Might be the best post of the day...
on
Why Windows is Slow
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Too bad you posted as AC - I thought this was great.
You're absolutely correct - my personal opinion is that if you don't use it at least once a week it has no business in your system tray. Reminds me of the guy who drives around all summer with half a dozen bags of sand in his trunk because he might need them next winter - and then complains about performance;-)
Computing resources are limited resources - the more crap you have running on startup the worse your machine's gonna run. For me the most intrusive (and offensive) of these programs is RealMedia's player. That damn thing puts hooks everywhere.
On legacy hardware - I have a 300MHz Thinkpad i1400 that I rescued from my mother-in-law and replaced the dead 4gb hard drive with a 40gb drive with an 8 mb cache. Increased RAM to 256mb and tried to install no less than seven Linux distributions. I'm comfortable in both Linux and Windows and my mail/web/irc server runs FC4.
Anyway, I installed FC4 and the current releases of Slackware, SuSE, Ubuntu, DSL, Puppy Linux and Vector Linux. None of the installations went without pain - mainly because of the opl3sa2 sound card and NeoMagic video. The only distribution where I had all the hardware working at the same time was with Vector Linux (damn nice distribution, BTW) - but the 2.6 kernel would crash on shutdown and the 2.4 kernel didn't like my soundcard. Fortunately almost all distributions saw my wireless card and that part worked flawlessly.
So - after much pain I installed Windows XP from CD and Service Pack 2 from my USB flash drive. Popped in the WLAN card (had to obtain and install a driver for it) and everything works.
I'm a big fan of xfce as a window manager - lotsa features and reasonably fast but not as bloated as KDE or Gnome. Sorry, guys - but XP ran circles around any Linux distribution I installed.
...I don't want the federal government getting involved with this. This is just censorship towards minors. Minors should be able to view what they please, but parents should be the ones responsible for stopping them from viewing things they don't wish for their young ones to view...
*puts on parent hat*
Yes, I'm a parent. My kids are grown and gone, though.
Agree that minors should be able to view anything their parents think is appropriate and that it's a parent's job to monitor kids' internet use, TV use, whatever. I see this is a less-intrusive tool than NetNanny or SurfControl.
True story. Several years ago I was using a cache browser to find something I'd visited a week before and ran into a whole pile of pr0n in my cache. Had the Typical Parental Response directed at my teenage son. Humiliated, he left the room and I was still seething a bit.
Enter the spousal unit. The spousal unit is my son's stepmother, and she said "I have one question for you. Did you have a stash of Playboys when you were his age?"
Fuck. Couldn't argue that one - had to go apologize to the kid for hollering at him and explained that while I did not approve, I'd prefer he got his pr0n fix at home. Showed him how to clear a cache and said that I wanted to inflict a few discussions about pr0n on him.
I learned through these conversations that my son believed women posed for the pictures because they liked to, that he'd never considered that financial need, drug addiction, pimps or organized crime might be larger factors than a girl getting her jollies posing naked on the internet. Asked him if he'd like a nude picture of him on the web - he thought the idea was pretty disgusting so I asked him why he thought a girl would figure any differently.
It was the start of many such conversations. He's 23 now and feels I'm not *quite* the moron I was when he was 16, but catching the kid surfing sites I felt were inappropriate did lead to a few interesting discussions.
I never did *censor* my kids' internet use, but I think responsible parents do know what their kids are viewing. They also know where their children are, who they're with and whether there's any adult supervision available.
A parent's job is to be a parent, not a buddy. Too bad most of us don't learn to be great parents until we're too old to have kids:-*
Right now I use a Kyocera SE44 slider. Tiny phone, tiny screen. Works great, though. The buttons are too small for my fat fingers and the screen is getting a little hard for my presbyopic eyes to see, but it works until the current contract's up.
But - I'm closer to 50 than 40 (or even 45) and have been a professional geek most of my adult life. At this point in my life I want *simple* technology that works.
Last May I kicked my cable TV provider to the curb and got a satellite dish. Got two TVs and two computers wired up for the price I was paying coughcomcastcough for a a two-tv digital cable setup (had analog-only to the computers). Plus, I got this really cool DVR;-)
That same month I told the local phone company to take a hike, ported our home number to the spousal unit's cell and got a cell phone for myself. Since only about ten people have the number to my phone, interruptions have decreased significantly.
