Sending a raw error code to 99 percent of Internet users is bad service. Better to catch the code and deliver a plain language message.
Guess what browsers and web-proxies have done for, umm, 10 years? Mine says "Name Error: The domain name does not exist". What could OpenDNS possibly add to this simple message, other than their spam?
Short of running their own DNS, what's a better approach?
Better approach to what? Why not just use your ISPs nameserver?
They're providing a near-zero value product, spam you with ads in dubious locations (NX) and collect a lot of personal data with borderline phishing methods (google proxy) without announcing either of that clearly upfront.
And if you are concerned with worm infections, why not run OpenDNS + IDS + Antivir?
Because OpenDNS provides no added protection? The other two are plenty sufficient while nobody knows whether the OpenDNS detection is reliable nor whether they will bother to add detection of future worms etc.
Remember many phishing toolbars claim to protect you against other phishing toolbars. OpenDNS is running the same model here.
Agree'd. The "Open" in their name is misleading. In reality many consider OpenDNS to be a scam operation.
Furthermore nobody should rely on a DNS provider (of all things!) to report worm infections. The idea is so wrong, it reminds me of the TV scams where they want to sell you a worthless product, bundled with 5 other, totally unrelated worthless products. "Buy this quality home-trainer for only $499 and you'll get this USB-stick, a bar of soap, two lightbulbs and a chinese ipod-knockoff, for free!".
If you're concerned with worm infections then you run antivirus software and maybe an IDS (e.g. snort) on your internet gateway. Both will report malicious traffic much more reliable than OpenDNS because that's what they're designed to do.
Well, *every* bugtracker software does that, including the OSS ones. Redmine, trac, MantisBT, googlecode, launchpad, Jira, Bugzilla, to name just a few.
Well, I think it's a bit far fetched to call kids that go through their archival phase (which is a compensation behaviour) a valid use case. Yes it's nice that they can. But it normally cools down with age and generally even those kids have a hard time explaining to anyone why they need a video and audio collection that rivals video-stores or radio-stations.
1TB holds 250 dvd-rips without compression. Or roughly 1000 full-length movies in the more common compressed form (divx etc.). That's good for one year of constant consumption of three movies per day (about 6 hours), every day...
Consequently I think even these part-time pirates will stop caring at some point in the near future, simply because they won't be able to fill the drive up before their spleen ends.
We're getting there. Seriously who is using up 2TB and in what timeframe? There's always use cases for big drives (video editing and databases) but the average consumer will probably stop caring soon.
The key difference is that the Unices have had a security model from day 1 while windows started as a single-user system. Linux alone (not counting other Unices) is approaching 20% market-share in the server market which is potentially more attractive to malware writers because the hosts are usually better connected and better equipped. The reason we rarely see botnets span significantly into the server-area is not that the bad guys wouldn't be trying (look at your server-logs sometime) or because the average server-admin was better qualified (look at the millions of broken default installs from various hosting providers). The reason is that it's, on average, a much harder target. Unix systems have proper firewalling, capability constraints, process accounting etc. built in. They're more transparent and easier to harden - which is exactly what would happen if we'd start to see more widespread attacks.
The mechanics of software security are not exactly rocket science when layered bottom up. Windows is troubled because they basically sprinkled one thin layer of "security powder" on the outside of an otherwise wide open core. Consequently your "personal firewall" is implemented as an afterthought and can be trivially bypassed from an unprivileged account. Such tricks are a bit harder to pull off on OSX or linux.
And how does that relate to the point I made? By using OSX or linux you get both, the benefit of a system that was designed with security in mind and the benefit of a system that isn't targeted much by worm writers.
Interestingly you can already be 99,9999% safe simply by using a Mac or Linux. Neither e-mail nor browsing applications are broken per se - it's that one operating system.
Yes and yes. Interesting to hear that click-to-focus is not mandatory anymore? And windows don't necessarily raise to top anymore when they receive focus? That may be worth a second look then. These two points constantly nuts when trying to work with many windows.
And with magic titlebar I mean the top titlebar, yes. It leads to funny effects when you're not sure which app is currently focussed and I never understood the advantage of putting app-contextual options so far away from the app. It just has never stopped feeling "wrong" to me.
Mandatory click to raise: Last time I tried there was no way to configure "focus follows mouse" in OSX. Also there was no way to prevent OSX from raising a window when clicked - which makes "quickly" entering some data in a half-obscured window a pain because it destroys your window order.
