I realise this is all very well for me to say, but I've always known that this was the case and acted accordingly. On a simple level, I've never said anything online that I wouldn't say to my mother or I wouldn't be prepared to stand behind in future. There is no such thing as anonymity on the 'net, never has been. That's the reason why I don't have alt's. There isn't anything to gain.
I do recognise however that most of the non-geek audience won't have thought of this, and may be bitten, but them's the breaks IMO. The expectation of anonymity is no excuse for acting like an idiot. That said my hormones had already raged. Though Dr Aleks Krotoski does say that in the future, people who do not have a complete record, warts and all, will not be taken seriously, because they are not fully three dimensional people.
Well said, it's the software that the issue, hardware is nothing without it.
The way I figure it, users are like mice, you have to have them otherwise, like the windmill cat, you have no job. Companies pay for infrastructure and we get to play with and make it sing, or at least hum:)
It's a good life, all things considered, computers have always been good to me.
OpenSolaris is Fedora Core to RHEL, It may not have made much of an inroad onto the desktop, but it'll do as a replacement for x86 on the server, I'm sure they'll move Crossbow and the ZFS updates into x86 eventually, but then it'll cost to 8% plus of the purchase price of the Sun hardware you have to run it on. OpenSolaris may not work well on retail hardware but it's OK on PC server hardware, and it's free, great for server appliances and the like, especially if you're a Solaris shop anyway.
There are products you can buy that are normally used in businesses, that allow you to do key stroke logging, remote snooping the screen, etc. If you're as paranoid as the business that use these tactics on their workers then I'm you can find them with the Google. I don't expect they will be cheap, and they will require a lot of setup, you'd also have to do this away from home for obvious reasons. But if you mistrust your kids that much already I'm sure you're prepared for that.
Of course as pointed out above they can be circumvented with the Google too, often by the simple expedient of going to a library, or a friends house. You could of course spy on them there to, by bugging their phone, though of course if you follow down this route you'll work out that locking in their room, and home schooling them under armed guard is the only rational choice. What you're going to do in a few years once they leave home and become adults, (so called) is a different matter.
You could of course just lock them in the basement.
For the most part most people on slashdot are not the target audience, and most people who will ever touch Windows 7 will get it the same way they got XP, etc. with a new machine. Given the current economic environment, I doubt very many "consumers" will be part with hard earned cash for a PC they don't need at present.
it will be interesting to see what the conversion stats are once we're beyond the initial release though.
I think if people are coming from an existing application they generally have expectations, provided they can do the same things in the same way they usually stay. If users have to change their workflow however, then the novelty wears of really fast. Which brings me to my second point, if user have support, then they'll stay longer, and wont mind doing stuff like tcpdumps, etc. provided somebody else is telling them what to type or tweak. If people know they can just ask somebody and get results in a day they usually stay. At least in my experience of familial & work tech support anyway.
Trying to have kids at the moment, funnily enough the first two things that occurred to me once I began to think about that was that I needed to get rid of the TV and windows. The way I figure it they both teach bad habits, and I'll be dammed if any kid of mine is going to grow up a windows user:)
But seriously, who the hell cares about about the native interface? The fact that it looks like it was designed in the 90's is because it was, like the rump of XP, it's "good enough" and compared to anything else they've ever put out it's fairly bullet proof, provided you don't try to get clever with the underlying hardware.
I don't know about you, but XP will be my last windows OS.
I've been a sysadmin for years too, and for those that love tech & the life it's still the only job worth doing IMO, or perhaps more to the point the only one I do for less/free. The job, and the challenges that come with it, is it's own reward.
Objection works just fine, you just install "nightly tester tools" and hit the "override compatibility" button. I'm running Objection 0.3.3 with Firefox 3.0.3 just fine.
Yup, I used to use it as the back-end for the postmaster account for an international agency, (we got a lot of SPAM) It rarely fell over, and it was subjected to a load of 250K messages or more per day. I used it to weed the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. So yes, it really is *that* stable.
The older I get the more I recognise this as truth.
