The phrase was borrowed for a fairly good British TV comedy about a seriously incompetent bank manager: The Peter Principle (unimaginatively called "The Boss" in the US).
I also haven't seen a system with both a working, updated install of Norton...
As far as I'm concerned, you can stop right there. My experiences with various versions of Symantec products always broke down at the "working, updated" portion. Every run of Liveupdate was a crapshoot, waiting to see if I would once again have to uninstall and reinstall the entire package because an update failed. For a while I had a permanent link to the page with their special uninstall tool, because it generally took four to five reinstalls for one to get past its very first Liveupdate uncorrupted.
What finally moved me away from Symantec forever was when one of our systems that hadn't been on the internet for a while got connected, did a Liveupdate, and promptly went belly-up. After much searching, I found an item in Symantec's knowledge base explaining how a particular patch could cause the problem we developed. But the article was dated several months before, and the flawed patch was still available on Liveupdate!
Symantec is unprofessional, unreliable, and unconcerned about its consumers.
Actually the article is a lot of the same old "what's wrong," and darn little "why." Accurate enough, but nothing new—waste of a Slashdot posting, if you ask me.
Filmmakers will adapt to be sure to high fps formats. Hell, you can always display lower frame rates when you want.
It's not that simple. I remember when stop-motion animation was still the rule, and it had one basic problem: No motion blur. For full animation like Wallace and Gromit, this has minimal impact on suspension of disbelief, but it's one of the reasons that kids today sneer at Jason and the Argonauts or Clash of the Titans (or Robocop).
Problem is, when you shoot film at a higher frame rate than 24fps, your individual frame exposures are shorter and motion blur is reduced. If you shoot at 60fps and play back at 60fps, fine. If you shoot at 60fps and play as 24fps slomo, fine. But if you shoot at 60fps and play back as 24fps live speed (dropping 3 out of 5 frames), motion looks unnatural, as if even your human actors were stop-motion animation.
For example, look at the fight scenes toward the end of 2001's The Mummy Returns, where single shots switch from live speed to slomo and back by omitting frames. Cool effect at first glimpse, but visually annoying—fake-looking, in fact—in the long run. Weirdly, the slomo portions of those shots look more "realistic" than the live-speed portions.
Hate to break it to you man, you just sound crusty.
Too true. I said I usually avoid these discussions. But I do get tired of the automatic assumption by so many people that switching to Linux/Unix would be as easy for everybody as it was for them. Some people don't seem to realize that there is more to running some businesses than Office and email.
Remember, I started out trying to answer the great-grandposter's question: "What is the calculation that Windows users -- esp. businesses -- make that allows them to keep on using Windows?" And the OpenBSD website is a perfect example of my answer. If anywhere on OpenBSD.org is an answer to the question, "Can I run AutoCAD under OpenBSD?" their search function doesn't reveal it. And AutoCAD is the least expensive and most commonly used of the packages I would have to migrate.
If I can't migrate our applications, I can't use Linux. They range from DOS-based CNC programming software to a COM+-based shop management package so complex that even Windows doesn't play well with it. Who knows how a Windows emulator would react? I don't, and I can't afford to gamble.
I simply loathe many aspects of Windows. I am interested in Linux, and I probably would like it once I got used to it, in two or three years. But whether my company can afford to switch to it, whether I could manage the migration myself, and whether there's some company in town competent to do it for a reasonable price are much more complicated questions, ones my regular job (draftsman and designer) simply hasn't allowed me the time to answer.
Cue Howard Bannister: "I am not repeating myself! I am not repeating myself! Oh, God, I'm repeating myself!"
All I set out to say was that a small company like mine, even if they have somebody with a clue, often can't spare the resources even to find out if such a migration is feasible, can't always cut through the blind Linux loyalty to distinguish the truth from the hype, and can't withstand the potential loss of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars resulting from a failed migration.
Actually, you've kind of emphasized my point. I never read past the headline of that particular article, because I don't have time to do the research necessary to sort out the truth from the FUD.
I haven't been an IT professional for nearly twenty years; these days I'm just the one who knows more about it than anyone else at my company. These days I can provide a professional viewpoint, but not the professional experience. That's not enough--not nearly enough--to set up and maintain a secure server in Linux.
Your post is largely based on a misconception that's entirely my fault. Sorry about that.