Understanding the motivation behind the way the operating system UIs work will probably go a long way to reducing my frustration in the future.
Good luck with that, didn't work for me. I still use my macbook occassionally and I still hate their separation between window and application switching. In general, when I "ALT-TAB" (or "CMD-TAB" fwiw) then I want to quickly browse through all windows that are available to me. The UI is invited to provide a smart ordering for me (i.e. show other windows of the current application first) but the mental effort of distinguishing between a "window switch" and an "app switch" never worked for me.
But frankly OSX as a whole just isn't for me - even though I really wanted to like it and literally worked for 2 months straight only on my MacBook in an attempt to learn it. The semantics of the dock are still counter-intuitive to me and showstoppers like mandatory click-to-raise or the absurd "magic titlebar" ultimately made me go back to my linux desktop.
Well, I don't know what a statistical relevant sample size is but we're not talking 2 or 3 offbrand drives here but more like 10-20 per year and roughly a hundred seagates. The offbrands do regularly sneak in when seagate is either not in stock or when someone makes us a good deal "but only with these nice WDs".
It's obviously still anecdotical evidence but we *do* take notice when a seagate fails because it happens so rarely. And that's with about 700 seagates and maybe 100 offbrands deployed right now.
I will. Shit like this happens from time to time, read up on IBM's legendary "deathstar" fiasco to see how to really turn such a thing into a PR disaster.
Seagate on the other hand is acknowledging the issue and seems to be communicating about it as open as possible. Plus they offer RMA and recovery services. What more can they do, really?
We have bought almost exclusively seagate for our S-ATA disks over the past 5 years because their failure rate has consistently been lower than that of the competition. They have a reputation to lose and it seems like they're trying their best to keep it.
I see no reason why one screwed up model should remove my trust in a company that has served us well for so long. Cut them some slack and compare your historic failure rates of seagate drives versus others.
Well, I for one re-downloaded a few albums that I already own from piratebay simply because I was too lazy to rip them myself. Why go through the hassle of shuffling physical discs when one click of a button will do the same?
Furthermore I occassionally got additional live-recordings, rare recordings, bootlegs, even documentaries bundled with the discographies that I downloaded - that's what I call added value.
Re:The Zen of First Post
on
The Zen of SOA
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
defined SOA in the actual posting
Service Oriented Architecture. It's a software development design pattern that makes suggestions on how data, logic and responsibilities could be arranged in a distributed system.
and maybe put in a sentence or two on what it's all about
The original and stated purpose of such acronyms is to give people a common vocabulary that makes it easier to talk about technology without dropping down to details every time. In reality SOA, like many of its relatives, has been immediately watered down to the point where the actual purpose becomes clear: To sell books, to blend decision makers with fancy tech speak on shiny powerpoint slides and, generally, to sound smart by dropping them randomly in meetings.
It falls into the same bucket as terms like "SCRUM", "Extreme Programming", "Agile", "Web2.0" etc. in that there is not "one" SOA with one ruleset or recipe to follow. Instead it's a generic tag that everybody and their dog uses to label their latest brainfart about distributed programming.
These tags serve an important purpose nonetheless; they are strong indicators for meaningless content and clueless people. In that role they're real timesavers because whenever you encounter them in the wild you know that it's safe to stop reading/stop listening from that point onwards.
A new low in slashdot history. Can't remember a worse headline and article in recent times, can anyone else? This article is just one big WTF. Is slashdot that desperate for traffic?
By these standards your nut article will indeed make a headline soon. And why did my submission not get posted, yet: My windows PC with a 27 inch screen runs at 1600x1200 resolution, my ubuntu on a 15 incher only 1024x768. Are windows graphics drivers better than the linux kernel?"
Yes, it's human error, but not the type of error where the pilot actually flies it into the ground.
Yep. It's more the type where the pilot leaves the cockpit to take a dump and notices too late (with pants already down) that he forgot to put the autopilot on. Used to happen all the time in commercial aviation, that's why they've added autopilot-enable buttons to the loo. Nowadays those cause other problems of their own...
But he owned a typewriter, the equivalent of that time. Yes, there may be a handful of absolute geniuses in the world that, for some reason, never learned to use a computer. Something tells me that this woman is not one of them.
Use your common sense. "Boot time" obviously refers to the time that the user is waiting for the machine and not the other way round. And "usable desktop" is obviously the point in time when the user can begin launching his applications without significant slowdowns from boot-tasks still grinding in the background.