For a while, as a younger man, I took the offended, "don't bug me" attitude to fillial tech support. These days however, wherever I wind up in the world, If I find myslelf at somebody's house, and they aske me a technical question on finding out what I do for a living, I "fix" thier computer for them. I show them how to use it, I have a pre-written text about what they should and shouldn't know, etc. I install firefox, thunderbird, AV, anti spyware, etc. Tweak the OS, takes me about 5 hours. Then I give them my email address and tell them to contact me if they ever need a hand.
So yeah, I'll take C, "computers" have been good to me, it's the least I can do by way of payback. Ignorance, and not MS, is the real enemy. Most people just want something that works, and that applies equally well to the free stuff as it does to the proprietary.
Indoors? Ocasionally, but only if the door is open. Mostly not.
Driving? Not bad, it understeers a lot, good in straight lines. Though that could just be me. There are races.
Hand to hand is fun. It's a quicker cleaner kill than with bullets, especially if you max out strength. You hit them they fly, useful for crowd control. They run away a lot when you're very hard. You can punch and kick, people, cars, trucks, etc. Punches do more damage over time. Not tried to pick up live people but you can pick up and throw dead ones. Nice rag doll physics. How far depends on how strong, you can throw cars too. I can lift 2 Tonnes at present and throw it about about 250 feet. You can rip car doors off, etc.
But like he said, jumping into a firefight and laying the smackdown on a group of thugs, never gets old, it's a lot like the matrix in that respect, It's a lot of fun just jumping from building to building, like virtual parcourt. It's got minimal plot, and it's fairly fast paced, but it's loads of fun. To the point where you find yourself thinking, "Superman doesn't use a gun..."
It's a blast, rent it, you wont be dissapointed.
Metacritic is fabulous, I bought ICO because of a "review" I read on metacritic. I say "review" as it was an odd one, more about what it felt like to play, the graphis/sound approach. I also tend to rate highly those reviews that clearly love the game. Reviews for Gal Civ 2, were a lot like that. Same thing with Freefall, even given it's obvious flaws.
But as a way to check out the general feel of a game, metacritic is great. The only print reviews I take seriously these days are in Edge and Games(tm) The rest of them are just Ad copy fodder for the most part, useful for indepth preview features, but useless for final reviews. Eurogamer is also great if you want really hillarious bad reviews. When they don't like a game they really "put the boot in" Thier review of driver3 for instance was an instant classic:)
You can also get a lot of mileage from the gamespot forums.
If you can, find a University/college IT dept, that needs people. At least in the UK, most colleges and UNI's employ current and ex students as they cant afford to pay as much as private industry. Becuase of this the jobs you get to do are many and varied, and it's not really that important if you screw up once or twice.
The advice about reading books and installing Linux on your PC will only get you so far. Becuase what you lack is experience of theings that can and do go wrong in a working network of machines. Especially relevant are the interoperability issues.
Certianly in Europe and the UK, what really counts is experience, of the "hands on & in" variety. Anyone can bulshit a certificate with a brain dump, you can go on course that will virtually guarantee you come out with a cert. But again, lab work is no substitute for a real problem on a real network.
If you want to do UNIX for a living, generalise, don't specialise. Be good at one commercial distribution of UNIX, (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.) and some form of Linux. RedHat Enterprise is used widely, so Fedora may be good, but any distro will do, Gentoo is also very good from the "build it yourself" aspect, especially if you do it from the level one tar ball and a boot floppy.
You will also need some experience of the major disk systems, such as Veritas, Disksuite or some other Journalled/logical disk variant. But beyond that what you need most if just experience. Universities and small non-profit organisations are very good places to learn, the pay is lousy, (I got a 60% pay rise when I moved to the private sector) but if you love the life, they are some of the best places in the world to experiment in a non-presurised environment.
Know also that wherever you go you'll need to retrain for the environment, this usually takes about 30 days.
I think what really pisses "honest people" off is the fact that they pay for it while "the scurvy pirate" gets it for free, usually without the protection systems, etc. that honest people have to suffer through. Often, at least with Software, this is incredibly annoying.