Last fall when my mother-in-law's laptop died (second HD failure) I took her down to the Apple store and she bought an iMac. She's almost 80 years old and can surf the web, do email and whatever alse she needs to do with a minimum of fuss. Once I got the iMac connected to her wireless network she *never* called me again for technical support. I'm so impressed I'm getting ready to buy an iMac for me. Bye Bye, Microsoft;-)
But I digress.
As I continue to try to simplify my life (which is what technology's supposed to do, ain't it?) all I want is a phone that *makes phone calls*, has an address book that I can synchronize with my computer and doesn't play games, MP3s, support polyphonic ringtones, have a camera (and especially not a flash - I own a digital camera, honest) and so on.
Of course, if you looked up 'curmudgeon' in the dictionary you'd see my picture, but the older I get the *less* impressed I am with devices that can do everything.
But can't do any of them well. Can I have just a phone, please?
I have a 40GB Pocketec USB 2.0 hard drive that's powered just fine over USB 2.0 - no Firewire, but it's smaller and (IM frequently less than HO) cuter than the Mercury. I'm seeing them on Froogle for as little less than the Mercury also - but I paid a lot more than that for mine when it first came out;-)
...Don't make your hearing impaired employees give it up unelss you're providing them with something that is equally as good. The sidekick has built-in softare for telephone relay chat services, absolutely essential for deaf users.
Thank you for the information - I guess Nokia just markets the SK; I didn't know they don't make them;-)
I'm trying hard to be sensitive to user needs here - that's why the sitdown to see what the users think about a SK --> Blackberry switch. It's already been pointed out to me by upper management that I'm not gonna get to cram anything down anybody's throat - not that I'd want to anyway.
I can think of about four TTY relay services that work with a Blackberry - and you're absolutely right. This is one of those things where user preference will win out. There's a corporate edict for me to reduce the number of cell carriers in the enterprise, but in the end if I'm left with ten devices on a T-Mobile account I figure management can live with that;-)
Is it just me, or is there not really that much point to this (unless you're deaf)? After all, the point of a text is that you can send it when you're not in a position to get involved in a lengthy conversation, just need a quick snippet of information, or just to send "pub, 8pm". But with IM, you're effectively just having a conversation.... why not just talk? Surely it's easier and more effective than typing like mad at keys that are hardly designed for the purpose?
Part of my job is to provide text messaging solutions for hearing-impaired employees. Got a meeting this afternoon with the eight hearing-impaired employees, two signers and the Equal Opportunity office to talk about solutions.
Right now they're using Nokia Sidekicks for SMS and I'm trying to switch them over to Blackberrys. The Sidekick is kind of a neat device with a full QWERTY keyboard but the only vendor that offers them is T-Mobile and during testing we found the Blackberrys had better coverage, lower latency and could receive push email instead of pulling it with the Sidekicks. Also, this'd let the buiding's Emergency Operations Center send one email to a group and notify all of them of an evauaction drill or an emergency.
I'd *really* like to get T-Mobile out of my enterprise. Right now I have a bit less than 500 cellular devices deployed and the only thing keeping T-Mobile around is these damn Sidekicks.
But I digress. My point is there are SMS solutions for hearing-impaired folks that actually work pretty well - and for the folks who really need to text it's a great solution.
Whopping 4k RAM and I still play Advanced Dungeons and Dragons on an Aquarius emulator;-)
Next? Atari 800XL - when I was stationed in Germany I got a Eurospec model (faster clock speed since CPU speed was tied to graphics output - the Euro models were 25% faster).
You can do things with these machines you simply can't do with modern PCs - f'rinstance you can copy the floppy drive's ROM to system RAM, change a couple pointers and get the old 90k floppy drives reading and writing 180k per side.
How many people have actually seen (much less owned) a disk notcher?;-)
A project manager should naturally know more than his staff as he needs to make decisions that require technical knowledge of the issues involved.
Respectfully disagree. I'm an IT project manager with a strong technical background and a sprinkling of acronyms after my name. My job is to paint the big picture and keep the project on track - it's not my job to make technical decisions. It *is* my job to act on technical recommendations from qualified subordinates.
IT project managers should *not* make technical decisions unless required to resolve differences between subordinate teams - that's what subordinate managers are for.