I am--by default--IT support for my company, but I don't make the purchasing decisions. My only allowed input to our network upgrade two years ago was to tell my boss that one of the consultants was a known idiot, which advice was ignored. I was not consulted at all about our single biggest software purchase until after the contract was signed, when I was asked if we would need new hardware. But now that the purchases are here, I have to keep them running, because I'm the only one who has a clue.
I wasn't "complaining about my well thought choice"; I was complaining about the people (unlike you) who seem to think that any company can convert to Linux with a snap of the fingers. I have twenty years of familiarity with MS-DOS; it's going to be a long time before I know Linux that well. As you say, it's not a two-week crash course.
And lots of small companies don't even have somebody like me--they're at the mercy of Best Buy or Dell or a local company like the idiots who set up our new server so that what looked like a backup of C:\ (the system drive) was in fact a backup of C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator (the Administrator user profile).
What you are saying is that fixing broken Windows takes up so much of your time, that you can't afford to look at an alternative.
No, what I'm saying is that I spend very little time at all on Windows maintenance, because it's not my primary job. My company couldn't afford to keep me if it was.
I don't spend time fixing broken systems. Our systems are clean, according to every check I can make up to HijackThis and RootkitRevealer, and have been clean for four years, since my boss got one of the relatively harmless Klez variants in his mailbox.
Think of that ancient UNIX machine you talked about - how much effort do you invest in maintaining it? Pretty much zero huh?
Yep, but I also know that the last time it needed an upgrade (for Y2K, something Windows already handled gracefully), we had to ship the entire box cross-country to get the upgrade installed.
Honestly, I almost never patch my Linux servers and only upgrade them every 3 years.
Our one NT 3.51 workstation hasn't been patched since it was installed in 1998. It never locks up; it never shuts down.
Except for one incident caused by third-party software using Java, our Windows SBS 2003 server has never crashed or failed to boot in the nearly two years since it was installed.
I loathe Windows, but in my experience the NT-based versions do not deserve to be painted with the reputation for unreliability that the home versions have rightfully earned.
Sorry, but I have to call counter-bullshit: You still don't understand my world. You've given the longest and most detailed response so far, so allow me to concentrate my answers on your post.
First, please, I'm not a "Windows Guy(tm)". I loathe nearly every Microsoft product I've ever used. (Notepad's not too bad.) My nickname is no accident; I started out as a mainframe FORTRAN IV programmer. I still maintain an MS-DOS machine at home, although it rarely gets fired up any more. I have used Linux-based utilities, although I know nearly nothing about Linux itself.
Before these fancy computer systems a small business involved dozens of people just typing and tabulating stuff... If the boss gets a personal secretary all to himself yet your bread-in-butter computer systems have a good coating of dust, someone isn't minding the store.
Our entire company doesn't involve "dozens of people"; we literally have as many computers as employees at the moment, including the owners of the company, who share our one secretary. We don't have an accountant, or payroll clerk, or HR manager, either. We literally can't afford a full-time IT person. Hell, we can barely afford me.
...get off UNIX's nuts about command interfaces. Unlike Windows you have a choice of both GUI and command line environments in UNIX.
Okay, this was a bit offtopic and maybe inappropriate. I should have said we have one elderly Unix machine; it is legacy, with proprietary software, and I don't have much control over it. I don't have root access, and I can't change how it's set up. But MS-DOS from the same period (or the DOS available in Windows 2000/XP) is better documented and easier to use than the command interface on that Unix system.
Stop reading newsgroups. Block slashdot.org while at work. Spend one of those hours learning about filtering out stupid work emails....You mentioned all your training is from work done "in my spare time" so I can assume that you're willing to sacrifice personal time to work.
Not very bloody much. By "in my spare time" I meant at work. I have a family life and I like to enjoy it; this is the longest stretch I've spent on Slashdot in weeks.
We're a small independent manufacturing company, and I'm the draftsman and designer, so my workload is highly variable. Last week I worked overtime to get a particular project out the door; next week I may have thirty hours of production work. I spend the extra time as productively as I can, learning how our systems work, documenting what I've done to them (Yes, real documentation!)--and reading the Microsoft newsgroups, where I find answers to many of my more puzzling questions (like why our server failed to reboot last fall). I learned about the WMF exploit from Slashdot; should I have skipped the headlines that day? "[Learn] about filtering out stupid work emails"--learn where? In the MS Outlook help? Ack!
How many inches of your resume are taken up with MS technologies you learned in your free spare time? Your work situation has little to do with the OS Marketplace and everything to do with the resume marketplace.
