The hackers, for their part, seemed equally impressed with the
technical knowledge of the senior executives they encountered.
At one point, researcher Matt Conover was talking about a fairly obscure
type of problem called a "heap overflow." When he asked the crowd, made up
mostly of vice presidents, whether they knew about this type of issue, 18 of
20 hands went up.
"I doubt that there is another large company on this planet that has that
level of technical competency in management roles," Moore
said.
First, at a company like Microsoft, I'd be asking about the 2 senior
managers who didn't know about heap attacks. Second, this
whole article is a bit of a puff piece it seems designed to put Microsoft in
the best light, "Can't we just all get along?".
Good for Microsoft that they're willing to do this kind of thing... shame
on them for waiting until the five years into the 21st Century. While I
don't hold much hope Microsoft truly cares about security other than how it
affects their public image and bottom line, maybe that kind of pressure will
finally be enough to get them to clean up their mess, if only a little bit.
I've posted on this before... one of many episodes of trying to get support. In this particular case, I pretty much KNEW what the problem was, which as I'm sure many/most slashdotters also try to determine before resorting to call tech support.
From the word "go", (ironic), it was clear my dance with HP (love their product... a laptop zx5000) was less about them helping me solve my problem and more about them doing anything they possibly could to avoid doing warranty work! And, once they discovered I had a dual boot machine, they immediately jumped to the claim that dual-booting my machine voided the warranty, though not one of the support people I talked to (I talked to four) could point to the words in the warranty whereby dual-booting my machine really did void the warranty.
This was not a unique experience for me... my typical experience is usually along the lines of:
reboot the machine (as if I'd not tried that multiple times)
uninstall the drivers around specific bad behavior
re-install drivers
complete OS re-install or system re-image.
I don't know what HP and other companies are smoking when they put together "support" staff, but based on empirical and andecdotal evidence they don't "get it". Especially for the slashdot type (not being elitist... just pragmatic) it would be nice to be able to get to a support call where you either get to skip the preamble (see above list) and immediately discuss symptoms and possible causes along with solutions.
So, bottom line, I see the problem being:
Companies create support centers as a first line of defense by either:
creating so much FUD and confusion to the uninitiated consumer they give up in frustration and just go on living with their "problem"
arguing with the more savvy consumers on the merits of whether or not warranty service applies
Companies creating support centers in the belief that support is doable with non-expert staff using only a flow-chart of "troubleshooting techniques" and "countermeasures"
Companies create support centers ignoring that often consumers are quite technical and have done most of the work up front and are ready to talk shop by the time they call a support line. This lack of consideration to the consumer ends up costing the company in good will, the company in time spent for support that really isn't, and for the consumer in wasted time jumping through unnecessary initial hoops they'd already considered.
Oh, and I don't see this getting better soon, if ever. Sigh.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone comment on the fact that Britney is also one of the top music viruses! Hasn't anyone noticed that CD's are being sold with her picture on it claiming to have music on it?
Do whatever you will to or for your body, your appearance, but do so at
your own risk. Since tattoos are essentially permanent, think about long
term goals, ramifications, etc., and what some "permanent" might mean for
those goals.
The OP talks about some places being "cool" with tattoos, piercings,
etc. That may be true, but that is only a snapshot of today's standards.
During the dotcom heyday, with IT "specialists" (most really weren't,
n'est-ce pas?) the standard for acceptable appearance was "anything goes".
We need you, and we still love you even though your hair is
filthy and goes to your waist, and you have tattoos.
But, I worked for a large corporation for 21 years... when I started, the
dress code was un-stated, but tacitly enforced... you had to wear dress
pants (absolutely no jeans), dress shirt, and at least a sports coat (yes,
the tie was optional). Over time, as IT became the place
to work and demand for workers was high I saw this dress code disappear and
the office soon looked like the stretch pants, khaki cutoff shorts,
flip-flops and sandals capital of the United States!
Fast forward to the dotcom crash... new management, and new dress codes,
this time actually formally enforced. Yeah, things change.
So, think about it... tattoos go a long way... and regardless of right or
wrong, some people react negatively to them, and regardless of whether
you like that or not, it's there! (I know of a very close friend
who lost out to a med-school... she found out later it was influenced by her
tattoos.) (Also, I think this has even passed muster in court of law -- I
think Starbucks actually has a dress code and appearance code that was
challenged by someone who had a pierced something, and Starbucks prevailed.)
For those who need further prodding and convincing, read John Malloy's Dress for Success.
Whether personally you like or don't like people's reactions to how you look
at least Malloy will give you some empirical perspective to work with...