The transition from geek to manager is a difficult one and I think many companies make a huge mistake hiring managers from the technical ranks - well, not without training them as managers first. Out of the box a good tech is almost *never* a good manager.
I didn't mean to imply that $FOO and $BAR are (or should be) mutually exclusive, but did intend to set up a straw man to illustrate a point. I was speaking more to the smartphone thing than the $100 laptop thing, but I do figure even a mesh network requires connectivity to resources outside the community to be really effective.
And you're right - there will always be some kids who go to bed hungry.
How are disadvantaged third-world types going to use smartphones without cell towers - or are we only talking about urban disadvantaged third-world types?
As others have pointed out perhaps we should give them the infrastructure to feed themselves, medicine, education and the ability to have sex without killing themselves off before we give them laptops *or* cell phones.
Grrr. How can we justify missions to Mars when kids are still going to bed hungry?
I think you should. If you go back to a single bud in the good ear I think you'll find after a few months you'll be able to hear equally well out of both ears.
...It's been a long time since anybody cared about USENET, especially since the advent of web forums and competent WWW searching. Rest in peace, USENET. We'd miss you, except you have no use anymore, and we've hardly noticed you've gone.
Horsefeathers.
I'm still in the newsgroups every day, reading in alt.support.cancer and sci.med.diseases.cancer and posting in alt.support.cancer.breast as I've found them to be the most comprehensive resource available to support a sick significant other. Been doing it for more than six years.
You'll also find me in *.linux.* getting answers to 'how do I' questions and in one of the *.mp3.* groups seeing what's new.
I think all the people who think Usenet is dead should continue not to use it - then we oldtimers who started out with FIDONet (way before anybody could even spell 'web-based discussion board') can have our resource back.
Sorry for being pernickety, but unless your install is getting a bit old and crotchety, oryou have a dying hard drive, I fail to see why it would be any slower now than when it was new...
Simple. Bloatware;-)
You're correct, though. If I ran the same OS and applications I used when I built the machine it'd run like a rocket.
Got a plain old dual processor 1GHz box that with video and hard drive upgrades is still competent. It does everything I need it to do, although processor- or memory-intensive processes are getting a bit sluggish. Rendering video takes a little time, but that's more because the application I use renders in a single thread - but I can play games and render video at the same time;-)
I still believe if you could remove all the latency from I/O subsystems in a modern PC you'd have more processor than you could use by a longshot - IMO high-end PCs just wait for data faster than older machines, and a lot of the performance boost you see with a new machine is simply masking latency in other subsystems.
PCI-X and improved memory bandwidth will solve some of these problems, but it's a bandaid at best. I do tend to chuckle at people buying the newest/fastest peripheral, not understanding that a lot of the time the peripheral will talk faster than the nine(?) year-old PCI bus that's feeding it.
When troubleshooting performance issues the component that's working at 100% capacity is *always* the bottleneck - and with most home and business users, that bottleneck is almost never the CPU itself.
I have two XP boxen and one FC4 mail/web/irc server at home.
Although Linux has come a heck of a long way since I first installed a Yggdrasil distribution more than a few years ago, I don't think most computer users *want* to get that deep into the internals of their hardware, filesystem or applications. Ease of use is light-years better than it was five years ago but still isn't where it needs to be.
I'm not a big fan of Gnome or KDE either, finding as much or more bloat there as I do in Windows these days - but keep them both installed so I can run applications from either under xfce4 - now *there's* a window manager;-)
For me, consistency between applications keeps me using Windows as a desktop environment and the configurability (is that even a word?) of Linux makes it perfect for a home or departmental server.
Within reason I'd think a 'high-powered reader' probably wouldn't make much difference if the tag was invisible to a normal reader - passive RFID tags are 'powered' by reflected energy.
I found your example of the roadside bomb fascinating - and one I hadn't considered. However, whatever one used to hide the IED would also interfere with RFID data transfer - and we're talking about something that pretty much has to be close-range.
But you're right - there are quite a few security concerns. It's not cost effective for the gummint to create a custom solution, so you can pretty much be assured that any passport RFID solution is gonna use COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) products. If that's the case there may not be any way to tell the difference between a passport and a box of cornflakes without actually reading the tag.
Anyway, thanks for the food for thought this morning. It was a great topic to bat around with my morning coffee;-)
I'm the RFID guy for the federal agency where I work - assuming they're using passive tags they've got a range of ~3m (reliably, about one meter). All one would have to do is encrypt the data on the RFID tag and there'd be no reason to sniff tags.