How many inches? About 2-1/2 lines, actually--I am no longer an IT professional! That's my primary point: A company the size of mine can't afford to have full-time IT support. I learned Windows NT, then Windows 2000, then Windows SBS 2003 (which I'm still learning) because there was nobody else who could, not because I wanted them on my resume.
In our town there are only about three PC sales-and-service firms that have more than three employees, and from past experience I wouldn't trust a single one of them to reset the high scores on Minesweeper. (Remember the guys who left the Administrator password blank?) A company like ours that can't afford to hire an MCSE t
I've managed to read the source after installing it... but if it was bad, I'd've already been hosed by that point.
There's a fundamental lack of logic here that nobody ever seems to point out. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether you read the source before or after you run the EXE. If these guys are black hats, there's not the slightest reason to expect the EXE to match the source.
Even if they're legit, what guarantee do you have that they're sufficently competent and orderly to keep all the components in sync, to make sure that somebody didn't make one last little tweak in the EXE without updating the published copy of the source?
Any time you run an EXE or DLL you didn't compile and link yourself, you are expressing trust in the honesty and competence of the people who provide it, whether the source code is published or not. Even among those who understand the source code, very few of them are competent to check if the compiled code matches the source.
Re:Why do folks still use Windows?
on
Trustworthy Computing
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What is the calculation that Windows users -- esp. businesses -- make that allows them to keep on using Windows?
I usually stay out of the Windows/Linux/Mac arguments, but I'm afraid you just don't understand my world.
I work for a very small company, probably typical of thousands of other very small companies. Our company is too small to afford a full-time IT staff; I'm the entire IT department, and it's a very small part of my job. I'm the IT guru because I'm the only one there who knows a DLL from a dungheap.
I have formal training in computers, but so long ago that the field was still called EDP and time-sharing was a big deal. I've spent years learning what I know about Windows and Windows networks, in my spare time. It would take me years more to reach a similar level of expertise with a brand-new OS. And until I reached that level, we'd be more vulnerable than with Windows.
My company has about a dozen computers, including a single domain server with no backup server. We have about $60,000 invested in software (other than OS's) that will only run under Windows. We have no hardware to set up a test server, no money (or time) to spend on unsuccessful experiments.
The only person in our company who has ever used Linux is our 21-year-old secretary. We have one Unix machine, which I despise, because its desktop GUI is primitive and its command interface makes MS-DOS look well-designed and intuitive.
I rarely get to spend more than two or three hours a week on network maintenance, security monitoring, and research combined. If I hadn't automated them I wouldn't have time to do file backups some weeks. I have no time to spend trying to research the seventeen hundred different distros of Linux available, or whether Wine will support our COM+-dependent network applications--or whether the WMF exploit still applies if we run Windows applications on Linux.
We can't afford to have a regular support contract with a local computer-specialist firm. That's assuming we could even find someone in town we can trust--the overpriced morons who did our last batch of installations gave us a two-NIC server with only one NIC enabled (so no firewall), and set up user workstations with the Administrator password left blank!
I loathe Microsoft, and have since I first saw Windows 3.11. But what possible reason do I have for trusting the claims of Red Hat or Debian more? What research I can do is hardly reassuring. Remember Saturday's story here: researchers found 812 flaws in the Windows operating system, 2,328 problems in various versions of the Unix/Linux operating systems (Mac included)?
Somehow the Windows folks keep on choosing to use Windows...
I didn't choose Windows; I inherited it and have no resources to replace it. My company didn't really choose Windows; it was forced on us by the marketplace. Be realistic! My wife just bought an Apple, and the first thing she installed on it was the OS-X version of MS Office, necessary for compatibility with her company.
Maybe in another ten years Linux will be enough of a force that applications will be written for cross-compatibility, but little companies like mine can't wait that long. We have to use what we can, right now.
Two quick ones, one simple and elegant (to do, not to tell), the other showing my anal-retentive side.
Simple: The IBM 1130, a business computer from the early sixties, used solid blocks of translucent plastic for several of its control buttons and indicator lights, such as RUN and STOP—and PARITY CHECK. Only a friction fit held the buttons; they were easily removed. The pale STOP button lit up whenever no program was running, so a favorite trick of operators was to switch the STOP buttons and the vivid scarlet PARITY CHECK button, and see who panicked.