There are very few 'terrorists' in the world that the Americans didn't create through their own acts of terror. If America would stop its interference in the affairs of other countries, there would probably be almost none at all outside of the White House.
A naive way of looking at the world at best, extremely dangerous at worst. The canard that "America is to blame" is as tiring as the faux security around terrorism (yes, I agree a lot of the attempts to rein in terrorism are bogus and do little to stem terrorism).
But, please do not think for a moment there aren't evil people and even evil organizations, there are! Accusations of imperialism, interference, brutality against the United States merely serve convenient rationale up to these people. If we were the most benign country in the world, terrorism would still exist. Yeah, there might be reasons to resent the United States. That resentment doesn't extend to the right to bomb, kill, maim, and fly commercial jets into buildings.
Despite not making the cut for Longhorn in 2006 and Longhorn Server in 2007, Microsoft is still finding uses for Monad technology. Microsoft Watch reports that Exchange 12 administration functions will be built atop Monad, which would enable users to do everything from the command line that can be done from the graphical interface.
Aside from not completely understanding that last sentence, I understand it enough to know it's one of the most frustrating things about how Microsoft chose to implement Windows. They came from the angle "gui is better", almost "gui is everything", to the detriment of allowing streamlined command line scripting. I'm sure many have their own examples, but most frustrating for me was trying to:
create "cron" (scheduled tasks) entries without having to use their obtuse gui.
do a shutdown hibernate from the command line (do that in a script for scheduled task). (btw, a cinch in unix... I have machines that obediently shut themselves off at the end of my work day every day if I forget to...) I eventually had to use third party (cygwin) command line to do this.. with all the caveats of this approach "not supported".
add, disable, delete a user
change a user password
So here we are now in the, let's see, Twenty-First Century!, and Microsoft is talking about plans to provide the same functionality from the command line that exists in the GUI? If this is really true, if this is really how they've approached their design for Windows and the underlying technology, I am amazed beyond belief! Seems like they've done this completely upside-down!
What are some of the features available in the Acrylic product?
Acrylic is a professional illustration, painting, and graphic design product. For a complete list of features please download and install the Acrylic Beta, and then refer to the accompanying release notes document which covers in detail the principal capabilities of the application.
I don't know about others, but I don't think I've ever downloaded anything without first knowing what the features are. And, especially for ostensibly a graphics/pictures application... I'd also expect some screenshots. Instead, from Microsoft, we get, "Try it, you'll like it!" "Trust us!"
I guess before I download 77M of unknown quality and featured software, I'll wait to hear from the bleeding edge users who trust Microsoft. It's not that I don't trust Microsoft, it's just that I don't trust Microsoft.
I can't think that Joe and Pam User would want to experiment with an OS on their PC at home.
Aside: while it is admirable you go for being sensitive and politically correct here to include women (and at the risk of my karma for saying so), just saying Joe is sufficient (Just look at the first returned result).
I can't remember specifics on this one, which is my fault I guess, but I had a Windows user do something that ended up corrupting a file in the system directory (same file name?, don't remember), and the system just stopped working... I recovered it by getting that file from another machine and copying it back into that system directory (booted from DOS to do that..), and the system started working again. Weird.
The other time was actually on a SUN system, and this person insisted on always being logged in as root (wish I could have more control over that kind of stuff -- what a Windows way of existing!). This person did the same thing, dragged and dropped "fstab" (had a personal copy he was "playing" with) and thought he dragged and dropped to a "$HOME/etc", but instead put it over the system/etc/fstab... The file was syntactically wrong, and on next system boot the system could not mount/usr (that was the corrupted entry).... Ask me sometime about how I recovered THAT system... (send the request to my un-obfuscated e-mail address).
this is natural selection at its best
on
The Death of Folders?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't think the directory as we know it is dead, it is a nice way to
hierarchically (word?) organize our data (but wait, Documents and
Settings???). Seriously, directories are intuitive enough and most
people get comfortable with them quickly.
But, there are some problems with directories:
they get messy when too deep (where the heck is that
directory I put those files in?)
in a GUI, they're really really really annoying, and potentially
very dangerous. On many occasion I've had people come to
me to help them recover a file that "disappeared". Mysterious at first, I
came to recognize the dreaded "mouse button accidentally released" during a
drag and drop as the common cause for "lost" files in a gui universe.
