From the article you linked to, on Microsoft's KB (Do they still call it technet?):
"Warning The steps in the article are effective only on Volume License media. If you try these steps on OEM media or on retail media, you will not change the product key."
AFAIK, this will only work with another volume licensed key. I occasionally have to install windows to test something for one of my moonlighting clients, and no, I don't buy a discrete license for a machine that's only going to have my copy of XP on it for two hours; I've been around the particular treadmill described here. (I own a "legit" XP license for my virtual PC instance; and I rarely start it up, so usually I'm not in violation anyway - one license, one running instance. *shrug*).
But if the author of the parent post buys his parents a licensed copy of XP from a vendor, it won't be volume licensed, and this trick may not work.
The big problem with alternative money systems is that, here in the US, anyway, alternate monetary systems (LETS, simple quid-pro-quo barter, etc) have two significant legal drawbacks; if you don't declare the value recieved as income, you can be arrested for tax evasion by the IRS; and the Patriot Act made such behavior an 'aggravator' of terrorist action; this means that such behavior is now a 'marker' for terrorism. So if you should excercise a 'directory traversal attack' (you know, adding "/pub/" to the end of a URL to see if you can find the file that the broken link used to point to) and piss off the wrong person... it could get very ugly.
This is not strictly true. Presentation skills and real knowledge and understanding will out. If you know your 'stuff' and can do more than play buzzword bingo, you can and will get jobs. If you doubt that the HR type your interviewing with understands your technical expertise, tell them you'd like a technical interview with their working engineers. I have no degree in anything. I've been offered every position I've interviewed for. I'm scrupulously honest about what I know - when someone says, "We've got a lot of Gelding Framistats here." I say, "Really? I'm not familiar with the term. What is it?" The explanation usually offers me a lot of room to demonstrate my understanding of the concepts behind the device in question, and the teams I've interviewed with have appreciated the honesty.
Go take classes in presentation and public speaking. No shit. Personal, calm confidence - not bravado - is the *key* to getting the jobs you want. Well, that and *real* knowledge of the field you want to work in.
Tell you what. Every time you buy a copyrighted work from someone overseas, immediately send the RIAA, the MPAA, and anyone else you can think of, a check. That way you know you've taken care of your repsonsibilities.
"The smaller and more powerless the political machine can be made, the less the market can be distorted towards the favoured players, the better chance the rest of us have to compete."
I think that our own history gives this statement a significant contrast. The railroads, the various land concerns (ranchers, loggers, etc) made their employees into indentured servants in a way that modern companies can only dream of. In our history, the times of weak political power have bracketed the most egregious abuse of the workers.
I'm no pie-eyed dreamer; I know and understand the venal nature of the body politic. But despite the assertion that they've unified, the opposition is easily generated by various selections of legislators and other politicians being purchased by opposing business interests. Coporations have opposing interests, and in spite of the corporate sponsorships, you and I still have to vote them into office (unless, of course, you're George Bush). So the politicians accept campaign donations from many disparate sources, and generally 'serve two masters' (or more) ineffectively, all the while trying to maintain appearances for the plebes. This chaos is the only thing that reins in corporate power at all.
Your idealistic Randite anarchist assertions certainly sound good on the lips - simple solutions to complex problems - but they have never born out at any point in history. When the Merchants and the Rulers are not in opposition - whether it be real opposition or purchased opposition - the Merchants lay claim to whatever power there is. When there is no government to stop them - to contest their power over us - they've employed armies. Destroy the political (ie, legal power over business) and you grant them license to abuse anyone they choose.
"I think that sentence represents quite clearly an extremely common, but fundamentally mistaken, view of the relationship.
The politicians are never a buffer against corporate greed. They're its creators, sustainers, and enablers.
Consider, just for a moment, that the corporation itself owes its existence to the political realm. Corporations are not natural entities. They originated in letters patent issued by the Monarch. Today the legislature plays his role. Without political power distorting the marketplace there would be no corporations."
Obviously, I disagree with your conclusion without opposing your statements of 'fact'. Certainly the law is what brings corporations into existence. The law is what creates a market in which they can thrive. That much is uncontestable. But to suggest that only politics can give rise to greed is somewhat simplistic and naive. First, "corporations" are not greedy. People are greedy. Without the law there would be no 'corporations', per se, but there would be collectives called something else whereby a strong man (a rich man) began enforcing his will on the populace. It's always been that way, and barring some genetic universal enlightenment, it always will - there are always those who are willing to sell out ther fellows - or kick in their doors and take their shit - at the behest and pay of a greedy person.
LOL... OTC, unscheduled. Kids have been drinking cough medicine forever, and the DMX had little to do with it. It was the alcohol and the sugar, bud. 80 proof, that stuff was when I was a kid. They'll drink mouthwash, too, if it tastes good enough and doesn't hurt their stomach. We had a 'toiletries machine' in my jr. high - it was always sold out of the no-name mouthwash that was basically alcohol and mint flavoring.
Oh good grief. Of course it's not a coincidence. Israel wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for the Christian Zionists. I mean, I'm no conspiracy theorist; it's fairly easy to discover that the policies that ended up with the creation of the state of Israel in 1947 began with the assertions of a British general in the 1800s who thought that if 'we' returned all the 'jews' to the 'holy land', then those very prophecies could be fulfilled and Jesus would return. It's true that not everyone who participated in the situation knew what the initial impetus was, and of course the Jews who wanted their own country didn't care about Jesus' return. Many people thought it was a good attempt at a beginning of an apology for the holocaust; I don't have any strong emotional ties to any of those debates. I have little sympathy for the Arab countries bitching about Israel - let's remember that many of them were essentially created at the same time, when the Brits and the Yanks carved up the Middle East the last time - but I don't find any great mystery in prophecies being force-fed to the world by their believers.
I think you're a very thoughtful person, but somewhat impersonal in your perceptions. If I may, let me rephrase your statements, and you can correct me if I mischaracterize them.