Anal-retentive: One place I worked in the late eighties used DEC CRTs that supported two character sets, one of which could be programmed. The MicroVAX OS allowed users to send messages from one CRT to another, including ESC sequences and other special characters. I manually built a batch file that transmitted all the escape sequences to completely reprogram a CRT's alternate character set then clear the screen.
The command prompt used the primary character set, but for some reason the text editor always switched to the alternate set. So one day one of my coworkers opened a program for editing, and instead of a screen full of COBOL he saw blanks, except where all his E's had been replaced by a hand with the middle finger upraised. (All your E's are belong to us.)
It worked so well that I spent two days manually coding a full character set, so that when my boss opened the text editor his screen filled with Hebrew characters. No question of escaping blame—he knew I was the only one there who'd take the time and trouble.
The company I went to work for in 1981 already had standards in place to enforce four-digit years. The fact that they had a medical database containing patients over a century old might have had something to do with it, but they were also anticipating the century rollover. Since they used their original Xerox mainframe from 1963 to 1984, they fully expected their new Honeywell mainframe to last them into the third millenium.
Sadly, of course, all that planning and coding we did back in the eighties was totally wasted. The entire database was scrapped in the early nineties, as the company rolled from mainframe onto PCs. Bah.
Why would combination locks have a master key in the first place?
Because the school administration wants to be able to open any locker at any time, without requiring the combination. This was the policy at my high school back in the seventies—all the locks were the same Master V-series.
A friend of mine pulled the same stunt: dismantled a lock and made a key to fit it. (He didn't steal the lock; the school made us buy them.) He then shifted all the locks on one row one locker to the right. (I don't know whether he moved the last lock back to the left end or just popped it off the stack.)
After he graduated, he gave me his key, which I never got up the nerve to use (I was an awful coward back then), and about four old locks that it fits. To my astonishment, when I went back for my twentieth high school reunion, the same V-series locks were still in use! My 21-year-old key would have opened every locker in the school.
I still have the key, and for all I know, it would still work.
Which brings up the question, why would anyone hide their technical contact information? Personal, I have no problem with... I rarely have to deal with the domain owner. But fake tech info?
Because for millions of small sites (like mine), the tech contact is the domain owner. My site isn't the sort to attract loons and thieves, so I don't worry that much about having my personal info made public. But I do get tired of having to shred two or three credit card offers a month for my "business", when it is obvious from the site content (which plainly no automated WHOIS harvester has ever bothered to check) that not a dime of revenue is generated by it.
The Spywarewarrior tests also used a much larger number of spyware targets. Does it bother anybody but me that ZDNet tested detection of only 10 spyware programs, when most of the AS programs out there check for several thousand? Or that ZDNet doesn't name the particular 10 targets it used, or say how old they are?
10 new spyware programs can appear in a matter of days or hours; not every company can respond to them that quickly. Did ZDNet test how effective these programs are overall, or just how quickly they identify and add new problems?
Myself, I want AS software for the long haul. I'm a very careful browser, and neither Ad-Aware nor Spybot has had any work to do on my home system for about three years--except that about a month ago I reinstalled a package I downloaded almost 6 years ago that--Surprise!--included an adware/monitoring program. Even though the adware was ultimately harmless (the company that originally wrote the adware has since gone out of business; there's no website left for their adware to report to), both Ad-Aware and Spybot were ready to clean it off for me.
Susan Bradley, a Microsoft MVP, has created a "Hall of Shame" for Windows-based software that requires Admin/Power User privilege to run, or that has other serious security flaws. The list is still short (and sort of disorganized), but she's trying. A good many big-name vendors are on her list (and she's not afraid to add Microsoft products).
Nominate your favorite offenders! Tell your friends! If Threatcode.com catches on (she's a server guru, so maybe she can survive a slashdotting), maybe at least a few companies will respond to the bad publicity.
I know, I've got a Pollyanna attitude, but I keep hoping...
Unless, of course, you are American, in which case you will require the story to be transfered to the USA, as was done for the radio show.
Kiss my kippers, you chauvinist!:-) I'm an American born and raised, never been out of the country (unless you count walking a few hundred yards into a Mexico border town). But several of my favorite authors over the years have been English, and I don't just mean J.K. Rowling.
I would no more find The War of the Worlds improved by having it moved to America than you would find Christine (by the quintessentially American author Stephen King) improved by changing the car from a 1958 Plymouth Fury to a 1959 Morris Mini.
Time and landscape are part and parcel of stories like these, and they rarely benefit from being translated. Only because Welles was a master storyteller himself was the Mercury Theatre production so successful.