But it gets really dangerous when the lost file from
"drag and drop" does something to a system directory, something I've
encountered at least twice! (It can almost literally render a system
unusable.)
they become useless when not deep enough (hmmmmmm, I know I
have that photo in this directory, but among the 4000 others I
can't find it!)
they're too specific... How many times have you thought, "I'll
put it here, no wait, it's more appropriate over there, hmmm...."? And then
just give in and put copies of the file in multiple directories (which
introduces a whole 'nother slew of issues).
they're confusing in the quasi-standards community... (This new
executable I'm contributing, does it belong in "/usr/bin", "/usr/sbin",
"/usr/local/bin"?)
However, this article I think shows the way technology will take us and I
like the abstraction and "flattening" of the storage universe. I've already
become less neurotic about how to organize and store photos, etc.,
especially now with photo organizers and desktop search software like Google
desktop. For me it makes more sense to "ask" my computer where something is
and have it return the top twenty most likely responses (with the ability to
drill deeper if necessary).
Directories served a good purpose, but weren't they mostly artifacts
anyway? Aren't they kind of an opaqueness of underlying technology?
Directories as far as I remember were a way of implementing pointers and
references to blocks of data on a drive, albeit a nicely abstracted
implementation at the time (except for DOS, ick... (why no ".xxx" extensions
allowed for DOS directories, huh?)).
Thanks for the link... fish is actually on my list of "things to do". I'm intrigued by some of the extensions along with some of the smoothing of what I've thought of rough edges in sh...
Still, fundamentally I still think my original point holds... and would gladly include fish as a considered implementation. In that regard, POSIX as a standard changes/evolves too slowly, but for me it's the linchpin of CLI scripting. I still use Bourne as my standard for "strict" when crafting a shell script, and experiment with improvements to the interactive shell, mostly I use zsh but concede many of the sh derivatives have gone far to make the CLI universe a happier place.
I'm mostly disappointed that Microsoft doesn't even bother showing up on the radar when they come out with their CLI. It seems a little conceited, but more sinister, it is a familiar theme. Fortunately, from what I've seen of it so far, it is weird enough, obtuse enough, and so deep under the covers I give it little chance of taking over the CLI scripting world (consider that normal Windows wonks are so gui oriented, this new CLI is going to be way beyond their grok (for most), and consider the POSIX/bash/sh/zsh/fish crowd (not to mention perl, ruby, etc.... but those are not really CLI's per se) which are typically already quite adept in their universe and are unlikely to take much of a look at Damon).
I seem to remember Microsoft's new "scripting" and CLI mentioned before, and descriptions of its powerful features. Basically it was described as object-oriented in architecture with claims of superior technology then!
From the article: Monad was started as a project to provide a more powerful command line competitive with the BASH shell on Unix and Linux, using ideas gleaned from WMIC, but using the.NET Framework as its core component instead.
What concerns me is not Microsoft's improvement of their technology, especially their CLI (as a long time forced-to-use-DOS CLI, believe me, it's long needed the overhaul), but Microsoft's yet another implementation of a primitive that goes against quasi standards, albeit in this case a fairly high level standard.
I wonder why they wouldn't implement a POSIX compliant shell... that would go oh so far to allow portability of apps across platforms. Instead they come up with their idea of CLI.
I know there's always cygwin to handle POSIX scripts, but I find it slow, and difficult to manage effectively in the morass that is Windows. Certainly a POSIX-like interface in Window's CLI would attract more scripters if Microsoft supplied their own native implementation.
Otherwise, what is the motivation? Once again, with Microsoft's leverage and monopoly, it feels like a new "product", that if they can leverage with their monopoly, they continue their assimilation of another niche in the marketplace.
This is oh-so-wrong on too many levels! One (that's too many.)! There are so many ways for employees to betray a financial or corporate trust. Likewise, there are many ways for an employer to betray a trust. This would, in my opinion, be one of the most onerous with many potential avenues for backfiring.
Consider the disgruntled or dishonest employee. Think they're intent to betray a company is stopped by this policy? Not a chance! This kind of "policy" would only bolster a disgruntled employee's rationalization/justification, etc. to follow through with betrayal. They only need choose some mechanism other than e-mail and there are many.
Now, consider the neutral employee... a policy like this could create a tipping point and generate resentment enough to give cause to consider doing something subversive to a company. After all, the company, by fiat, is essentially assuming an employee is "up to something".
Finally, consider the loyal employee (how many of those will there be after widespread policies like these?)... A quick glance around and loyal employees may begin to wonder what end from loyalty....
warned that only a small percentage of the two million
English-speaking graduates per year turned out by Indian universities
actually have good enough English to work in customer-facing offshore
operations.