"Okay, I'll grant that the Wal-Mart policies ( union-busting, paying grindingly low wages, making people work beyond their paid hours, advising them to seek public assistance for food stamps and health benefits, and the like) make quitting and unionizing unrealistic goals for many of their victims, but I think that if enough people end up suffering this kind of grinding poverty and dehumanizing suffering, and the government doesn't help them out, someone will finally notice."
That may seem a little inflammatory, but lets not forget that those numbers - minimum wage workers, Wal-Mart employees - are *people*. Real people, with dreams, hopes, plans. People that, I must say - but for the grace of Providence - could be me. I've done a stint living in my car, when I was a kid; it fills me with the heebie-jeebies to think about putting my daughter and wife in that situation through the insanity of corporate greed and the monetary mismanagement of our government.
People need to realize that the laws that allow companies to make money were put in place to benefit society, NOT the other way 'round. Companies are supplicants at the public trough; they all depend on one public resource for existence - our labor. I'm no communist, although as I've gotten older, I've found a surprising bit of socialism in my heart that I suspect is reactionary to the impecunities of the moneyed elite. Regardless, these discussions are important, but we *really* must remember that "the poor" are not abstract, at all. "They" are real people, really suffering.
"Seriously, there's a huge institutional imbalance between labour and capital, but papering over it with minimum wage laws and welfare systems does nothing to address the root problem."
What is it you percieve as the root problem?
"It just places more and more people in a position where their survival is dependent on politics. Good for the politicians, bad for everyone else."
And what kind of non-political solutions are there? Honestly, I'd love to hear of them.
And whether any of us like it or not, the politicians - from the local level on up - are our only buffer against the corporate greed; as long as we can keep politicians and corporations (or enough of 'em) at odds, we stand some chance of freedom and wellbeing. As soon as they unite, we are their slaves.
Nah, that's not it. I don't hate "Microsoft"; that's just a name on a door somewhere. I don't hate 'the corporation'; corporations are not individuals, no matter what the law would have us believe.
The reason I find this eminently amusing is that Microsoft is a company built on marketing. At no particular point has Microsoft had "The Superior Technical Solution"; they have always had luck and better marketing. Since DOS 3.3 there have frequently been products that were more stable, faster, easier to use - you name it. And Microsoft's captains have beaten them in two ways: Marketing and Money.
So of course when a company who has built their foundation on marketing flubs it, it's more amusing than when a company who has built their foundation on performance of one kind or another flubs it. It's inescapable that the Bg Dog gets more scrutiny than the Contender, anyway. And Microsoft apologists should understand that.
"It's not just strange- it's wrong. My job title at one point was "Systems Engineer". I didn't have an engineering degree, and my father (who did) was severely irked, rightfully so; just because I came up with solutions involving computer systems did not make me an "engineer". This is the same kind of BS. "Journalist" is a professional title, and you can't slap it on a person simply because they yack about current events."
Bullshit. If you were, in fact, engineering solutions with computers, it is reasonable and right to call you a Systems Engineer. I am a Systems Engineer with no degree; I work next to Systems Engineers who have masters degrees in various fields, and in fact am regarded as one of the "go to" Systems Engineers. Every time I hear this horsecrap about "You're only an engineer if you have an engineering degree" I have to laugh; that's like my friend, who works for the Railroad, who says, "You're not a damned engineer until you drive a train!"
"Go to Merriam-Webster and look up "journalism". Under "2B", you'll find "writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation". When anyone in the media talks about "journalism", that is the context they are referring to, not the OTHER definition of "someone who keeps a journal" (ie, diary.) Most of the "web loggers" who get up in a tizzy about this, compare themselves to professional journalists, which indicates they are using the 2B definition."
Talk about picking your definitions to support your thesis. You don't even have the primary definition 2. For those just tuning in, here's the entry from M-W:
Main Entry: journalism Pronunciation: 'j&r-n&-"li-z&m Function: noun 1 a : the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media b : the public press c : an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news or the management of a news medium 2 a : writing designed for publication in a newspaper or magazine b : writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation c : writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest.
Wow, it looks like the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media qualifies; and writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest. This whole freaking study is a bunch of 'journalistic' self-aggrandizement; The guy who writes a column is a journalist; the guys who review movies in the NYTimes are journalists... so are bloggers if they fit any of the above definitions, regardless of quality, literacy, etc. Someone can be *bad* at their job, and still be doing that job, dontcha know.
I respect those who have invested the effort to attain a degree. I don't envy them, and I don't think that education alone qualifies them for anything; and in industries like mine (I'm a systems engineer), requiring a degree would cut you off from many of your best candidates.
Good point. I suppose 'realtime' varies in application somewhat; at least according to Wikipedia it does. IM is a 'soft real-time' application in my world; the value of the response steadily declines as the delay increases. For many people who don't use it daily in the course of their jobs, that is probably not the case, although I have seen a few online flirting sessions that would have been negatively impacted in proportion to the delay - maybe the square of the delay! heh. The answer to "Do you think I'm attractive?" loses importance rapidly as the delay increases, until it finally has a *negative* value.:D My casual conversations are asynchronous, to be sure.
Oh, see, I think that FAR too often, people pick up the PHONE and CALL me when a tiny IM would have done the trick. I could do with a little less of that direct communication, thank you; most people talk, and talk, and talk, and say so very little; IM is asynchronous. I can address it when I feel like it, or if I'm in the middle of figuring out a particularly knotty problem with seven xterms running snoop and tcpdump on six different machines, I can IGNORE it.
Lots of people use OTR or other IM-encryption to keep their local net nazis from showing up at their desk because they said "b00bs" in an IM conversation with a friend. I'm not particularly worried about the government; in spite of being a political radical, I really don't present much of a threat. The local yokels, on the other hand, are positively *dying* for an opportunity to prove the value of their hand-dandy new sniffer.