In fact, my wife and I prefer the Bloomsbury editions of J.K. Rowling, because the Scholastic Books versions have been so painfully Americanized—("Sorcerer's Stone", indeed!)—so I can understand where your attitude arises.
P.S. Of course, since one of my favorite British authors is Nevil Shute, my image of England tends to be stuck in the '50s when everything was falling apart and the smart people were leaving for Australia.
Slashdot Mirror
The phrase was borrowed for a fairly good British TV comedy about a seriously incompetent bank manager: The Peter Principle (unimaginatively called "The Boss" in the US).
"Spam Green is people!"
I also haven't seen a system with both a working, updated install of Norton...
As far as I'm concerned, you can stop right there. My experiences with various versions of Symantec products always broke down at the "working, updated" portion. Every run of Liveupdate was a crapshoot, waiting to see if I would once again have to uninstall and reinstall the entire package because an update failed. For a while I had a permanent link to the page with their special uninstall tool, because it generally took four to five reinstalls for one to get past its very first Liveupdate uncorrupted.
What finally moved me away from Symantec forever was when one of our systems that hadn't been on the internet for a while got connected, did a Liveupdate, and promptly went belly-up. After much searching, I found an item in Symantec's knowledge base explaining how a particular patch could cause the problem we developed. But the article was dated several months before, and the flawed patch was still available on Liveupdate!
Symantec is unprofessional, unreliable, and unconcerned about its consumers.
Re your sig: You misspelled "evar".
Do you trust them to deliver by tommorow, without fail?
Heck, I don't even trust them to spell "tomorrow".
It's always a damn shame when an insightful comment like the parent is posted AC. Why be afraid to admit to a well-thought-out philosophical position?
Actually the article is a lot of the same old "what's wrong," and darn little "why." Accurate enough, but nothing new—waste of a Slashdot posting, if you ask me.
Filmmakers will adapt to be sure to high fps formats. Hell, you can always display lower frame rates when you want.
It's not that simple. I remember when stop-motion animation was still the rule, and it had one basic problem: No motion blur. For full animation like Wallace and Gromit, this has minimal impact on suspension of disbelief, but it's one of the reasons that kids today sneer at Jason and the Argonauts or Clash of the Titans (or Robocop). Problem is, when you shoot film at a higher frame rate than 24fps, your individual frame exposures are shorter and motion blur is reduced. If you shoot at 60fps and play back at 60fps, fine. If you shoot at 60fps and play as 24fps slomo, fine. But if you shoot at 60fps and play back as 24fps live speed (dropping 3 out of 5 frames), motion looks unnatural, as if even your human actors were stop-motion animation.
For example, look at the fight scenes toward the end of 2001's The Mummy Returns, where single shots switch from live speed to slomo and back by omitting frames. Cool effect at first glimpse, but visually annoying—fake-looking, in fact—in the long run. Weirdly, the slomo portions of those shots look more "realistic" than the live-speed portions.
Sorry--she got married just last week. To an undertaker. Seriously.
Hate to break it to you man, you just sound crusty.
Too true. I said I usually avoid these discussions. But I do get tired of the automatic assumption by so many people that switching to Linux/Unix would be as easy for everybody as it was for them. Some people don't seem to realize that there is more to running some businesses than Office and email.
Remember, I started out trying to answer the great-grandposter's question: "What is the calculation that Windows users -- esp. businesses -- make that allows them to keep on using Windows?" And the OpenBSD website is a perfect example of my answer. If anywhere on OpenBSD.org is an answer to the question, "Can I run AutoCAD under OpenBSD?" their search function doesn't reveal it. And AutoCAD is the least expensive and most commonly used of the packages I would have to migrate.
If I can't migrate our applications, I can't use Linux. They range from DOS-based CNC programming software to a COM+-based shop management package so complex that even Windows doesn't play well with it. Who knows how a Windows emulator would react? I don't, and I can't afford to gamble.
I simply loathe many aspects of Windows. I am interested in Linux, and I probably would like it once I got used to it, in two or three years. But whether my company can afford to switch to it, whether I could manage the migration myself, and whether there's some company in town competent to do it for a reasonable price are much more complicated questions, ones my regular job (draftsman and designer) simply hasn't allowed me the time to answer.
Cue Howard Bannister: "I am not repeating myself! I am not repeating myself! Oh, God, I'm repeating myself!"