I don't know what to make of India's "taking" of the market the way they
have. And, I don't know who to blame. But, I do know:
India definitely has not solved or stepped up to
solving the "English" problem. Of the last ten support calls I've made to
any company (not just computers), I'd guess I was talking to
someone in India nine of those calls, and of those nine times, not
one time was I able to carry on any kind of reasonable
communication with my "support"! (And, working in technology, I've
actually been complimented on my better-than-average ability to understand
people with heavy accents! Sadly, this doesn't always translate nicely to
phone conversations.)
Companies outsourcing support have glossed over any consideration of
customer support and/or satisfaction in favor of perceived "large" savings.
I see this as incredibly short-sighted, but maybe not "fightable", as it
appears everyone is going this route.
I guess I blame India for short-sheeting the buying public claiming to
provide "equal" services for far less cost... It's disingenuous at best,
downright unethical otherwise. I'm guessing they'll have similar level of
service for non-English European countries.... Heaven help those consumers
when they start making calls for help.
I guess I blame corporations for "bottom-line" decision making over
customer satisfaction.
Sidebar: Does anyone wonder why, if India can provide "equal" service...
for far less money (i.e., "phone" support) why "phone" services like
911 haven't been sent overseas? I don't.
Sidebar 2: Suggestion: if you do need support for
something, I can't suggest strongly enough... keep calling, and hanging up
until you get someone who you can easily understand (NOTE: that
could end up being someone in India, but empirical data suggest
otherwise)... Maybe if we all did that, the skew would be back to English
speaking support.
Seems to me the advent of e-mail as a key role player in managing
information is pretty natural evolution. In the face of all efforts to
create information management systems, data mining systems, et. al., e-mail
quietly assumes a central responsibility for more people than ever. And
this has probably happened for a few reasons:
e-mail has been around for a long long time, and has finally been
socialized to be as everyday common activity or vernacular as "google"
(ironic).
e-mail is comfortable. People abstract e-mail easily
from their previous snail mail universe. Interestingly I've seen people
actually evolve e-mail habits to mimic their snail mail habits, e.g.,
checking only once a day, managing "turn around" times to the tune of days,
not minutes, etc.
e-mail has leveraged the rest of IT technology as
processors and storage have increased through the years.
e-mail is central, i.e., you can (once you get
comfortable with this) pretty much start managing much of your data life
around e-mail... why not? You have to pretty much go there all the time for
communication anyway, why not send yourself reminders, links, data, etc.,
and use e-mail searching to retrieve.
e-mail is now amazing with the leverage of third party
technology like Google Desktop search. I've pretty much gotten to total
(okay, heavy) reliance on Google Desktop and e-mail for managing
data in my Windows environment.
Probably a lesson learned from the article is the importance of some
contigency plan, but losing e-mail for a day sounds like it turned
into a positive experience for the authors. Regardless, it appears once you
lose e-mail access (in power outage, system outage, etc.), you've lost
essentially your context of IT anyway, and contingency is pretty much old
school interaction (phone calls, paper trails, MBWA, etc.)... no biggy.
Reading the posts, I was surprised there weren't more suggestions for a more reasonable or intuitive directory organization, e.g, perhaps "/home/USER" for instead of "Documents and Settings/blah blah blah". The "Documents and Settings" paradigm seems to be confusing enough to baffle even the software application providers.
Many times I've had to traverse the hell that is "Documents and Settings" just to find where some misguided application has dropped my latest "Untitled n" masterpiece. Sometimes, I never find it.
My solution, for myself, and for others I do support for has been to actually create a "/home/USER" where USER is... Then I show users how to set up their software to point to that directory or any subdirectories they've chosen to create. So far, they've all thanked me.
I'm guessing there'll be a bit of flaming at me along the lines of "The standard isDocuments and Settings...", but as I mentioned at the outset, educating me, your friends, etc. isn't enough... I've seen off-the-shelf software misuse or completely miss the paradigm.
So, hopefully, this will be fixed too... (while "/home" may be imperfect... what exactly does "Documents and Settings" represent? Especially as Microsoft begins to move more and more to an "object" model.)
As for more basic CD player compatibility issues, Gilliat-Smith says the discs are compliant with Sony Philips CD specifications and should therefore play in all conventional CD players.
How many CD players out there are conventional? I've been burned big time by some CD's that would not play on my car CD player. Exchanged them only to find the exchanged CD's failed/skipped in the same way on the same tracks in the same places. Finally had to just ask for my money back! As far as I can tell my car CD player is conventional.
I'll continue to buy CD's, but if I can't rip them to mp3's, and they don't play on all of my CD players, I'm asking for my money back! I find it ironic Sony, co-creator of the Compact Disc (tm) to be one of the companies to come back to pollute that standard.
As near as I can tell, a truly compliant CD should play on all CD players, conventional or otherwise.