Tor is a great idea. My few forays into that dimension have been, however, somewhat disappointing, speed wise. I'm not sure how well it's going to deal with a realtime app like IM. Aside from the path obfuscation provided by tor, I'm not sure how this is significantly more... newsworthy... than OTR ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messag ing ) messaging. OTR provides "Perfect Forward Secrecy" and "Deniable Encryption", and plugins/local proxies/native support is already available in/for current IM clients.
'"The most popular brands of antivirus on the market... have an 80 percent miss rate... So if you are running these pieces of software, eight out of 10 pieces of malicious code are going to get in," said Ingram.'
Your argument is specious. Your conclusion may not be completely so ( that's an individual min-max: Is the effort, expense, and general PITA compensation for my 20% risk reduction ), but I'm more inclined to believe it's an IT-type "No one ever got fired for recommending an antivirus application be installed" rather than any real value-add position. I work for a major technology corporation that shall remain nameless; the corporate desktop image is crippled by some of this AV software that 'does not work' ( per TFA ), costs large quantities of dollars, and does not 'catch' viruses or trojans. To be fair, it might, but the email system in and out of the network scans all attachments and kills anything remotely resembling an executable ( including important Visio diagrams and Word documents). All web traffic is redirected through a transparent proxy that crashes IE (although it jsut irritates firefox) by forcing authentication for any URL it deems 'questionable'. And the desktop AV software has missed every challenge it's been faced with.
As a Unix Systems Engineer, I just sit at my Solaris, Linux, and OSX machines and shake my head in sympathy for my less fortunate brethren, and (mostly) resist the desire to invoke the ancient Dilbert line... "Here's a nickel, kid; go get yourself a better computer."
That would depend on the means used to acquire said information. The fact that I give you permission to 'dig up what information you can' on me doesn't grant you immunity from prosecution for, say, social engineering data out of the county clerk (fraud), computer crime (hacking the hospital's database, for instance), or other process that's illegal by its very character. I can *give* you that information, of course, but then you're not 'digging it up', eh?
" If such a framework did not exist, it would be very unlikely a group of investors would give Company A $10 million to map NYC to produce the hypothetical game, hence said game / database would not exist, or at least not until the GPL had reached the required state to make such a game possible."
Of course, this is where I take exception. If the game can pay for the database, the database will be created, regardless of whether or not they can charge someone *again* for the use of the database. If you can make $40,000,000 on a game, with a $10M investment, who wouldn't fund the DB - regardless of the DB's legal/copyright/protection status afterwards?
And the original thesis was pitting GTA against Flight Simulator - two games unlikely to be in a consumer's "Either/or" zone, so the competetive advantage is moot.
"So if I spent 3 billion dollars and mapped out every cubic meter of NYC in 3-D, to within a few meters accuracy, and used that in the next Grand Theft Auto game, you are saying you should be able to just copy that data wholesale and use it in Flight Simulator 2007?"
Mmmm.... What commitment have you made to the original architects of the buildings that you've mapped out in NY? To the workers that built the streets? Are you paying them royalties or license fees? Do they 'own' their 'design'? Will your hypothetical "GTA-The Big Apple" make less money if our friend does use the same database in Flight Simulator? The point many are missing here is that databases are not creative acts, ie, not what IP was designed to protect; they are in fact labor intensive, even tedious. A 'database' is most saliently protected as a 'trade secret' or some such nonsense, but in the end I'm not sure it matters; as I said, does your game make less money if another game uses the same database describing New York?
I'm constantly amused by the assertion that people with iPods and iTunes are upset because they "can't transfer files because of DRM". It's poppycock. No, I can't buy an album from the Apple store and then email it out to all my friends in the original AAC format (that's what we're really talking about here, isn't it? I mean, if you have iTunes and an iPod, you can play your songs everywhere you can take them, according to *any* current license agreement; your computer, your iPod, and your CD player)... But iTunes and the Apple Music Store allow you to burn your songs to CD. Here's the deal. You buy songs, you burn them to cd using iTunes. When you're done, what does the little icon in the upper right corner say? Oh, yeah, "Import songs". Click on it. When it's done, guess what you have? DRM-free digital music. I leave it as an excercise for the reader to discern how to get iTunes to prefer mp3s; AAC produces higher quality at smaller filesize (google it, it's easy to find audiophile sources that explain their methodology), but you can't give AAC files to your buddies with SanDisk players and Zen players and iRiver players. Of course, it's illegal, anyway, to do so, but what the hell. I am no supporter of DRM, but let's not be coy; mp3 is 'preferred' because you can share them with anyone.
DRM is a non-issue with iTunes and iPod. Not so with many other DRM formats.
Let's face it, peeps; except in the case of custom-built solutions, where developer support is a must, the average company wants "corporate support" - ie, someone to call and blame when the system is down, so that nobody at the company actually has to take responsibility for their platforms.
Now. If you're deploying linux on cutting edge hardware, you should be able to get support for that Linux from your hardware vendor. If you're deploying it on commodity hardware, and you're really a "mega corporation", you *should* be able to support your own platforms. My team does; final tier support for linux and solaris, with vendor fallback for hardware. We've discovered that we can save immense amounts of money by supporting our platforms ourselves. The typical support contract will more than pay for a 'spare server' or two, for instance. Even with the average once-yearly time-and-materials call, we're saving literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, and millions in some applications.
When you deploy platforms, you should test them thoroughly; depending on vendor support in place of such testing is insane, and generally a bad idea. I'm having trouble coming up with a scenario that I don't think that internal support or vendor hardware support shouldn't be able to handle.
The corporate world needs to learn that having someone to 'call and blame' isn't worth millions of dollars per year.
Mmmm... VTRs, laserdisk, etc. DVRs have only simplified and streamlined the process performed by my VCR years ago. Something else automates the lookup of the program times and the like, but the essence remains the same. Video on demand has, again, streamlined and simplified the process of watching movies on that same VCR. Again, no basic paradigm change (from the user's perspective), just an application change.