I cite in this "HalfLife 2" which I bought, and was unplayable for months, unless I used a crack, where other bugs then foiled me. and "Poser5" Which had a protection scheme, that caused the program to abort randomly, and occasionally shut down your whole PC.
In both cases, the protection was ultimately removed to solve the problems.
Then there is the Sony rootkit debacle.
While I can understand the content producers need to paint copyright infringment as "theft" and I even agree with the adverts, in that people would not steal the actual hardcopy of any given item. I think it's time to recognise that no matter what you preach, or how high you preach from, most ordinary people who commit copyright infringement, have absolutely no guilt about it whatsoever. It's the lack of guilt, and indeed the fact that would not even think to be ashamed of such "normal" acts, that will eventually cause the content producers to settle. They can sue all they want, the horse has already bolted. Closing the stable door after the fact does nothing but draw curious stares from onlookers.
Crap!
Appologies for the formatting, it's just one of those days.
senior-IETF-member-8
You think that a violation of an RFC by an SMTP client or server is good and sufficient reason to reject all mail from the system's domain.
programmer-3
With standards, the implementation cost is about zero, so the FUSSP will be practically universally deployed within months of being documented in an RFC.
knows-SMTP-4
You know that SMTP has no authentication and have never heard of SMTP-AUTH, SMTP-TLS, S/MIME, or PGP.
knows-SMTP-5
You know that the failure of SMTP servers to authenticate the SMTP clients of strangers is a major bug in SMTP instead of an expression of a primary design goal.
[Sigh]
http://rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html
FUSSP = "Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem"
senior-IETF-member-8
You think that a violation of an RFC by an SMTP client or server is good and sufficient reason to reject all mail from the system's domain.
programmer-3
With standards, the implementation cost is about zero, so the FUSSP will be practically universally deployed within months of being documented in an RFC.
knows-SMTP-4
You know that SMTP has no authentication and have never heard of SMTP-AUTH, SMTP-TLS, S/MIME, or PGP.
knows-SMTP-5
You know that the failure of SMTP servers to authenticate the SMTP clients of strangers is a major bug in SMTP instead of an expression of a primary design goal.
SMTP = Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. it looks like this for a reason. If you still think there is a silver bullet for SPAM, (other than one delivered between the eyes of anyone who's responsible for it) then you've never actually had to deal with SPAM on any level other than a personal mail account.
Sorry for being harsh, but I'm having a bad day with SPAM, and I'm not prepared to let that slide without comment.
Heck! Couldn't have said it better myself. I loved Halo on the Xbox, (though the PC version sucked a little) and I played through about 50% of Halo2 by all accounts then I got into something more interesting. I too never play online, I want to beat the computer/designer, not another person who may or may not be cheating. So yeah, if I get something capable of inspiring the same awe in me that playing through Halo single player did, then I'll be happy. Even if it doesn't have prettier graphics, and new guns.
As a rule of thumb you can put 20 runrays on a E450 server, (from memory a long time since I layed with a sun ray) the really cute thing is getting the smart card to work. yank the key from your sunray, move to the cubicle down the hall, plug your card in, and "Bingo!" your session, your way, even the apps you left open. V slick, documentation dept had them.
Yeah, I loved first ed. Shadowrun. Random scatter grenade tables, (when grenades still existed) and glorious oddities like a troll physical adept with a polearm that was lethal in melle. (average strike of around 12d6 at 2's to hit, against impact armour:) S2 may have made the game easier by making all the damage codes into a 2, but it wasn't nearly as much fun, or anywhere near as deadly:)
This from the game with the slogan "it's only a fleshwound":D
Slashdot Mirror
I realise this is all very well for me to say, but I've always known that this was the case and acted accordingly. On a simple level, I've never said anything online that I wouldn't say to my mother or I wouldn't be prepared to stand behind in future. There is no such thing as anonymity on the 'net, never has been. That's the reason why I don't have alt's. There isn't anything to gain.