Now, if only we could catch Al Qaeda's Osama Bin Laden in violation of copyright laws! Then he'd have to deal with the RIAA and the MPAA.... heaven help him!
Poor security doesn't justify the means. From a referenced slashdot article:
The Graduate School of Business has rejected all 41 applicants who tried to gain unauthorized access to their application files after an unidentified hacker posted instructions on BusinessWeek's website March 2 about how to access the confidential information..
This, in my opinion, is really the heart of the issue. I jumped into this discussion a little late, so I haven't had time to read all 150 posts, but what I've read so far I find a little disturbing. There seems to be a common theme that The school had bad security and the hackers were merely (in the words of one comment) asking the right question. I disagree.
I don't think poorly obfuscated information intended to be kept confidential justifies hackers taking or accessing it, much less publicizing for others how to do the same. It seems unethical to me. And, I know I'm risking big time going down the chute of flamebait and troll modding hell for saying so, but I just think the pervasive "justification" of this hacking many of "us" perpetuates the stereotype of "in your face" behavior just because we know the technology and you (rhetorical) don't.
The school blew it only in the sense they didn't have much of a mechanism to prevent access, but would we still be saying it was okay if the school had some huge encryption in place to hide data and someone had hacked that? It really isn't that much different. The fact that the school "hid" the information sets the bar high enough to define the standard as to what the hackers did as inappropriate hacking. Just my $.02
As a number of posters have noted, the article is riddled with errors (Jim???), and doesn't say much that isn't common sense. However the conjecture about Firefox taking over the market is only conjecture.
I do think firefox has a chance of doing big things, but it's not going to do it by itself. Firefox still needs our help.
Tomorrow I am going to my brother's house to set up his new computer for his daughter who will take that computer to college this fall. As per normal I will spend about 30 minutes getting it set up, and then about another hour ensuring it has firefox, and thunderbird installed and prominently in the quick launch tray, and also configured for fast startup (always in memory after first use).
Additionally I will expunge all visible references to IE and Outlook (on the START menu, in the Programs menu, etc.) and ensure his default clients are set to firefox and thunderbird.
Fortunately I don't have to give any tutorial on firefox and its features as I've already set up his other computer previously and he now doesn't even really remember how to fire up IE.... so much the better. I also switched out any software that overrides the default browser setting (specifically McAffee).
For all slashdotters, this is one contribution we can make above and beyond posts in this forum. (Lots of good posts and info in this forum.... my brother hasn't a clue what slashdot is, nor does he care -- probably the attitude of 99%++ of the consumer demographic.) Let's all give firefox the additional nudge -- it couldn't hurt.
Slashdot Mirror
vim (syntax on, syntax html)
I don't know what all of the fuss is about.... I've been having my pictures printed at WalMart for years, and never had any problems....
..., ahem, ...., uh, ...., never mind.
Hmmmmmmm, let's see... movie at the theatre:
Or, movie at home:
Yeah, I'm not sure I get it... why would anyone prefer the theater over watching movies at home?
Why do I get the feeling that suddenly there are a few extra terabytes of free disk space across the country?
First, at a company like Microsoft, I'd be asking about the 2 senior managers who didn't know about heap attacks. Second, this whole article is a bit of a puff piece it seems designed to put Microsoft in the best light, "Can't we just all get along?".
Good for Microsoft that they're willing to do this kind of thing... shame on them for waiting until the five years into the 21st Century. While I don't hold much hope Microsoft truly cares about security other than how it affects their public image and bottom line, maybe that kind of pressure will finally be enough to get them to clean up their mess, if only a little bit.
I've posted on this before... one of many episodes of trying to get support. In this particular case, I pretty much KNEW what the problem was, which as I'm sure many/most slashdotters also try to determine before resorting to call tech support.
From the word "go", (ironic), it was clear my dance with HP (love their product... a laptop zx5000) was less about them helping me solve my problem and more about them doing anything they possibly could to avoid doing warranty work! And, once they discovered I had a dual boot machine, they immediately jumped to the claim that dual-booting my machine voided the warranty, though not one of the support people I talked to (I talked to four) could point to the words in the warranty whereby dual-booting my machine really did void the warranty.
This was not a unique experience for me... my typical experience is usually along the lines of:
I don't know what HP and other companies are smoking when they put together "support" staff, but based on empirical and andecdotal evidence they don't "get it". Especially for the slashdot type (not being elitist... just pragmatic) it would be nice to be able to get to a support call where you either get to skip the preamble (see above list) and immediately discuss symptoms and possible causes along with solutions.