[trivial sig argument] And a side note - name calling and profanity do not preclude accurate content; to dismiss an argument on those grounds amounts to ad hominem ("You're calling names and cussing, which I dislike, therefore you must be wrong.") [/trivial sig argument]
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
For some systems it makes sense - for instance, in my employment, it's common to archive several GB of email. Under those circumstances, a database would make sense, with indexes and the like. My personal email, on the other hand, only a few hundred Kbytes, and most of the emails I save are 'reciepts' for online purchases, so a database would be like swatting flies with a sledgehammer.
The argument you present is not germane. It's perfectly legal for me to build a house that's impossible for law enforcement to enter. A warrant grants the police the legal right to do what's necessary to search a location, but if I am not home, and they can't get in, I'm not in violation of the law; they just have to wait until I get there to open the door. Only in the event I don't allow them access am I in violation of the law. Not only that, I can *tell* if the police kick in my door when I'm not home - particularly if I have, say, a strong deadbolt. But this would allow them to "search" (tap) my property, location, or communication *without me knowing*.
Eventually they're going to try and make it illegal to encrypt your communication with an algorithm lacking an integrated government decryption key. Stop 'em now.
"You are referring to the GUI layer, not the "OS" (where "OS" is being used in the academic, rather than marketing, sense)."
Rather, but that was only one example of the *many* issues the Citrix product dealt with. Remember that MS eventually purchased much of the Citrix technology; what they (citrix) accomplished was *hard*. And in my work with their engineering department (as a fairly high-profile customer support contract POC) they expressed frustration with a *lot* of things that were implemented 'with a single-user-mentality'.
"It's quite possible to have a multiuser OS, then stick a single user GUI on top of it (OS X is another example)."
Except that you can load OSX without Aqua (It's called "Darwin"). Try loading NT without Windows. I think I've even seen a couple of pages about how to get multiple aqua sessions running with VNC - because Aqua isn't net-aware (like X).
" Ironically, with it's lack of a superuser concept, if anything NT is *more* multiuser than unix (until equivalents on unix started appearing recently)."
I'm not sure what you mean here. The "Administrator" login is pretty much "root" equivalent; I can change the name and noodle all kinds of stuff, but waaaay back in the day (nt3.51 to early 2k) there was stuff you could not do if you weren't the "original admin account". Perhaps there's no longer an 'inherent' superuser; but the systems in *nix you're referring to actually don't have a root user at all unless you boot with root enabled. Different concept, IMO.
"Note that multiple non-GUI logins on Windows (eg: with a telnet server) have always been possible, as have non-interactive services running in separate user contexts. The problems you are describing are limited solely to the GUI layer."
Sure, via the POSIX subsystem. OTOH, once you invoked it, you would have a 'case sensitive file system'; there was no end of cussing by NT admins over THAT little craziness! And the problems weren't limited 'solely to the GUI layer', but were pretty much bypassed by the POSIX layer. The 'single user mentality' also applied to a lot of server-type process issues. Not to mention the memory model that routinely allowed an application failure to take the entire box down like a pole-axed steer on the slaughterhouse floor. So when, for instance, PC Docs convinced MS SQL that it should try and resolve a particular query, NT puked and died.
"The vast, vast majority of "viruses", "worms" and "spyware" are, strictly speaking, trojans. "Real" worms - that use unpatched remote exploits and spread automatically - are very uncommon on Windows, as they are on all other platforms. Anything that requires user interaction to kick off - which covers nearly all browser and email vectors - is, strictly speaking, a "trojan"."
The security firms disagree with you. True, the vast majority of 'malware' is trojan in nature, but I specifically avoided 'trojans' in the database when I did my informal troll through Sophos' malware list. Historically, a "Trojan" is a program that behaves differently than advertised for stealth reasons; it might, in fact, install a virus, but they're two separate classes of software. Viruses are malware that you can 'catch' - ie, by recieving and opening an email; no user execution is required. Worms are malware that can self-replicate across the network without user intervention. Worms, I agree, are rare. Viruses are not, according to Sophos and their kindred, and my point was that in my informal stroll through the database, a good percentage of the viruses I examined - and there are LOTS of them, some initially installed via Trojans, but then 'catchable' after that - used some form of privilege escalation. But I agree completely about the "current" thing; if a patch is available, no virus exploiting it is 'current', indeed.
"I've no doubt they exist - my point is they're relatively uncommon."
And my point, of course, was that they are MUCH more common, in Windows, than *nix "Privilege escalation exploits".:D
Very good points, and I agree, in principle, with many of them, with minor caveats and considerations. However, having spent a considerable amount of time working with Citrix when it came out and lots of time on the phone with their support organization and software engineers, I would completely disagree with your assertion that "Windows NT was designed and build from the ground up as a multiuser OS". I was an MCSE - Microsoft's targetted audience at that time, someone who already had a couple of years time-in-grade supporting MS products (NT 3.51, 3.51 with newshell, and NT 4.0) and intimately familiar with the functioning of 'normal' NT. The engineers at Citrix certainly disagree with you, and I can't really challenge them since they had the source code. I know that there were constant problems related to things such as the decision to run the GDI as a privileged user, and the fact that many processes must run as the privileged user and cannot run multiple times. Your assertions are probably related to the filesystem, which supports significantly finer-grained permissions that *nix of most flavors and is unquestionably 'multi-user capable'. (although OSX supports ACLs, and there's a very nifty free GUI tool for managing them!). Perhaps the distinction is that MS meant "usable by multiple sequential logins" and Unix is "usable by multiple concurrent logins" - an important distinction (as Citrix would testify)
More of what you said has the ring of relevance, but I'm not ready to call it 'true'. I'll grant that there is nothing an OS can do to protect one from 'trojans', but I contest your assertion about viruses and worms. I browsed Sophos' virus database for a while, and a large number of them use exploits to system services that run as privileged users, others jigger holes in the file system security of windows, and various other nefarious things that would be (have in fact proven to be) more difficult in various *nix environments - far from 'failing' if run as a non-privileged user.