All I set out to say was that a small company like mine, even if they have somebody with a clue, often can't spare the resources even to find out if such a migration is feasible, can't always cut through the blind Linux loyalty to distinguish the truth from the hype, and can't withstand the potential loss of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars resulting from a failed migration.
Actually, you've kind of emphasized my point. I never read past the headline of that particular article, because I don't have time to do the research necessary to sort out the truth from the FUD.
I haven't been an IT professional for nearly twenty years; these days I'm just the one who knows more about it than anyone else at my company. These days I can provide a professional viewpoint, but not the professional experience. That's not enough--not nearly enough--to set up and maintain a secure server in Linux.
Your post is largely based on a misconception that's entirely my fault. Sorry about that.
I am--by default--IT support for my company, but I don't make the purchasing decisions. My only allowed input to our network upgrade two years ago was to tell my boss that one of the consultants was a known idiot, which advice was ignored. I was not consulted at all about our single biggest software purchase until after the contract was signed, when I was asked if we would need new hardware. But now that the purchases are here, I have to keep them running, because I'm the only one who has a clue.
I wasn't "complaining about my well thought choice"; I was complaining about the people (unlike you) who seem to think that any company can convert to Linux with a snap of the fingers. I have twenty years of familiarity with MS-DOS; it's going to be a long time before I know Linux that well. As you say, it's not a two-week crash course.
And lots of small companies don't even have somebody like me--they're at the mercy of Best Buy or Dell or a local company like the idiots who set up our new server so that what looked like a backup of C:\ (the system drive) was in fact a backup of C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator (the Administrator user profile).
What you are saying is that fixing broken Windows takes up so much of your time, that you can't afford to look at an alternative.
No, what I'm saying is that I spend very little time at all on Windows maintenance, because it's not my primary job. My company couldn't afford to keep me if it was.
I don't spend time fixing broken systems. Our systems are clean, according to every check I can make up to HijackThis and RootkitRevealer, and have been clean for four years, since my boss got one of the relatively harmless Klez variants in his mailbox.
Think of that ancient UNIX machine you talked about - how much effort do you invest in maintaining it? Pretty much zero huh?
Yep, but I also know that the last time it needed an upgrade (for Y2K, something Windows already handled gracefully), we had to ship the entire box cross-country to get the upgrade installed.
Honestly, I almost never patch my Linux servers and only upgrade them every 3 years.
Our one NT 3.51 workstation hasn't been patched since it was installed in 1998. It never locks up; it never shuts down.
Except for one incident caused by third-party software using Java, our Windows SBS 2003 server has never crashed or failed to boot in the nearly two years since it was installed.
I loathe Windows, but in my experience the NT-based versions do not deserve to be painted with the reputation for unreliability that the home versions have rightfully earned.
Security, of course, is another matter...
First, please, I'm not a "Windows Guy(tm)". I loathe nearly every Microsoft product I've ever used. (Notepad's not too bad.) My nickname is no accident; I started out as a mainframe FORTRAN IV programmer. I still maintain an MS-DOS machine at home, although it rarely gets fired up any more. I have used Linux-based utilities, although I know nearly nothing about Linux itself.
Our entire company doesn't involve "dozens of people"; we literally have as many computers as employees at the moment, including the owners of the company, who share our one secretary. We don't have an accountant, or payroll clerk, or HR manager, either. We literally can't afford a full-time IT person. Hell, we can barely afford me.
Okay, this was a bit offtopic and maybe inappropriate. I should have said we have one elderly Unix machine; it is legacy, with proprietary software, and I don't have much control over it. I don't have root access, and I can't change how it's set up. But MS-DOS from the same period (or the DOS available in Windows 2000/XP) is better documented and easier to use than the command interface on that Unix system.
Not very bloody much. By "in my spare time" I meant at work. I have a family life and I like to enjoy it; this is the longest stretch I've spent on Slashdot in weeks.
We're a small independent manufacturing company, and I'm the draftsman and designer, so my workload is highly variable. Last week I worked overtime to get a particular project out the door; next week I may have thirty hours of production work. I spend the extra time as productively as I can, learning how our systems work, documenting what I've done to them (Yes, real documentation!)--and reading the Microsoft newsgroups, where I find answers to many of my more puzzling questions (like why our server failed to reboot last fall). I learned about the WMF exploit from Slashdot; should I have skipped the headlines that day? "[Learn] about filtering out stupid work emails"--learn where? In the MS Outlook help? Ack!