So, bottom line, I see the problem being:
Oh, and I don't see this getting better soon, if ever. Sigh.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone comment on the fact that Britney is also one of the top music viruses! Hasn't anyone noticed that CD's are being sold with her picture on it claiming to have music on it?
Do whatever you will to or for your body, your appearance, but do so at your own risk. Since tattoos are essentially permanent, think about long term goals, ramifications, etc., and what some "permanent" might mean for those goals.
The OP talks about some places being "cool" with tattoos, piercings, etc. That may be true, but that is only a snapshot of today's standards. During the dotcom heyday, with IT "specialists" (most really weren't, n'est-ce pas?) the standard for acceptable appearance was "anything goes". We need you, and we still love you even though your hair is filthy and goes to your waist, and you have tattoos.
But, I worked for a large corporation for 21 years... when I started, the dress code was un-stated, but tacitly enforced... you had to wear dress pants (absolutely no jeans), dress shirt, and at least a sports coat (yes, the tie was optional). Over time, as IT became the place to work and demand for workers was high I saw this dress code disappear and the office soon looked like the stretch pants, khaki cutoff shorts, flip-flops and sandals capital of the United States!
Fast forward to the dotcom crash... new management, and new dress codes, this time actually formally enforced. Yeah, things change.
So, think about it... tattoos go a long way... and regardless of right or wrong, some people react negatively to them, and regardless of whether you like that or not, it's there! (I know of a very close friend who lost out to a med-school... she found out later it was influenced by her tattoos.) (Also, I think this has even passed muster in court of law -- I think Starbucks actually has a dress code and appearance code that was challenged by someone who had a pierced something, and Starbucks prevailed.)
For those who need further prodding and convincing, read John Malloy's Dress for Success. Whether personally you like or don't like people's reactions to how you look at least Malloy will give you some empirical perspective to work with...
A naive way of looking at the world at best, extremely dangerous at worst. The canard that "America is to blame" is as tiring as the faux security around terrorism (yes, I agree a lot of the attempts to rein in terrorism are bogus and do little to stem terrorism).
But, please do not think for a moment there aren't evil people and even evil organizations, there are! Accusations of imperialism, interference, brutality against the United States merely serve convenient rationale up to these people. If we were the most benign country in the world, terrorism would still exist. Yeah, there might be reasons to resent the United States. That resentment doesn't extend to the right to bomb, kill, maim, and fly commercial jets into buildings.
From the article:
Aside from not completely understanding that last sentence, I understand it enough to know it's one of the most frustrating things about how Microsoft chose to implement Windows. They came from the angle "gui is better", almost "gui is everything", to the detriment of allowing streamlined command line scripting. I'm sure many have their own examples, but most frustrating for me was trying to:
So here we are now in the, let's see, Twenty-First Century!, and Microsoft is talking about plans to provide the same functionality from the command line that exists in the GUI? If this is really true, if this is really how they've approached their design for Windows and the underlying technology, I am amazed beyond belief! Seems like they've done this completely upside-down!
From the FAQ, referenced on the Acrylic page:
I don't know about others, but I don't think I've ever downloaded anything without first knowing what the features are. And, especially for ostensibly a graphics/pictures application... I'd also expect some screenshots. Instead, from Microsoft, we get, "Try it, you'll like it!" "Trust us!"
I guess before I download 77M of unknown quality and featured software, I'll wait to hear from the bleeding edge users who trust Microsoft. It's not that I don't trust Microsoft, it's just that I don't trust Microsoft.
Aside: while it is admirable you go for being sensitive and politically correct here to include women (and at the risk of my karma for saying so), just saying Joe is sufficient (Just look at the first returned result).
The other time was actually on a SUN system, and this person insisted on always being logged in as root (wish I could have more control over that kind of stuff -- what a Windows way of existing!). This person did the same thing, dragged and dropped "fstab" (had a personal copy he was "playing" with) and thought he dragged and dropped to a "$HOME/etc", but instead put it over the system /etc/fstab... The file was syntactically wrong, and on next system boot the system could not mount /usr (that was the corrupted entry).... Ask me sometime about how I recovered THAT system... (send the request to my un-obfuscated e-mail address).
I don't think the directory as we know it is dead, it is a nice way to hierarchically (word?) organize our data (but wait, Documents and Settings???). Seriously, directories are intuitive enough and most people get comfortable with them quickly.
But, there are some problems with directories:
However, this article I think shows the way technology will take us and I like the abstraction and "flattening" of the storage universe. I've already become less neurotic about how to organize and store photos, etc., especially now with photo organizers and desktop search software like Google desktop. For me it makes more sense to "ask" my computer where something is and have it return the top twenty most likely responses (with the ability to drill deeper if necessary).