This is obviously always an apples-to-oranges comparison but with just a tiny bit of common sense it can still be more meaningful than "OSX boots in 4 seconds".
Slashdot Mirror
Guess what browsers and web-proxies have done for, umm, 10 years? Mine says "Name Error: The domain name does not exist". What could OpenDNS possibly add to this simple message, other than their spam?
Better approach to what?
Why not just use your ISPs nameserver?
The domains that you resolve, obviously. Good for a nice browsing profile.
They're providing a near-zero value product, spam you with ads in dubious locations (NX) and collect a lot of personal data with borderline phishing methods (google proxy) without announcing either of that clearly upfront.
Because OpenDNS provides no added protection? The other two are plenty sufficient while nobody knows whether the OpenDNS detection is reliable nor whether they will bother to add detection of future worms etc.
Remember many phishing toolbars claim to protect you against other phishing toolbars. OpenDNS is running the same model here.
Agree'd. The "Open" in their name is misleading. In reality many consider OpenDNS to be a scam operation.
Furthermore nobody should rely on a DNS provider (of all things!) to report worm infections. The idea is so wrong, it reminds me of the TV scams where they want to sell you a worthless product, bundled with 5 other, totally unrelated worthless products. "Buy this quality home-trainer for only $499 and you'll get this USB-stick, a bar of soap, two lightbulbs and a chinese ipod-knockoff, for free!".
If you're concerned with worm infections then you run antivirus software and maybe an IDS (e.g. snort) on your internet gateway.
Both will report malicious traffic much more reliable than OpenDNS because that's what they're designed to do.
Better yet, smoke some of that realistic grass. Then you'll be writing rave reviews, too.
You may want to take a look at redmine which many consider to be "trac done right".
Well, *every* bugtracker software does that, including the OSS ones.
Redmine, trac, MantisBT, googlecode, launchpad, Jira, Bugzilla, to name just a few.
It's not quite a unique selling point.
Well, I think it's a bit far fetched to call kids that go through their archival phase (which is a compensation behaviour) a valid use case.
Yes it's nice that they can. But it normally cools down with age and generally even those kids have a hard time explaining to anyone why they need a video and audio collection that rivals video-stores or radio-stations.
1TB holds 250 dvd-rips without compression. Or roughly 1000 full-length movies in the more common compressed form (divx etc.).
That's good for one year of constant consumption of three movies per day (about 6 hours), every day...
Consequently I think even these part-time pirates will stop caring at some point in the near future, simply because they won't be able to fill the drive up before their spleen ends.
We're getting there. Seriously who is using up 2TB and in what timeframe?
There's always use cases for big drives (video editing and databases) but the average consumer will probably stop caring soon.
The key difference is that the Unices have had a security model from day 1 while windows started as a single-user system.
Linux alone (not counting other Unices) is approaching 20% market-share in the server market which is potentially more attractive to malware writers because the hosts are usually better connected and better equipped. The reason we rarely see botnets span significantly into the server-area is not that the bad guys wouldn't be trying (look at your server-logs sometime) or because the average server-admin was better qualified (look at the millions of broken default installs from various hosting providers). The reason is that it's, on average, a much harder target.
Unix systems have proper firewalling, capability constraints, process accounting etc. built in. They're more transparent and easier to harden - which is exactly what would happen if we'd start to see more widespread attacks.
The mechanics of software security are not exactly rocket science when layered bottom up. Windows is troubled because they basically sprinkled one thin layer of "security powder" on the outside of an otherwise wide open core. Consequently your "personal firewall" is implemented as an afterthought and can be trivially bypassed from an unprivileged account. Such tricks are a bit harder to pull off on OSX or linux.
And how does that relate to the point I made?
By using OSX or linux you get both, the benefit of a system that was designed with security in mind and the benefit of a system that isn't targeted much by worm writers.
Before trying to sound smart in public you should maybe look up your catch phrase...
ion3.
Interestingly you can already be 99,9999% safe simply by using a Mac or Linux.
Neither e-mail nor browsing applications are broken per se - it's that one operating system.
Yes and yes. Interesting to hear that click-to-focus is not mandatory anymore? And windows don't necessarily raise to top anymore when they receive focus? That may be worth a second look then. These two points constantly nuts when trying to work with many windows.
And with magic titlebar I mean the top titlebar, yes. It leads to funny effects when you're not sure which app is currently focussed and I never understood the advantage of putting app-contextual options so far away from the app. It just has never stopped feeling "wrong" to me.