Saw an article with pictures last year - I don't understand why this is news now, unless it's just that Uncle Sam's Flying Circus is finally testing transparent aluminum in applications.
I'm a federal employee and information assurance is a huge part of my job. I don't understand why CERT needed another resource rather than tying things into NISTs shiny new National Vulnerability Database. Seems to me that one-stop shopping for both software vulnerabilities and malware alerts would be the thing to do.
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Too bad you posted as AC - I thought this was great.
;-)
You're absolutely correct - my personal opinion is that if you don't use it at least once a week it has no business in your system tray. Reminds me of the guy who drives around all summer with half a dozen bags of sand in his trunk because he might need them next winter - and then complains about performance
Computing resources are limited resources - the more crap you have running on startup the worse your machine's gonna run. For me the most intrusive (and offensive) of these programs is RealMedia's player. That damn thing puts hooks everywhere.
On legacy hardware - I have a 300MHz Thinkpad i1400 that I rescued from my mother-in-law and replaced the dead 4gb hard drive with a 40gb drive with an 8 mb cache. Increased RAM to 256mb and tried to install no less than seven Linux distributions. I'm comfortable in both Linux and Windows and my mail/web/irc server runs FC4.
Anyway, I installed FC4 and the current releases of Slackware, SuSE, Ubuntu, DSL, Puppy Linux and Vector Linux. None of the installations went without pain - mainly because of the opl3sa2 sound card and NeoMagic video. The only distribution where I had all the hardware working at the same time was with Vector Linux (damn nice distribution, BTW) - but the 2.6 kernel would crash on shutdown and the 2.4 kernel didn't like my soundcard. Fortunately almost all distributions saw my wireless card and that part worked flawlessly.
So - after much pain I installed Windows XP from CD and Service Pack 2 from my USB flash drive. Popped in the WLAN card (had to obtain and install a driver for it) and everything works.
I'm a big fan of xfce as a window manager - lotsa features and reasonably fast but not as bloated as KDE or Gnome. Sorry, guys - but XP ran circles around any Linux distribution I installed.
*puts on parent hat*
Yes, I'm a parent. My kids are grown and gone, though.
Agree that minors should be able to view anything their parents think is appropriate and that it's a parent's job to monitor kids' internet use, TV use, whatever. I see this is a less-intrusive tool than NetNanny or SurfControl.
True story. Several years ago I was using a cache browser to find something I'd visited a week before and ran into a whole pile of pr0n in my cache. Had the Typical Parental Response directed at my teenage son. Humiliated, he left the room and I was still seething a bit.
Enter the spousal unit. The spousal unit is my son's stepmother, and she said "I have one question for you. Did you have a stash of Playboys when you were his age?"
Fuck. Couldn't argue that one - had to go apologize to the kid for hollering at him and explained that while I did not approve, I'd prefer he got his pr0n fix at home. Showed him how to clear a cache and said that I wanted to inflict a few discussions about pr0n on him.
I learned through these conversations that my son believed women posed for the pictures because they liked to, that he'd never considered that financial need, drug addiction, pimps or organized crime might be larger factors than a girl getting her jollies posing naked on the internet. Asked him if he'd like a nude picture of him on the web - he thought the idea was pretty disgusting so I asked him why he thought a girl would figure any differently.
It was the start of many such conversations. He's 23 now and feels I'm not *quite* the moron I was when he was 16, but catching the kid surfing sites I felt were inappropriate did lead to a few interesting discussions.
I never did *censor* my kids' internet use, but I think responsible parents do know what their kids are viewing. They also know where their children are, who they're with and whether there's any adult supervision available.
A parent's job is to be a parent, not a buddy. Too bad most of us don't learn to be great parents until we're too old to have kids :-*
Right now I use a Kyocera SE44 slider. Tiny phone, tiny screen. Works great, though. The buttons are too small for my fat fingers and the screen is getting a little hard for my presbyopic eyes to see, but it works until the current contract's up.
;-)
;-)
But - I'm closer to 50 than 40 (or even 45) and have been a professional geek most of my adult life. At this point in my life I want *simple* technology that works.
