They just have needs along the lines of "but I need a spreadsheet which can run all those macros and stylesheets we already have". (Something where, incidentally, OpenOffice fails miserably.) Or "but I need something which still runs all those ActiveX and Flash games on the MSN site." Or whatever.
Having Windows or Linux or OS/2 or even SCO Unix on their machine is _not_ their goal. Being able to keep hanging around with their buddies in EverQuest or with their ActiveX Backgammon buddies on Microsoft's site, on the other hand, might just be.
Normal users also don't like to learn new stuff or experiment. "Change" almost means "trauma" for the normal user. You have to give them a damn good reason to go through it. "You sorta can run some of your old apps" isn't even starting to cut it. They can run their apps without switching, too. Now if you gave them a killer app that they _can't_ run without switching, _that_ might count.
The normal user sees no thrill in experimenting. They don't want to try a car with the pedals in completely different position every week, and sometimes with a joystick or gamepad instead of a steering wheel. Same here. Ideally they'll want to learn once where the buttons are, and then find them in the exact same position in every single app, from now until doomsday.
I.e., again, you have to give them a damn good reason to switch to another OS.
Incidentally, it's another reason why Linux is still utterly unfit for Joe Average's desktop. Each app coming with a different set of widgets, and its own completely original interface, is _not_ what Joe Average wants. You can talk about the greatness of the Bazaar model and the advantages of free experimenting with new ideas all you want, for normal users all that's just unneeded stress. But that's a whole other topic.
Incidentally, the same applies to the browser flame wars. Same as Joe Average doesn't really care about the OS, only about the apps, he also doesn't care about the browser. He cares about the web sites. The browser is just a window to see the web through. It's just a tool, like his TV. And just like his TV, he'll not switch to another one, as long as the old one works reasonably well. But that's again another topic.
Basically all I'm saying is that the Real World (TM) works by completely other rules than the code-centric "woohoo, look at what cool gimmicks we've coded" view that's rampant on Slashdot. And sometimes someone has to come and rain on your parade. Call it trolling if you will. Personally I call it a "reality check."
Of course, that's not to say that I don't admire the work of the Wine coders. Damn impressive achievement, from a coder point of view. But also far from the point where it'll get Joe Average to switch. That's all I'm saying.
I'm not perceiving the sound as a threat, I'm perceiving it as:
1. First and foremost: just that. Noise. It's a simple signal-to-noise-ratio problem. Too much noise drowns the useful signal.
If I try watching a DVD together with someone (as opposed to alone, using headphones), I have to crank the volume _way_ up to just be able to understand what they're saying in the movie.
If I'm talking to the phone, I often find myself walking over to the kitchen, to get away from the PC which indeed sounds "like F15s during take-of". It wasn't even a conscious decision. I just suddenly started noticing "why am I always talking on the phone in the kitchen?"
And when gaming or listening to music, I have to use headphones _and_ crank the volume up just to keep the sound from being drowned in white noise. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that CD quality music was supposed to be mixed with the noise of a jet engine.
2. As added inconvenience. Having to wear headphones can get old, annoying or uncomfortable, at times. Much as I'd probably use them anyway to avoid waking up the neighbours at midnight, it would be nice to be able to do without them at other times.
3. As stress. No, not on the same level as, say, death of a relative or having to find a new job. But nevertheless, I'd feel more relaxed in a less noisy environment.
You seem to mis-understand what the whole "terrorism" is all about. Far as I know, those people are not just a bunch of Beavis and Butthead clones, who just like to see stuff explode.
They're nutcases, yes. Definitely. Pathological nutcases, even. But they still need to be motivated by something.
Before going any further, please remember: I'm _not_ advocating terrorism. Just trying to understand how a sick mind works.
They picture themselves as freedom fighters. They picture themselves as fighting against some supreme evil. An evil that, in their sick mind, needs to be stopped at all cost.
Think about it: you don't risk your life just because you like the abstract idea of "fear". You don't fly a plane into a building, killing yourself in the resulting flames, just because you dislike modern society.
I.e., these nutcases have to _believe_ in something. And I mean _really_ _believe_.
They don't want to end modern society, they think they're doing the world some supreme service. One that warrants loss of one's own life.
Now think about Linux and some of it's zealots.
No, don't get me wrong. I know that the vast majority of Linux users and advocates are normal, balanced people. Leading normal, balanced lives.
But then there also are some rare nutcases who view it all as some Holy Battle against the Great Satan. (Microsoft or SCO, of course.) Who see their role in life as freeing the People from some Great Tyranny.
Heck just look at Sun's management, and you have the prime example of such frothing at the mouth. (Not pro-Linux, but frothing at the mouth against Microsoft anyway.)
And that way lies terrorism. Precisely the same psycho mentality of "at all cost, we must bring down the tyranny of the Great Satan" (in their sick mind, the USA) is what motivated those people to fly a plane into a building.
Now would a Linux psycho fly a plane into a building? Well, no. Or at least none has, yet. But they could do a lot of harm nevertheless, like DDOS attacks and spreading viruses. See for example the DDOS attack on SCO.
And stuff like that is a big PR damage to the whole Open Source community.
Well, I'm not really an Apple fan, but I'll have to aggree there. For whoever wants a RISC Unix box, the G5 is one damn fine choice.
... Because the base config for a PE 1600sc is lower than the PE 1750 base config? If you configure both to the exact same config as the Sun, the PE 1750 is actually cheaper.
;)
You know, I would expect someone on a troll^H^H^H^H crusade against "Slashdot idiots making invalid comparisons", you'd have at least the minimal mental skills to configure something on Dell's site and read the resulting price. No, really. It's easy.
But then, hey, maybe we've identified the ideal niche market for Sun: People who can't even figure out how to configure something on Dell's site. Hey, maybe Sun's gonna make a big profit, after all