Directories served a good purpose, but weren't they mostly artifacts anyway? Aren't they kind of an opaqueness of underlying technology? Directories as far as I remember were a way of implementing pointers and references to blocks of data on a drive, albeit a nicely abstracted implementation at the time (except for DOS, ick... (why no ".xxx" extensions allowed for DOS directories, huh?)).
Still, fundamentally I still think my original point holds... and would gladly include fish as a considered implementation. In that regard, POSIX as a standard changes/evolves too slowly, but for me it's the linchpin of CLI scripting. I still use Bourne as my standard for "strict" when crafting a shell script, and experiment with improvements to the interactive shell, mostly I use zsh but concede many of the sh derivatives have gone far to make the CLI universe a happier place.
I'm mostly disappointed that Microsoft doesn't even bother showing up on the radar when they come out with their CLI. It seems a little conceited, but more sinister, it is a familiar theme. Fortunately, from what I've seen of it so far, it is weird enough, obtuse enough, and so deep under the covers I give it little chance of taking over the CLI scripting world (consider that normal Windows wonks are so gui oriented, this new CLI is going to be way beyond their grok (for most), and consider the POSIX/bash/sh/zsh/fish crowd (not to mention perl, ruby, etc.... but those are not really CLI's per se) which are typically already quite adept in their universe and are unlikely to take much of a look at Damon).
I seem to remember Microsoft's new "scripting" and CLI mentioned before, and descriptions of its powerful features. Basically it was described as object-oriented in architecture with claims of superior technology then!
From the article: Monad was started as a project to provide a more powerful command line competitive with the BASH shell on Unix and Linux, using ideas gleaned from WMIC, but using the .NET Framework as its core component instead.
What concerns me is not Microsoft's improvement of their technology, especially their CLI (as a long time forced-to-use-DOS CLI, believe me, it's long needed the overhaul), but Microsoft's yet another implementation of a primitive that goes against quasi standards, albeit in this case a fairly high level standard.
I wonder why they wouldn't implement a POSIX compliant shell... that would go oh so far to allow portability of apps across platforms. Instead they come up with their idea of CLI.
I know there's always cygwin to handle POSIX scripts, but I find it slow, and difficult to manage effectively in the morass that is Windows. Certainly a POSIX-like interface in Window's CLI would attract more scripters if Microsoft supplied their own native implementation.
Otherwise, what is the motivation? Once again, with Microsoft's leverage and monopoly, it feels like a new "product", that if they can leverage with their monopoly, they continue their assimilation of another niche in the marketplace.
This is oh-so-wrong on too many levels! One (that's too many.)! There are so many ways for employees to betray a financial or corporate trust. Likewise, there are many ways for an employer to betray a trust. This would, in my opinion, be one of the most onerous with many potential avenues for backfiring.
Consider the disgruntled or dishonest employee. Think they're intent to betray a company is stopped by this policy? Not a chance! This kind of "policy" would only bolster a disgruntled employee's rationalization/justification, etc. to follow through with betrayal. They only need choose some mechanism other than e-mail and there are many.
Now, consider the neutral employee... a policy like this could create a tipping point and generate resentment enough to give cause to consider doing something subversive to a company. After all, the company, by fiat, is essentially assuming an employee is "up to something".
Finally, consider the loyal employee (how many of those will there be after widespread policies like these?)... A quick glance around and loyal employees may begin to wonder what end from loyalty....
No, this is just plain bad policy.
So, does anyone else remember the marketing ploy enhancing the desirability of Cabbage Patch Dolls? Once again, genius marketing.
(any guesses how inflated the price will be once the perception is out there the 360's will be "rare"?)
From the article:
I don't know what to make of India's "taking" of the market the way they have. And, I don't know who to blame. But, I do know:
I guess I blame India for short-sheeting the buying public claiming to provide "equal" services for far less cost... It's disingenuous at best, downright unethical otherwise. I'm guessing they'll have similar level of service for non-English European countries.... Heaven help those consumers when they start making calls for help.
I guess I blame corporations for "bottom-line" decision making over customer satisfaction.
Sidebar: Does anyone wonder why, if India can provide "equal" service... for far less money (i.e., "phone" support) why "phone" services like 911 haven't been sent overseas? I don't.
Sidebar 2: Suggestion: if you do need support for something, I can't suggest strongly enough... keep calling, and hanging up until you get someone who you can easily understand (NOTE: that could end up being someone in India, but empirical data suggest otherwise)... Maybe if we all did that, the skew would be back to English speaking support.