I do recognise however that most of the non-geek audience won't have thought of this, and may be bitten, but them's the breaks IMO. The expectation of anonymity is no excuse for acting like an idiot. That said my hormones had already raged. Though Dr Aleks Krotoski does say that in the future, people who do not have a complete record, warts and all, will not be taken seriously, because they are not fully three dimensional people.
Well said, it's the software that the issue, hardware is nothing without it.
The way I figure it, users are like mice, you have to have them otherwise, like the windmill cat, you have no job. Companies pay for infrastructure and we get to play with and make it sing, or at least hum :)
It's a good life, all things considered, computers have always been good to me.
Au Contriare.
OpenSolaris is Fedora Core to RHEL, It may not have made much of an inroad onto the desktop, but it'll do as a replacement for x86 on the server, I'm sure they'll move Crossbow and the ZFS updates into x86 eventually, but then it'll cost to 8% plus of the purchase price of the Sun hardware you have to run it on. OpenSolaris may not work well on retail hardware but it's OK on PC server hardware, and it's free, great for server appliances and the like, especially if you're a Solaris shop anyway.
There are products you can buy that are normally used in businesses, that allow you to do key stroke logging, remote snooping the screen, etc. If you're as paranoid as the business that use these tactics on their workers then I'm you can find them with the Google. I don't expect they will be cheap, and they will require a lot of setup, you'd also have to do this away from home for obvious reasons. But if you mistrust your kids that much already I'm sure you're prepared for that.
This sort of thing sounds like it's right up your alley: http://www.softactivity.com/
Of course as pointed out above they can be circumvented with the Google too, often by the simple expedient of going to a library, or a friends house. You could of course spy on them there to, by bugging their phone, though of course if you follow down this route you'll work out that locking in their room, and home schooling them under armed guard is the only rational choice. What you're going to do in a few years once they leave home and become adults, (so called) is a different matter.
You could of course just lock them in the basement.
For the most part most people on slashdot are not the target audience, and most people who will ever touch Windows 7 will get it the same way they got XP, etc. with a new machine. Given the current economic environment, I doubt very many "consumers" will be part with hard earned cash for a PC they don't need at present.
it will be interesting to see what the conversion stats are once we're beyond the initial release though.
Actually I've never had a problem with Symantec AV, but then I've always used the corporate edition without all the consumer crud.
My first Sparc was an IPC, with a huge 20" monitor, fantastic. Good way to go I figure. Sorry for your loss, but thanks for sharing.
I think if people are coming from an existing application they generally have expectations, provided they can do the same things in the same way they usually stay. If users have to change their workflow however, then the novelty wears of really fast. Which brings me to my second point, if user have support, then they'll stay longer, and wont mind doing stuff like tcpdumps, etc. provided somebody else is telling them what to type or tweak. If people know they can just ask somebody and get results in a day they usually stay. At least in my experience of familial & work tech support anyway.
Trying to have kids at the moment, funnily enough the first two things that occurred to me once I began to think about that was that I needed to get rid of the TV and windows. The way I figure it they both teach bad habits, and I'll be dammed if any kid of mine is going to grow up a windows user :)
But seriously, who the hell cares about about the native interface? The fact that it looks like it was designed in the 90's is because it was, like the rump of XP, it's "good enough" and compared to anything else they've ever put out it's fairly bullet proof, provided you don't try to get clever with the underlying hardware.
I don't know about you, but XP will be my last windows OS.
I've been a sysadmin for years too, and for those that love tech & the life it's still the only job worth doing IMO, or perhaps more to the point the only one I do for less/free. The job, and the challenges that come with it, is it's own reward.
They're only doing it because people are issuing take down notices for their on-line attack ads. They just can't get no love :)
Objection works just fine, you just install "nightly tester tools" and hit the "override compatibility" button. I'm running Objection 0.3.3 with Firefox 3.0.3 just fine.