How many inches? About 2-1/2 lines, actually--I am no longer an IT professional! That's my primary point: A company the size of mine can't afford to have full-time IT support. I learned Windows NT, then Windows 2000, then Windows SBS 2003 (which I'm still learning) because there was nobody else who could, not because I wanted them on my resume.
In our town there are only about three PC sales-and-service firms that have more than three employees, and from past experience I wouldn't trust a single one of them to reset the high scores on Minesweeper. (Remember the guys who left the Administrator password blank?) A company like ours that can't afford to hire an MCSE t
I've managed to read the source after installing it... but if it was bad, I'd've already been hosed by that point.
There's a fundamental lack of logic here that nobody ever seems to point out. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether you read the source before or after you run the EXE. If these guys are black hats, there's not the slightest reason to expect the EXE to match the source.
Even if they're legit, what guarantee do you have that they're sufficently competent and orderly to keep all the components in sync, to make sure that somebody didn't make one last little tweak in the EXE without updating the published copy of the source?
Any time you run an EXE or DLL you didn't compile and link yourself, you are expressing trust in the honesty and competence of the people who provide it, whether the source code is published or not. Even among those who understand the source code, very few of them are competent to check if the compiled code matches the source.
I work for a very small company, probably typical of thousands of other very small companies. Our company is too small to afford a full-time IT staff; I'm the entire IT department, and it's a very small part of my job. I'm the IT guru because I'm the only one there who knows a DLL from a dungheap.
I have formal training in computers, but so long ago that the field was still called EDP and time-sharing was a big deal. I've spent years learning what I know about Windows and Windows networks, in my spare time. It would take me years more to reach a similar level of expertise with a brand-new OS. And until I reached that level, we'd be more vulnerable than with Windows.
My company has about a dozen computers, including a single domain server with no backup server. We have about $60,000 invested in software (other than OS's) that will only run under Windows. We have no hardware to set up a test server, no money (or time) to spend on unsuccessful experiments.
The only person in our company who has ever used Linux is our 21-year-old secretary. We have one Unix machine, which I despise, because its desktop GUI is primitive and its command interface makes MS-DOS look well-designed and intuitive.
I rarely get to spend more than two or three hours a week on network maintenance, security monitoring, and research combined. If I hadn't automated them I wouldn't have time to do file backups some weeks. I have no time to spend trying to research the seventeen hundred different distros of Linux available, or whether Wine will support our COM+-dependent network applications--or whether the WMF exploit still applies if we run Windows applications on Linux.
We can't afford to have a regular support contract with a local computer-specialist firm. That's assuming we could even find someone in town we can trust--the overpriced morons who did our last batch of installations gave us a two-NIC server with only one NIC enabled (so no firewall), and set up user workstations with the Administrator password left blank!
I loathe Microsoft, and have since I first saw Windows 3.11. But what possible reason do I have for trusting the claims of Red Hat or Debian more? What research I can do is hardly reassuring. Remember Saturday's story here: researchers found 812 flaws in the Windows operating system, 2,328 problems in various versions of the Unix/Linux operating systems (Mac included)?
I didn't choose Windows; I inherited it and have no resources to replace it. My company didn't really choose Windows; it was forced on us by the marketplace. Be realistic! My wife just bought an Apple, and the first thing she installed on it was the OS-X version of MS Office, necessary for compatibility with her company.
Maybe in another ten years Linux will be enough of a force that applications will be written for cross-compatibility, but little companies like mine can't wait that long. We have to use what we can, right now.
Two quick ones, one simple and elegant (to do, not to tell), the other showing my anal-retentive side.
Simple: The IBM 1130, a business computer from the early sixties, used solid blocks of translucent plastic for several of its control buttons and indicator lights, such as RUN and STOP—and PARITY CHECK. Only a friction fit held the buttons; they were easily removed. The pale STOP button lit up whenever no program was running, so a favorite trick of operators was to switch the STOP buttons and the vivid scarlet PARITY CHECK button, and see who panicked.
Anal-retentive: One place I worked in the late eighties used DEC CRTs that supported two character sets, one of which could be programmed. The MicroVAX OS allowed users to send messages from one CRT to another, including ESC sequences and other special characters. I manually built a batch file that transmitted all the escape sequences to completely reprogram a CRT's alternate character set then clear the screen.
The command prompt used the primary character set, but for some reason the text editor always switched to the alternate set. So one day one of my coworkers opened a program for editing, and instead of a screen full of COBOL he saw blanks, except where all his E's had been replaced by a hand with the middle finger upraised. (All your E's are belong to us.)