Last May I kicked my cable TV provider to the curb and got a satellite dish. Got two TVs and two computers wired up for the price I was paying coughcomcastcough for a a two-tv digital cable setup (had analog-only to the computers). Plus, I got this really cool DVR
That same month I told the local phone company to take a hike, ported our home number to the spousal unit's cell and got a cell phone for myself. Since only about ten people have the number to my phone, interruptions have decreased significantly.
Last fall when my mother-in-law's laptop died (second HD failure) I took her down to the Apple store and she bought an iMac. She's almost 80 years old and can surf the web, do email and whatever alse she needs to do with a minimum of fuss. Once I got the iMac connected to her wireless network she *never* called me again for technical support. I'm so impressed I'm getting ready to buy an iMac for me. Bye Bye, Microsoft
But I digress.
As I continue to try to simplify my life (which is what technology's supposed to do, ain't it?) all I want is a phone that *makes phone calls*, has an address book that I can synchronize with my computer and doesn't play games, MP3s, support polyphonic ringtones, have a camera (and especially not a flash - I own a digital camera, honest) and so on.
Of course, if you looked up 'curmudgeon' in the dictionary you'd see my picture, but the older I get the *less* impressed I am with devices that can do everything.
But can't do any of them well. Can I have just a phone, please?
I have a 40GB Pocketec USB 2.0 hard drive that's powered just fine over USB 2.0 - no Firewire, but it's smaller and (IM frequently less than HO) cuter than the Mercury. I'm seeing them on Froogle for as little less than the Mercury also - but I paid a lot more than that for mine when it first came out ;-)
Yeah, but I need corporate email :-(
thanks -
Thank you for the information - I guess Nokia just markets the SK; I didn't know they don't make them ;-)
I'm trying hard to be sensitive to user needs here - that's why the sitdown to see what the users think about a SK --> Blackberry switch. It's already been pointed out to me by upper management that I'm not gonna get to cram anything down anybody's throat - not that I'd want to anyway.
I can think of about four TTY relay services that work with a Blackberry - and you're absolutely right. This is one of those things where user preference will win out. There's a corporate edict for me to reduce the number of cell carriers in the enterprise, but in the end if I'm left with ten devices on a T-Mobile account I figure management can live with that ;-)
Again, thanks for the information.
Part of my job is to provide text messaging solutions for hearing-impaired employees. Got a meeting this afternoon with the eight hearing-impaired employees, two signers and the Equal Opportunity office to talk about solutions.
Right now they're using Nokia Sidekicks for SMS and I'm trying to switch them over to Blackberrys. The Sidekick is kind of a neat device with a full QWERTY keyboard but the only vendor that offers them is T-Mobile and during testing we found the Blackberrys had better coverage, lower latency and could receive push email instead of pulling it with the Sidekicks. Also, this'd let the buiding's Emergency Operations Center send one email to a group and notify all of them of an evauaction drill or an emergency.
I'd *really* like to get T-Mobile out of my enterprise. Right now I have a bit less than 500 cellular devices deployed and the only thing keeping T-Mobile around is these damn Sidekicks.
But I digress. My point is there are SMS solutions for hearing-impaired folks that actually work pretty well - and for the folks who really need to text it's a great solution.
Not a thing ;-)
Yup.®
;-)
;-)
Whopping 4k RAM and I still play Advanced Dungeons and Dragons on an Aquarius emulator
Next? Atari 800XL - when I was stationed in Germany I got a Eurospec model (faster clock speed since CPU speed was tied to graphics output - the Euro models were 25% faster).
You can do things with these machines you simply can't do with modern PCs - f'rinstance you can copy the floppy drive's ROM to system RAM, change a couple pointers and get the old 90k floppy drives reading and writing 180k per side.
How many people have actually seen (much less owned) a disk notcher?
Respectfully disagree. I'm an IT project manager with a strong technical background and a sprinkling of acronyms after my name. My job is to paint the big picture and keep the project on track - it's not my job to make technical decisions. It *is* my job to act on technical recommendations from qualified subordinates.
IT project managers should *not* make technical decisions unless required to resolve differences between subordinate teams - that's what subordinate managers are for.
The transition from geek to manager is a difficult one and I think many companies make a huge mistake hiring managers from the technical ranks - well, not without training them as managers first. Out of the box a good tech is almost *never* a good manager.