Mandatory click to raise: Last time I tried there was no way to configure "focus follows mouse" in OSX. Also there was no way to prevent OSX from raising a window when clicked - which makes "quickly" entering some data in a half-obscured window a pain because it destroys your window order.
Good luck with that, didn't work for me.
I still use my macbook occassionally and I still hate their separation between window and application switching.
In general, when I "ALT-TAB" (or "CMD-TAB" fwiw) then I want to quickly browse through all windows that are available to me. The UI is invited to provide a smart ordering for me (i.e. show other windows of the current application first) but the mental effort of distinguishing between a "window switch" and an "app switch" never worked for me.
But frankly OSX as a whole just isn't for me - even though I really wanted to like it and literally worked for 2 months straight only on my MacBook in an attempt to learn it. The semantics of the dock are still counter-intuitive to me and showstoppers like mandatory click-to-raise or the absurd "magic titlebar" ultimately made me go back to my linux desktop.
Well, I don't know what a statistical relevant sample size is but we're not talking 2 or 3 offbrand drives here but more like 10-20 per year and roughly a hundred seagates. The offbrands do regularly sneak in when seagate is either not in stock or when someone makes us a good deal "but only with these nice WDs".
It's obviously still anecdotical evidence but we *do* take notice when a seagate fails because it happens so rarely. And that's with about 700 seagates and maybe 100 offbrands deployed right now.
I will.
Shit like this happens from time to time, read up on IBM's legendary "deathstar" fiasco to see how to really turn such a thing into a PR disaster.
Seagate on the other hand is acknowledging the issue and seems to be communicating about it as open as possible. Plus they offer RMA and recovery services. What more can they do, really?
We have bought almost exclusively seagate for our S-ATA disks over the past 5 years because their failure rate has consistently been lower than that of the competition. They have a reputation to lose and it seems like they're trying their best to keep it.
I see no reason why one screwed up model should remove my trust in a company that has served us well for so long. Cut them some slack and compare your historic failure rates of seagate drives versus others.
Well, I for one re-downloaded a few albums that I already own from piratebay simply because I was too lazy to rip them myself.
Why go through the hassle of shuffling physical discs when one click of a button will do the same?
Furthermore I occassionally got additional live-recordings, rare recordings, bootlegs, even documentaries bundled with the discographies that I downloaded - that's what I call added value.
Service Oriented Architecture.
It's a software development design pattern that makes suggestions on how data, logic and responsibilities could be arranged in a distributed system.
The original and stated purpose of such acronyms is to give people a common vocabulary that makes it easier to talk about technology without dropping down to details every time. In reality SOA, like many of its relatives, has been immediately watered down to the point where the actual purpose becomes clear: To sell books, to blend decision makers with fancy tech speak on shiny powerpoint slides and, generally, to sound smart by dropping them randomly in meetings.
It falls into the same bucket as terms like "SCRUM", "Extreme Programming", "Agile", "Web2.0" etc. in that there is not "one" SOA with one ruleset or recipe to follow. Instead it's a generic tag that everybody and their dog uses to label their latest brainfart about distributed programming.
These tags serve an important purpose nonetheless; they are strong indicators for meaningless content and clueless people.
In that role they're real timesavers because whenever you encounter them in the wild you know that it's safe to stop reading/stop listening from that point onwards.
A new low in slashdot history. Can't remember a worse headline and article in recent times, can anyone else?
This article is just one big WTF. Is slashdot that desperate for traffic?
By these standards your nut article will indeed make a headline soon.
And why did my submission not get posted, yet:
My windows PC with a 27 inch screen runs at 1600x1200 resolution, my ubuntu on a 15 incher only 1024x768. Are windows graphics drivers better than the linux kernel?"
Yep. It's more the type where the pilot leaves the cockpit to take a dump and notices too late (with pants already down) that he forgot to put the autopilot on. Used to happen all the time in commercial aviation, that's why they've added autopilot-enable buttons to the loo. Nowadays those cause other problems of their own...
But he owned a typewriter, the equivalent of that time.
Yes, there may be a handful of absolute geniuses in the world that, for some reason, never learned to use a computer. Something tells me that this woman is not one of them.
Use your common sense.
"Boot time" obviously refers to the time that the user is waiting for the machine and not the other way round.
And "usable desktop" is obviously the point in time when the user can begin launching his applications without significant slowdowns from boot-tasks still grinding in the background.
This is obviously always an apples-to-oranges comparison but with just a tiny bit of common sense it can still be more meaningful than "OSX boots in 4 seconds".