Yup, I used to use it as the back-end for the postmaster account for an international agency, (we got a lot of SPAM) It rarely fell over, and it was subjected to a load of 250K messages or more per day. I used it to weed the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. So yes, it really is *that* stable.
The older I get the more I recognise this as truth.
For a while, as a younger man, I took the offended, "don't bug me" attitude to fillial tech support. These days however, wherever I wind up in the world, If I find myslelf at somebody's house, and they aske me a technical question on finding out what I do for a living, I "fix" thier computer for them. I show them how to use it, I have a pre-written text about what they should and shouldn't know, etc. I install firefox, thunderbird, AV, anti spyware, etc. Tweak the OS, takes me about 5 hours. Then I give them my email address and tell them to contact me if they ever need a hand.
So yeah, I'll take C, "computers" have been good to me, it's the least I can do by way of payback. Ignorance, and not MS, is the real enemy. Most people just want something that works, and that applies equally well to the free stuff as it does to the proprietary.
YMMV
Indoors? Ocasionally, but only if the door is open. Mostly not. Driving? Not bad, it understeers a lot, good in straight lines. Though that could just be me. There are races. Hand to hand is fun. It's a quicker cleaner kill than with bullets, especially if you max out strength. You hit them they fly, useful for crowd control. They run away a lot when you're very hard. You can punch and kick, people, cars, trucks, etc. Punches do more damage over time. Not tried to pick up live people but you can pick up and throw dead ones. Nice rag doll physics. How far depends on how strong, you can throw cars too. I can lift 2 Tonnes at present and throw it about about 250 feet. You can rip car doors off, etc. But like he said, jumping into a firefight and laying the smackdown on a group of thugs, never gets old, it's a lot like the matrix in that respect, It's a lot of fun just jumping from building to building, like virtual parcourt. It's got minimal plot, and it's fairly fast paced, but it's loads of fun. To the point where you find yourself thinking, "Superman doesn't use a gun..." It's a blast, rent it, you wont be dissapointed.
Metacritic is fabulous, I bought ICO because of a "review" I read on metacritic. I say "review" as it was an odd one, more about what it felt like to play, the graphis/sound approach. I also tend to rate highly those reviews that clearly love the game. Reviews for Gal Civ 2, were a lot like that. Same thing with Freefall, even given it's obvious flaws.
:)
But as a way to check out the general feel of a game, metacritic is great. The only print reviews I take seriously these days are in Edge and Games(tm) The rest of them are just Ad copy fodder for the most part, useful for indepth preview features, but useless for final reviews. Eurogamer is also great if you want really hillarious bad reviews. When they don't like a game they really "put the boot in" Thier review of driver3 for instance was an instant classic
You can also get a lot of mileage from the gamespot forums.
If you can, find a University/college IT dept, that needs people. At least in the UK, most colleges and UNI's employ current and ex students as they cant afford to pay as much as private industry. Becuase of this the jobs you get to do are many and varied, and it's not really that important if you screw up once or twice.
The advice about reading books and installing Linux on your PC will only get you so far. Becuase what you lack is experience of theings that can and do go wrong in a working network of machines. Especially relevant are the interoperability issues.
Certianly in Europe and the UK, what really counts is experience, of the "hands on & in" variety. Anyone can bulshit a certificate with a brain dump, you can go on course that will virtually guarantee you come out with a cert. But again, lab work is no substitute for a real problem on a real network.
If you want to do UNIX for a living, generalise, don't specialise. Be good at one commercial distribution of UNIX, (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.) and some form of Linux. RedHat Enterprise is used widely, so Fedora may be good, but any distro will do, Gentoo is also very good from the "build it yourself" aspect, especially if you do it from the level one tar ball and a boot floppy.
You will also need some experience of the major disk systems, such as Veritas, Disksuite or some other Journalled/logical disk variant. But beyond that what you need most if just experience. Universities and small non-profit organisations are very good places to learn, the pay is lousy, (I got a 60% pay rise when I moved to the private sector) but if you love the life, they are some of the best places in the world to experiment in a non-presurised environment.