It worked so well that I spent two days manually coding a full character set, so that when my boss opened the text editor his screen filled with Hebrew characters. No question of escaping blame—he knew I was the only one there who'd take the time and trouble.
The company I went to work for in 1981 already had standards in place to enforce four-digit years. The fact that they had a medical database containing patients over a century old might have had something to do with it, but they were also anticipating the century rollover. Since they used their original Xerox mainframe from 1963 to 1984, they fully expected their new Honeywell mainframe to last them into the third millenium.
Sadly, of course, all that planning and coding we did back in the eighties was totally wasted. The entire database was scrapped in the early nineties, as the company rolled from mainframe onto PCs. Bah.
Why would combination locks have a master key in the first place?
Because the school administration wants to be able to open any locker at any time, without requiring the combination. This was the policy at my high school back in the seventies—all the locks were the same Master V-series.
A friend of mine pulled the same stunt: dismantled a lock and made a key to fit it. (He didn't steal the lock; the school made us buy them.) He then shifted all the locks on one row one locker to the right. (I don't know whether he moved the last lock back to the left end or just popped it off the stack.)
After he graduated, he gave me his key, which I never got up the nerve to use (I was an awful coward back then), and about four old locks that it fits. To my astonishment, when I went back for my twentieth high school reunion, the same V-series locks were still in use! My 21-year-old key would have opened every locker in the school.
I still have the key, and for all I know, it would still work.
Which brings up the question, why would anyone hide their technical contact information? Personal, I have no problem with... I rarely have to deal with the domain owner. But fake tech info?
Because for millions of small sites (like mine), the tech contact is the domain owner. My site isn't the sort to attract loons and thieves, so I don't worry that much about having my personal info made public. But I do get tired of having to shred two or three credit card offers a month for my "business", when it is obvious from the site content (which plainly no automated WHOIS harvester has ever bothered to check) that not a dime of revenue is generated by it.
The Spywarewarrior tests also used a much larger number of spyware targets. Does it bother anybody but me that ZDNet tested detection of only 10 spyware programs, when most of the AS programs out there check for several thousand? Or that ZDNet doesn't name the particular 10 targets it used, or say how old they are?
10 new spyware programs can appear in a matter of days or hours; not every company can respond to them that quickly. Did ZDNet test how effective these programs are overall, or just how quickly they identify and add new problems?
Myself, I want AS software for the long haul. I'm a very careful browser, and neither Ad-Aware nor Spybot has had any work to do on my home system for about three years--except that about a month ago I reinstalled a package I downloaded almost 6 years ago that--Surprise!--included an adware/monitoring program. Even though the adware was ultimately harmless (the company that originally wrote the adware has since gone out of business; there's no website left for their adware to report to), both Ad-Aware and Spybot were ready to clean it off for me.
Susan Bradley, a Microsoft MVP, has created a "Hall of Shame" for Windows-based software that requires Admin/Power User privilege to run, or that has other serious security flaws. The list is still short (and sort of disorganized), but she's trying. A good many big-name vendors are on her list (and she's not afraid to add Microsoft products).
Nominate your favorite offenders! Tell your friends! If Threatcode.com catches on (she's a server guru, so maybe she can survive a slashdotting), maybe at least a few companies will respond to the bad publicity.
I know, I've got a Pollyanna attitude, but I keep hoping...
Am I the only one who speed-read that headline as Vast Subsurface Martian Discovered? (Yipe!)
If it doesn't go away and release resources in less than a second, I consider it bad software.
:-)
Of course, in my experience XP takes at least 30 seconds to release resources and go away.
I would no more find The War of the Worlds improved by having it moved to America than you would find Christine (by the quintessentially American author Stephen King) improved by changing the car from a 1958 Plymouth Fury to a 1959 Morris Mini.
Time and landscape are part and parcel of stories like these, and they rarely benefit from being translated. Only because Welles was a master storyteller himself was the Mercury Theatre production so successful.
In fact, my wife and I prefer the Bloomsbury editions of J.K. Rowling, because the Scholastic Books versions have been so painfully Americanized—("Sorcerer's Stone", indeed!)—so I can understand where your attitude arises.
P.S. Of course, since one of my favorite British authors is Nevil Shute, my image of England tends to be stuck in the '50s when everything was falling apart and the smart people were leaving for Australia.
P.P.S. It's spelled transferred, not transfered.