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From the article you linked to, on Microsoft's KB (Do they still call it technet?):
"Warning The steps in the article are effective only on Volume License media. If you try these steps on OEM media or on retail media, you will not change the product key."
AFAIK, this will only work with another volume licensed key. I occasionally have to install windows to test something for one of my moonlighting clients, and no, I don't buy a discrete license for a machine that's only going to have my copy of XP on it for two hours; I've been around the particular treadmill described here. (I own a "legit" XP license for my virtual PC instance; and I rarely start it up, so usually I'm not in violation anyway - one license, one running instance. *shrug*).
But if the author of the parent post buys his parents a licensed copy of XP from a vendor, it won't be volume licensed, and this trick may not work.
The big problem with alternative money systems is that, here in the US, anyway, alternate monetary systems (LETS, simple quid-pro-quo barter, etc) have two significant legal drawbacks; if you don't declare the value recieved as income, you can be arrested for tax evasion by the IRS; and the Patriot Act made such behavior an 'aggravator' of terrorist action; this means that such behavior is now a 'marker' for terrorism. So if you should excercise a 'directory traversal attack' (you know, adding "/pub/" to the end of a URL to see if you can find the file that the broken link used to point to) and piss off the wrong person... it could get very ugly.
This is not strictly true. Presentation skills and real knowledge and understanding will out. If you know your 'stuff' and can do more than play buzzword bingo, you can and will get jobs. If you doubt that the HR type your interviewing with understands your technical expertise, tell them you'd like a technical interview with their working engineers. I have no degree in anything. I've been offered every position I've interviewed for. I'm scrupulously honest about what I know - when someone says, "We've got a lot of Gelding Framistats here." I say, "Really? I'm not familiar with the term. What is it?" The explanation usually offers me a lot of room to demonstrate my understanding of the concepts behind the device in question, and the teams I've interviewed with have appreciated the honesty.
Go take classes in presentation and public speaking. No shit. Personal, calm confidence - not bravado - is the *key* to getting the jobs you want. Well, that and *real* knowledge of the field you want to work in.
Tell you what. Every time you buy a copyrighted work from someone overseas, immediately send the RIAA, the MPAA, and anyone else you can think of, a check. That way you know you've taken care of your repsonsibilities.
"The smaller and more powerless the political machine can be made, the less the market can be distorted towards the favoured players, the better chance the rest of us have to compete."
I think that our own history gives this statement a significant contrast. The railroads, the various land concerns (ranchers, loggers, etc) made their employees into indentured servants in a way that modern companies can only dream of. In our history, the times of weak political power have bracketed the most egregious abuse of the workers.
I'm no pie-eyed dreamer; I know and understand the venal nature of the body politic. But despite the assertion that they've unified, the opposition is easily generated by various selections of legislators and other politicians being purchased by opposing business interests. Coporations have opposing interests, and in spite of the corporate sponsorships, you and I still have to vote them into office (unless, of course, you're George Bush). So the politicians accept campaign donations from many disparate sources, and generally 'serve two masters' (or more) ineffectively, all the while trying to maintain appearances for the plebes. This chaos is the only thing that reins in corporate power at all.
Your idealistic Randite anarchist assertions certainly sound good on the lips - simple solutions to complex problems - but they have never born out at any point in history. When the Merchants and the Rulers are not in opposition - whether it be real opposition or purchased opposition - the Merchants lay claim to whatever power there is. When there is no government to stop them - to contest their power over us - they've employed armies. Destroy the political (ie, legal power over business) and you grant them license to abuse anyone they choose.
"I think that sentence represents quite clearly an extremely common, but fundamentally mistaken, view of the relationship.
The politicians are never a buffer against corporate greed. They're its creators, sustainers, and enablers.
Consider, just for a moment, that the corporation itself owes its existence to the political realm. Corporations are not natural entities. They originated in letters patent issued by the Monarch. Today the legislature plays his role. Without political power distorting the marketplace there would be no corporations."
Obviously, I disagree with your conclusion without opposing your statements of 'fact'. Certainly the law is what brings corporations into existence. The law is what creates a market in which they can thrive. That much is uncontestable. But to suggest that only politics can give rise to greed is somewhat simplistic and naive. First, "corporations" are not greedy. People are greedy. Without the law there would be no 'corporations', per se, but there would be collectives called something else whereby a strong man (a rich man) began enforcing his will on the populace. It's always been that way, and barring some genetic universal enlightenment, it always will - there are always those who are willing to sell out ther fellows - or kick in their doors and take their shit - at the behest and pay of a greedy person.
LOL... OTC, unscheduled. Kids have been drinking cough medicine forever, and the DMX had little to do with it. It was the alcohol and the sugar, bud. 80 proof, that stuff was when I was a kid. They'll drink mouthwash, too, if it tastes good enough and doesn't hurt their stomach. We had a 'toiletries machine' in my jr. high - it was always sold out of the no-name mouthwash that was basically alcohol and mint flavoring.
Oh good grief. Of course it's not a coincidence. Israel wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for the Christian Zionists. I mean, I'm no conspiracy theorist; it's fairly easy to discover that the policies that ended up with the creation of the state of Israel in 1947 began with the assertions of a British general in the 1800s who thought that if 'we' returned all the 'jews' to the 'holy land', then those very prophecies could be fulfilled and Jesus would return. It's true that not everyone who participated in the situation knew what the initial impetus was, and of course the Jews who wanted their own country didn't care about Jesus' return. Many people thought it was a good attempt at a beginning of an apology for the holocaust; I don't have any strong emotional ties to any of those debates. I have little sympathy for the Arab countries bitching about Israel - let's remember that many of them were essentially created at the same time, when the Brits and the Yanks carved up the Middle East the last time - but I don't find any great mystery in prophecies being force-fed to the world by their believers.
I think you're a very thoughtful person, but somewhat impersonal in your perceptions. If I may, let me rephrase your statements, and you can correct me if I mischaracterize them.