Interesting observations ;-)
I didn't mean to imply that $FOO and $BAR are (or should be) mutually exclusive, but did intend to set up a straw man to illustrate a point. I was speaking more to the smartphone thing than the $100 laptop thing, but I do figure even a mesh network requires connectivity to resources outside the community to be really effective.
And you're right - there will always be some kids who go to bed hungry.
cheers -
As others have pointed out perhaps we should give them the infrastructure to feed themselves, medicine, education and the ability to have sex without killing themselves off before we give them laptops *or* cell phones.
Grrr. How can we justify missions to Mars when kids are still going to bed hungry?
I think you should. If you go back to a single bud in the good ear I think you'll find after a few months you'll be able to hear equally well out of both ears.
Horsefeathers.
I'm still in the newsgroups every day, reading in alt.support.cancer and sci.med.diseases.cancer and posting in alt.support.cancer.breast as I've found them to be the most comprehensive resource available to support a sick significant other. Been doing it for more than six years.
You'll also find me in *.linux.* getting answers to 'how do I' questions and in one of the *.mp3.* groups seeing what's new.
I think all the people who think Usenet is dead should continue not to use it - then we oldtimers who started out with FIDONet (way before anybody could even spell 'web-based discussion board') can have our resource back.
Simple. Bloatware ;-)
You're correct, though. If I ran the same OS and applications I used when I built the machine it'd run like a rocket.
PCI-X 533 is half again as fast as PCIe.
;-)
Good thing you posted as AC
Got a plain old dual processor 1GHz box that with video and hard drive upgrades is still competent. It does everything I need it to do, although processor- or memory-intensive processes are getting a bit sluggish. Rendering video takes a little time, but that's more because the application I use renders in a single thread - but I can play games and render video at the same time ;-)
I still believe if you could remove all the latency from I/O subsystems in a modern PC you'd have more processor than you could use by a longshot - IMO high-end PCs just wait for data faster than older machines, and a lot of the performance boost you see with a new machine is simply masking latency in other subsystems.
PCI-X and improved memory bandwidth will solve some of these problems, but it's a bandaid at best. I do tend to chuckle at people buying the newest/fastest peripheral, not understanding that a lot of the time the peripheral will talk faster than the nine(?) year-old PCI bus that's feeding it.
When troubleshooting performance issues the component that's working at 100% capacity is *always* the bottleneck - and with most home and business users, that bottleneck is almost never the CPU itself.
I have two XP boxen and one FC4 mail/web/irc server at home.
;-)
;-)
Although Linux has come a heck of a long way since I first installed a Yggdrasil distribution more than a few years ago, I don't think most computer users *want* to get that deep into the internals of their hardware, filesystem or applications. Ease of use is light-years better than it was five years ago but still isn't where it needs to be.
I'm not a big fan of Gnome or KDE either, finding as much or more bloat there as I do in Windows these days - but keep them both installed so I can run applications from either under xfce4 - now *there's* a window manager
For me, consistency between applications keeps me using Windows as a desktop environment and the configurability (is that even a word?) of Linux makes it perfect for a home or departmental server.
I'm happy dabbling in both worlds, actually
Within reason I'd think a 'high-powered reader' probably wouldn't make much difference if the tag was invisible to a normal reader - passive RFID tags are 'powered' by reflected energy.
I found your example of the roadside bomb fascinating - and one I hadn't considered. However, whatever one used to hide the IED would also interfere with RFID data transfer - and we're talking about something that pretty much has to be close-range.
But you're right - there are quite a few security concerns. It's not cost effective for the gummint to create a custom solution, so you can pretty much be assured that any passport RFID solution is gonna use COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) products. If that's the case there may not be any way to tell the difference between a passport and a box of cornflakes without actually reading the tag.
Anyway, thanks for the food for thought this morning. It was a great topic to bat around with my morning coffee ;-)
The Faraday cage is also a good idea.
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/8/8/9
Nice clickable picture of transparent aluminum here - dated August 2004.
Well, if we're establishing precendence [sic] maybe we should just execute the bastards. Wouldn't that be more of a deterrent?
If everybody would learn to bid properly there'd be no need for a sniping service.
I'm a federal employee and information assurance is a huge part of my job. I don't understand why CERT needed another resource rather than tying things into NISTs shiny new National Vulnerability Database. Seems to me that one-stop shopping for both software vulnerabilities and malware alerts would be the thing to do.