Know also that wherever you go you'll need to retrain for the environment, this usually takes about 30 days.
You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If... http://www.rhyolite.com//anti-spam/you-might-be.ht ml
Nostarch press are releasing a book about this soon, they had a mockup on display at the Frankfurt book fair.
I think what really pisses "honest people" off is the fact that they pay for it while "the scurvy pirate" gets it for free, usually without the protection systems, etc. that honest people have to suffer through. Often, at least with Software, this is incredibly annoying.
I cite in this "HalfLife 2" which I bought, and was unplayable for months, unless I used a crack, where other bugs then foiled me.
and "Poser5" Which had a protection scheme, that caused the program to abort randomly, and occasionally shut down your whole PC.
In both cases, the protection was ultimately removed to solve the problems.
Then there is the Sony rootkit debacle.
While I can understand the content producers need to paint copyright infringment as "theft" and I even agree with the adverts, in that people would not steal the actual hardcopy of any given item. I think it's time to recognise that no matter what you preach, or how high you preach from, most ordinary people who commit copyright infringement, have absolutely no guilt about it whatsoever. It's the lack of guilt, and indeed the fact that would not even think to be ashamed of such "normal" acts, that will eventually cause the content producers to settle. They can sue all they want, the horse has already bolted. Closing the stable door after the fact does nothing but draw curious stares from onlookers.
Appologies for the formatting, it's just one of those days. senior-IETF-member-8
You think that a violation of an RFC by an SMTP client or server is good and sufficient reason to reject all mail from the system's domain.
programmer-3
With standards, the implementation cost is about zero, so the FUSSP will be practically universally deployed within months of being documented in an RFC.
knows-SMTP-4
You know that SMTP has no authentication and have never heard of SMTP-AUTH, SMTP-TLS, S/MIME, or PGP.
knows-SMTP-5
You know that the failure of SMTP servers to authenticate the SMTP clients of strangers is a major bug in SMTP instead of an expression of a primary design goal.
[Sigh] http://rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html FUSSP = "Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem" senior-IETF-member-8 You think that a violation of an RFC by an SMTP client or server is good and sufficient reason to reject all mail from the system's domain. programmer-3 With standards, the implementation cost is about zero, so the FUSSP will be practically universally deployed within months of being documented in an RFC. knows-SMTP-4 You know that SMTP has no authentication and have never heard of SMTP-AUTH, SMTP-TLS, S/MIME, or PGP. knows-SMTP-5 You know that the failure of SMTP servers to authenticate the SMTP clients of strangers is a major bug in SMTP instead of an expression of a primary design goal. SMTP = Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. it looks like this for a reason. If you still think there is a silver bullet for SPAM, (other than one delivered between the eyes of anyone who's responsible for it) then you've never actually had to deal with SPAM on any level other than a personal mail account. Sorry for being harsh, but I'm having a bad day with SPAM, and I'm not prepared to let that slide without comment.
Heck! Couldn't have said it better myself. I loved Halo on the Xbox, (though the PC version sucked a little) and I played through about 50% of Halo2 by all accounts then I got into something more interesting. I too never play online, I want to beat the computer/designer, not another person who may or may not be cheating. So yeah, if I get something capable of inspiring the same awe in me that playing through Halo single player did, then I'll be happy. Even if it doesn't have prettier graphics, and new guns.
As a rule of thumb you can put 20 runrays on a E450 server, (from memory a long time since I layed with a sun ray) the really cute thing is getting the smart card to work. yank the key from your sunray, move to the cubicle down the hall, plug your card in, and "Bingo!" your session, your way, even the apps you left open. V slick, documentation dept had them.
Yeah, I loved first ed. Shadowrun. Random scatter grenade tables, (when grenades still existed) and glorious oddities like a troll physical adept with a polearm that was lethal in melle. (average strike of around 12d6 at 2's to hit, against impact armour :) S2 may have made the game easier by making all the damage codes into a 2, but it wasn't nearly as much fun, or anywhere near as deadly :) :D
This from the game with the slogan "it's only a fleshwound"