"Okay, I'll grant that the Wal-Mart policies ( union-busting, paying grindingly low wages, making people work beyond their paid hours, advising them to seek public assistance for food stamps and health benefits, and the like) make quitting and unionizing unrealistic goals for many of their victims, but I think that if enough people end up suffering this kind of grinding poverty and dehumanizing suffering, and the government doesn't help them out, someone will finally notice."
That may seem a little inflammatory, but lets not forget that those numbers - minimum wage workers, Wal-Mart employees - are *people*. Real people, with dreams, hopes, plans. People that, I must say - but for the grace of Providence - could be me. I've done a stint living in my car, when I was a kid; it fills me with the heebie-jeebies to think about putting my daughter and wife in that situation through the insanity of corporate greed and the monetary mismanagement of our government.
People need to realize that the laws that allow companies to make money were put in place to benefit society, NOT the other way 'round. Companies are supplicants at the public trough; they all depend on one public resource for existence - our labor. I'm no communist, although as I've gotten older, I've found a surprising bit of socialism in my heart that I suspect is reactionary to the impecunities of the moneyed elite. Regardless, these discussions are important, but we *really* must remember that "the poor" are not abstract, at all. "They" are real people, really suffering.
"Seriously, there's a huge institutional imbalance between labour and capital, but papering over it with minimum wage laws and welfare systems does nothing to address the root problem."
What is it you percieve as the root problem?
"It just places more and more people in a position where their survival is dependent on politics. Good for the politicians, bad for everyone else."
And what kind of non-political solutions are there? Honestly, I'd love to hear of them.
And whether any of us like it or not, the politicians - from the local level on up - are our only buffer against the corporate greed; as long as we can keep politicians and corporations (or enough of 'em) at odds, we stand some chance of freedom and wellbeing. As soon as they unite, we are their slaves.
Nah, that's not it. I don't hate "Microsoft"; that's just a name on a door somewhere. I don't hate 'the corporation'; corporations are not individuals, no matter what the law would have us believe.
The reason I find this eminently amusing is that Microsoft is a company built on marketing. At no particular point has Microsoft had "The Superior Technical Solution"; they have always had luck and better marketing. Since DOS 3.3 there have frequently been products that were more stable, faster, easier to use - you name it. And Microsoft's captains have beaten them in two ways: Marketing and Money.
So of course when a company who has built their foundation on marketing flubs it, it's more amusing than when a company who has built their foundation on performance of one kind or another flubs it. It's inescapable that the Bg Dog gets more scrutiny than the Contender, anyway. And Microsoft apologists should understand that.
"It's not just strange- it's wrong. My job title at one point was "Systems Engineer". I didn't have an engineering degree, and my father (who did) was severely irked, rightfully so; just because I came up with solutions involving computer systems did not make me an "engineer". This is the same kind of BS. "Journalist" is a professional title, and you can't slap it on a person simply because they yack about current events."
Bullshit. If you were, in fact, engineering solutions with computers, it is reasonable and right to call you a Systems Engineer. I am a Systems Engineer with no degree; I work next to Systems Engineers who have masters degrees in various fields, and in fact am regarded as one of the "go to" Systems Engineers. Every time I hear this horsecrap about "You're only an engineer if you have an engineering degree" I have to laugh; that's like my friend, who works for the Railroad, who says, "You're not a damned engineer until you drive a train!"
"Go to Merriam-Webster and look up "journalism". Under "2B", you'll find "writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation". When anyone in the media talks about "journalism", that is the context they are referring to, not the OTHER definition of "someone who keeps a journal" (ie, diary.) Most of the "web loggers" who get up in a tizzy about this, compare themselves to professional journalists, which indicates they are using the 2B definition."
Talk about picking your definitions to support your thesis. You don't even have the primary definition 2. For those just tuning in, here's the entry from M-W:
Main Entry: journalism
Pronunciation: 'j&r-n&-"li-z&m
Function: noun
1 a : the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media b : the public press c : an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news or the management of a news medium
2 a : writing designed for publication in a newspaper or magazine b : writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation c : writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest.
Wow, it looks like the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media qualifies; and writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest. This whole freaking study is a bunch of 'journalistic' self-aggrandizement; The guy who writes a column is a journalist; the guys who review movies in the NYTimes are journalists... so are bloggers if they fit any of the above definitions, regardless of quality, literacy, etc. Someone can be *bad* at their job, and still be doing that job, dontcha know.
I respect those who have invested the effort to attain a degree. I don't envy them, and I don't think that education alone qualifies them for anything; and in industries like mine (I'm a systems engineer), requiring a degree would cut you off from many of your best candidates.
Good point. I suppose 'realtime' varies in application somewhat; at least according to Wikipedia it does. IM is a 'soft real-time' application in my world; the value of the response steadily declines as the delay increases. For many people who don't use it daily in the course of their jobs, that is probably not the case, although I have seen a few online flirting sessions that would have been negatively impacted in proportion to the delay - maybe the square of the delay! heh. The answer to "Do you think I'm attractive?" loses importance rapidly as the delay increases, until it finally has a *negative* value. :D My casual conversations are asynchronous, to be sure.
Oh, see, I think that FAR too often, people pick up the PHONE and CALL me when a tiny IM would have done the trick. I could do with a little less of that direct communication, thank you; most people talk, and talk, and talk, and say so very little; IM is asynchronous. I can address it when I feel like it, or if I'm in the middle of figuring out a particularly knotty problem with seven xterms running snoop and tcpdump on six different machines, I can IGNORE it.
Lots of people use OTR or other IM-encryption to keep their local net nazis from showing up at their desk because they said "b00bs" in an IM conversation with a friend. I'm not particularly worried about the government; in spite of being a political radical, I really don't present much of a threat. The local yokels, on the other hand, are positively *dying* for an opportunity to prove the value of their hand-dandy new sniffer.