Seems to me the advent of e-mail as a key role player in managing information is pretty natural evolution. In the face of all efforts to create information management systems, data mining systems, et. al., e-mail quietly assumes a central responsibility for more people than ever. And this has probably happened for a few reasons:
Probably a lesson learned from the article is the importance of some contigency plan, but losing e-mail for a day sounds like it turned into a positive experience for the authors. Regardless, it appears once you lose e-mail access (in power outage, system outage, etc.), you've lost essentially your context of IT anyway, and contingency is pretty much old school interaction (phone calls, paper trails, MBWA, etc.)... no biggy.
Reading the posts, I was surprised there weren't more suggestions for a more reasonable or intuitive directory organization, e.g, perhaps "/home/USER" for instead of "Documents and Settings/blah blah blah". The "Documents and Settings" paradigm seems to be confusing enough to baffle even the software application providers.
Many times I've had to traverse the hell that is "Documents and Settings" just to find where some misguided application has dropped my latest "Untitled n" masterpiece. Sometimes, I never find it.
My solution, for myself, and for others I do support for has been to actually create a "/home/USER" where USER is... Then I show users how to set up their software to point to that directory or any subdirectories they've chosen to create. So far, they've all thanked me.
I'm guessing there'll be a bit of flaming at me along the lines of "The standard is Documents and Settings...", but as I mentioned at the outset, educating me, your friends, etc. isn't enough... I've seen off-the-shelf software misuse or completely miss the paradigm.
So, hopefully, this will be fixed too... (while "/home" may be imperfect... what exactly does "Documents and Settings" represent? Especially as Microsoft begins to move more and more to an "object" model.)
How many CD players out there are conventional? I've been burned big time by some CD's that would not play on my car CD player. Exchanged them only to find the exchanged CD's failed/skipped in the same way on the same tracks in the same places. Finally had to just ask for my money back! As far as I can tell my car CD player is conventional.
I'll continue to buy CD's, but if I can't rip them to mp3's, and they don't play on all of my CD players, I'm asking for my money back! I find it ironic Sony, co-creator of the Compact Disc (tm) to be one of the companies to come back to pollute that standard.
As near as I can tell, a truly compliant CD should play on all CD players, conventional or otherwise.
Now, if only we could catch Al Qaeda's Osama Bin Laden in violation of copyright laws! Then he'd have to deal with the RIAA and the MPAA.... heaven help him!
Poor security doesn't justify the means. From a referenced slashdot article:
This, in my opinion, is really the heart of the issue. I jumped into this discussion a little late, so I haven't had time to read all 150 posts, but what I've read so far I find a little disturbing. There seems to be a common theme that The school had bad security and the hackers were merely (in the words of one comment) asking the right question. I disagree.
I don't think poorly obfuscated information intended to be kept confidential justifies hackers taking or accessing it, much less publicizing for others how to do the same. It seems unethical to me. And, I know I'm risking big time going down the chute of flamebait and troll modding hell for saying so, but I just think the pervasive "justification" of this hacking many of "us" perpetuates the stereotype of "in your face" behavior just because we know the technology and you (rhetorical) don't.
The school blew it only in the sense they didn't have much of a mechanism to prevent access, but would we still be saying it was okay if the school had some huge encryption in place to hide data and someone had hacked that? It really isn't that much different. The fact that the school "hid" the information sets the bar high enough to define the standard as to what the hackers did as inappropriate hacking. Just my $.02
As a number of posters have noted, the article is riddled with errors (Jim???), and doesn't say much that isn't common sense. However the conjecture about Firefox taking over the market is only conjecture.
I do think firefox has a chance of doing big things, but it's not going to do it by itself. Firefox still needs our help.
Tomorrow I am going to my brother's house to set up his new computer for his daughter who will take that computer to college this fall. As per normal I will spend about 30 minutes getting it set up, and then about another hour ensuring it has firefox, and thunderbird installed and prominently in the quick launch tray, and also configured for fast startup (always in memory after first use).
Additionally I will expunge all visible references to IE and Outlook (on the START menu, in the Programs menu, etc.) and ensure his default clients are set to firefox and thunderbird.
Fortunately I don't have to give any tutorial on firefox and its features as I've already set up his other computer previously and he now doesn't even really remember how to fire up IE.... so much the better. I also switched out any software that overrides the default browser setting (specifically McAffee).
For all slashdotters, this is one contribution we can make above and beyond posts in this forum. (Lots of good posts and info in this forum.... my brother hasn't a clue what slashdot is, nor does he care -- probably the attitude of 99%++ of the consumer demographic.) Let's all give firefox the additional nudge -- it couldn't hurt.