Tor is a great idea. My few forays into that dimension have been, however, somewhat disappointing, speed wise. I'm not sure how well it's going to deal with a realtime app like IM. Aside from the path obfuscation provided by tor, I'm not sure how this is significantly more ... newsworthy... than OTR ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-record_messag ing ) messaging. OTR provides "Perfect Forward Secrecy" and "Deniable Encryption", and plugins/local proxies/native support is already available in/for current IM clients.
From TFA:
'"The most popular brands of antivirus on the market... have an 80 percent miss rate... So if you are running these pieces of software, eight out of 10 pieces of malicious code are going to get in," said Ingram.'
Your argument is specious. Your conclusion may not be completely so ( that's an individual min-max: Is the effort, expense, and general PITA compensation for my 20% risk reduction ), but I'm more inclined to believe it's an IT-type "No one ever got fired for recommending an antivirus application be installed" rather than any real value-add position. I work for a major technology corporation that shall remain nameless; the corporate desktop image is crippled by some of this AV software that 'does not work' ( per TFA ), costs large quantities of dollars, and does not 'catch' viruses or trojans. To be fair, it might, but the email system in and out of the network scans all attachments and kills anything remotely resembling an executable ( including important Visio diagrams and Word documents). All web traffic is redirected through a transparent proxy that crashes IE (although it jsut irritates firefox) by forcing authentication for any URL it deems 'questionable'. And the desktop AV software has missed every challenge it's been faced with.
As a Unix Systems Engineer, I just sit at my Solaris, Linux, and OSX machines and shake my head in sympathy for my less fortunate brethren, and (mostly) resist the desire to invoke the ancient Dilbert line... "Here's a nickel, kid; go get yourself a better computer."
That would depend on the means used to acquire said information. The fact that I give you permission to 'dig up what information you can' on me doesn't grant you immunity from prosecution for, say, social engineering data out of the county clerk (fraud), computer crime (hacking the hospital's database, for instance), or other process that's illegal by its very character. I can *give* you that information, of course, but then you're not 'digging it up', eh?
" If such a framework did not exist, it would be very unlikely a group of investors would give Company A $10 million to map NYC to produce the hypothetical game, hence said game / database would not exist, or at least not until the GPL had reached the required state to make such a game possible."
Of course, this is where I take exception. If the game can pay for the database, the database will be created, regardless of whether or not they can charge someone *again* for the use of the database. If you can make $40,000,000 on a game, with a $10M investment, who wouldn't fund the DB - regardless of the DB's legal/copyright/protection status afterwards?
And the original thesis was pitting GTA against Flight Simulator - two games unlikely to be in a consumer's "Either/or" zone, so the competetive advantage is moot.
"So if I spent 3 billion dollars and mapped out every cubic meter of NYC in 3-D, to within a few meters accuracy, and used that in the next Grand Theft Auto game, you are saying you should be able to just copy that data wholesale and use it in Flight Simulator 2007?"
Mmmm.... What commitment have you made to the original architects of the buildings that you've mapped out in NY? To the workers that built the streets? Are you paying them royalties or license fees? Do they 'own' their 'design'? Will your hypothetical "GTA-The Big Apple" make less money if our friend does use the same database in Flight Simulator? The point many are missing here is that databases are not creative acts, ie, not what IP was designed to protect; they are in fact labor intensive, even tedious. A 'database' is most saliently protected as a 'trade secret' or some such nonsense, but in the end I'm not sure it matters; as I said, does your game make less money if another game uses the same database describing New York?
I'm constantly amused by the assertion that people with iPods and iTunes are upset because they "can't transfer files because of DRM". It's poppycock. No, I can't buy an album from the Apple store and then email it out to all my friends in the original AAC format (that's what we're really talking about here, isn't it? I mean, if you have iTunes and an iPod, you can play your songs everywhere you can take them, according to *any* current license agreement; your computer, your iPod, and your CD player)... But iTunes and the Apple Music Store allow you to burn your songs to CD. Here's the deal. You buy songs, you burn them to cd using iTunes. When you're done, what does the little icon in the upper right corner say? Oh, yeah, "Import songs". Click on it. When it's done, guess what you have? DRM-free digital music. I leave it as an excercise for the reader to discern how to get iTunes to prefer mp3s; AAC produces higher quality at smaller filesize (google it, it's easy to find audiophile sources that explain their methodology), but you can't give AAC files to your buddies with SanDisk players and Zen players and iRiver players. Of course, it's illegal, anyway, to do so, but what the hell. I am no supporter of DRM, but let's not be coy; mp3 is 'preferred' because you can share them with anyone.
DRM is a non-issue with iTunes and iPod. Not so with many other DRM formats.
Let's face it, peeps; except in the case of custom-built solutions, where developer support is a must, the average company wants "corporate support" - ie, someone to call and blame when the system is down, so that nobody at the company actually has to take responsibility for their platforms.
Now. If you're deploying linux on cutting edge hardware, you should be able to get support for that Linux from your hardware vendor. If you're deploying it on commodity hardware, and you're really a "mega corporation", you *should* be able to support your own platforms. My team does; final tier support for linux and solaris, with vendor fallback for hardware. We've discovered that we can save immense amounts of money by supporting our platforms ourselves. The typical support contract will more than pay for a 'spare server' or two, for instance. Even with the average once-yearly time-and-materials call, we're saving literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, and millions in some applications.
When you deploy platforms, you should test them thoroughly; depending on vendor support in place of such testing is insane, and generally a bad idea. I'm having trouble coming up with a scenario that I don't think that internal support or vendor hardware support shouldn't be able to handle.
The corporate world needs to learn that having someone to 'call and blame' isn't worth millions of dollars per year.
Mmmm... VTRs, laserdisk, etc. DVRs have only simplified and streamlined the process performed by my VCR years ago. Something else automates the lookup of the program times and the like, but the essence remains the same. Video on demand has, again, streamlined and simplified the process of watching movies on that same VCR. Again, no basic paradigm change (from the user's perspective), just an application change.
[trivial sig argument]
And a side note - name calling and profanity do not preclude accurate content; to dismiss an argument on those grounds amounts to ad hominem ("You're calling names and cussing, which I dislike, therefore you must be wrong.")
[/trivial sig argument]
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
For some systems it makes sense - for instance, in my employment, it's common to archive several GB of email. Under those circumstances, a database would make sense, with indexes and the like. My personal email, on the other hand, only a few hundred Kbytes, and most of the emails I save are 'reciepts' for online purchases, so a database would be like swatting flies with a sledgehammer.
Context is important, I suspect.
The argument you present is not germane. It's perfectly legal for me to build a house that's impossible for law enforcement to enter. A warrant grants the police the legal right to do what's necessary to search a location, but if I am not home, and they can't get in, I'm not in violation of the law; they just have to wait until I get there to open the door. Only in the event I don't allow them access am I in violation of the law. Not only that, I can *tell* if the police kick in my door when I'm not home - particularly if I have, say, a strong deadbolt. But this would allow them to "search" (tap) my property, location, or communication *without me knowing*.
Eventually they're going to try and make it illegal to encrypt your communication with an algorithm lacking an integrated government decryption key. Stop 'em now.
"You are referring to the GUI layer, not the "OS" (where "OS" is being used in the academic, rather than marketing, sense)."
:D
Rather, but that was only one example of the *many* issues the Citrix product dealt with. Remember that MS eventually purchased much of the Citrix technology; what they (citrix) accomplished was *hard*. And in my work with their engineering department (as a fairly high-profile customer support contract POC) they expressed frustration with a *lot* of things that were implemented 'with a single-user-mentality'.
"It's quite possible to have a multiuser OS, then stick a single user GUI on top of it (OS X is another example)."
Except that you can load OSX without Aqua (It's called "Darwin"). Try loading NT without Windows. I think I've even seen a couple of pages about how to get multiple aqua sessions running with VNC - because Aqua isn't net-aware (like X).
" Ironically, with it's lack of a superuser concept, if anything NT is *more* multiuser than unix (until equivalents on unix started appearing recently)."
I'm not sure what you mean here. The "Administrator" login is pretty much "root" equivalent; I can change the name and noodle all kinds of stuff, but waaaay back in the day (nt3.51 to early 2k) there was stuff you could not do if you weren't the "original admin account". Perhaps there's no longer an 'inherent' superuser; but the systems in *nix you're referring to actually don't have a root user at all unless you boot with root enabled. Different concept, IMO.
"Note that multiple non-GUI logins on Windows (eg: with a telnet server) have always been possible, as have non-interactive services running in separate user contexts. The problems you are describing are limited solely to the GUI layer."
Sure, via the POSIX subsystem. OTOH, once you invoked it, you would have a 'case sensitive file system'; there was no end of cussing by NT admins over THAT little craziness! And the problems weren't limited 'solely to the GUI layer', but were pretty much bypassed by the POSIX layer. The 'single user mentality' also applied to a lot of server-type process issues. Not to mention the memory model that routinely allowed an application failure to take the entire box down like a pole-axed steer on the slaughterhouse floor. So when, for instance, PC Docs convinced MS SQL that it should try and resolve a particular query, NT puked and died.
"The vast, vast majority of "viruses", "worms" and "spyware" are, strictly speaking, trojans. "Real" worms - that use unpatched remote exploits and spread automatically - are very uncommon on Windows, as they are on all other platforms. Anything that requires user interaction to kick off - which covers nearly all browser and email vectors - is, strictly speaking, a "trojan"."
The security firms disagree with you. True, the vast majority of 'malware' is trojan in nature, but I specifically avoided 'trojans' in the database when I did my informal troll through Sophos' malware list. Historically, a "Trojan" is a program that behaves differently than advertised for stealth reasons; it might, in fact, install a virus, but they're two separate classes of software. Viruses are malware that you can 'catch' - ie, by recieving and opening an email; no user execution is required. Worms are malware that can self-replicate across the network without user intervention. Worms, I agree, are rare. Viruses are not, according to Sophos and their kindred, and my point was that in my informal stroll through the database, a good percentage of the viruses I examined - and there are LOTS of them, some initially installed via Trojans, but then 'catchable' after that - used some form of privilege escalation. But I agree completely about the "current" thing; if a patch is available, no virus exploiting it is 'current', indeed.
"I've no doubt they exist - my point is they're relatively uncommon."
And my point, of course, was that they are MUCH more common, in Windows, than *nix "Privilege escalation exploits".
Very good points, and I agree, in principle, with many of them, with minor caveats and considerations. However, having spent a considerable amount of time working with Citrix when it came out and lots of time on the phone with their support organization and software engineers, I would completely disagree with your assertion that "Windows NT was designed and build from the ground up as a multiuser OS". I was an MCSE - Microsoft's targetted audience at that time, someone who already had a couple of years time-in-grade supporting MS products (NT 3.51, 3.51 with newshell, and NT 4.0) and intimately familiar with the functioning of 'normal' NT. The engineers at Citrix certainly disagree with you, and I can't really challenge them since they had the source code. I know that there were constant problems related to things such as the decision to run the GDI as a privileged user, and the fact that many processes must run as the privileged user and cannot run multiple times. Your assertions are probably related to the filesystem, which supports significantly finer-grained permissions that *nix of most flavors and is unquestionably 'multi-user capable'. (although OSX supports ACLs, and there's a very nifty free GUI tool for managing them!). Perhaps the distinction is that MS meant "usable by multiple sequential logins" and Unix is "usable by multiple concurrent logins" - an important distinction (as Citrix would testify)
More of what you said has the ring of relevance, but I'm not ready to call it 'true'. I'll grant that there is nothing an OS can do to protect one from 'trojans', but I contest your assertion about viruses and worms. I browsed Sophos' virus database for a while, and a large number of them use exploits to system services that run as privileged users, others jigger holes in the file system security of windows, and various other nefarious things that would be (have in fact proven to be) more difficult in various *nix environments - far from 'failing' if run as a non-privileged user.