The only person who I have ever met who seemed to like Windows Mobile is my line manager - and I'm 95% certain that's because of the association with Microsoft. (He's a sucker for a name he knows - even if it later transpires the product is a load of rubbish).
Interestingly, his current phone is a blackberry and I don't recall being called upon to set up email on that.... yet we don't have BES.
I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone who's dealing with a bunch of people using Windows on the desktop - though TBH if I were to give a Unix desktop to anyone who knows enough to know what it is, they'd probably scream blue murder if they were forced to jump through the "run./configure, spend half an hour sorting out dependencies" hoops - that's exactly what package managers were invented for, FFS.
Having said all that, an office of Windows users I used to deal with had the greatest difficulty in understanding they could have admin rights without actually logging in as admin, despite having it explained to them in simple terms several times. Several PCs they actually rebuilt with dodgy copies of XP as a result of this.
The idea of allowing normal users to install signed software is actually not all that bad.
Frankly, the most common alternatives - either users have to ask IT to do it (which neither the users like nor does the IT department necessarily want to spend its days messing around with) or giving them local admin (or, this being Linux, local root) privileges are both awful.
Off the top of my head, I can think of a few sane solutions to the problem - none of which appear to have been given serious thought:
1. Provide a list of software which anyone can install. (Oh look, that's more or less what Fedora did, though obviously if you depend on signatures you don't need to compile and maintain a list. Might have been nice if they'd made it so the admin had to decide in advance what software could be allowed, rather than just sticking the entire repository in there, but the idea's sound) 2. Provide a sandbox of some sort that can be wiped on demand and install software into that.
Guy Fawkes? The man burned in effigy to underline his failure to accomplish his goals? I can think of better symbols!
Yet people complain that we need another one every year.
In fact, I recall when I was a kid reading the Just William books where William mentioned that his father "thought we needed someone to do the same again" (or words to that effect) - and they were mostly written in the 1930's-50s.
They've proposed a list of legislation as long as your arm and there has to be an election at some point before July next year - which means any legislation realistically needs to be passed before then. My guess is they'll have to prioritise and I'm not sure how high this would be on the priorities list.
It's not a vote winner, but at the same time it's being put forward by Mandelson, who is the original zombie politician - just when you thought he was dead he comes back again.
The consensus of opinion is, IMO, that this government will lose the next election. But don't count your chickens - it wouldn't be the first time a government which most people thought was in its dying gasps somehow got re-elected.
We still do, and it historically worked surprisingly well for a number of reasons.
The Lords can't pass laws on their own. In fact, I don't think they can even propose laws under normal circumstances (though there's no law stopping them from making a suggestion to the right people, I suppose...). What they can do is debate and amend laws which are going through the parliamentary process.
Most of the lords were from well-off families (which made them harder to bribe), had been educated in top schools (best education money can buy, and frankly in most cases money can buy a much better education than the state can provide) and because they weren't elected, they didn't have to worry about whether their stance on an issue would impact their re-election. Of course, in the strict sense of the word it is elitist but there's no intrinsic reason an elitist system can't work pretty well.
The Labour government has got rid of most of the hereditary seats in the House of Lords, replacing them with people appointed by, er, the Labour government.
I dunno. I'd imagine that if you're committing a felony and concerned enough to set up encryption that you're going to protect it a little better than your webmail account. But maybe I'm overestimating people here.
I rather fear you may be. Encryption isn't terribly well understood outside the IT industry - a lot of people only know it's a way to make something hard(er) to read.
The various other issues at stake - choosing a secure password, not writing it anywhere, not using the same password for anything else - are frequently overlooked and it's only relatively recently that clear warnings about such things have started to appear in user interfaces.
The keys could be stored on a 2nd secure device, something like a TPM chip that nukes it storage after 3 invalid password attempts.
Would never fly in most corporate environments. Nobody wants to tell the sales director that when they said "don't forget the password", they really weren't kidding.
This leaves you with the personal market for encryption (miniscule), military and government.
GIMP I'd class as one of the staunchly old-school apps in terms of its development team.
The sort from the bad old days of Linux where anyone who couldn't figure out how to compile a kernel from scratch and have it work first time without so much as a README was openly described as a drooling moron and worse on public mailing lists.
The sort where anyone saying "I've read and searched and still I can't understand...." may as well paint a target on their chest and carry around a big sign saying "Shoot here!". Though if you'd joined the list to say "GIMP can't do...." you'd be almost guaranteed to get at least three sets of step-by-step instructions to do exactly what you wanted.
I'm told that things are much better now. But I wonder how much carries over..... IME most such projects may do a perfectly good job at achieving what they need to technically, but seldom produce anything you'd really want to use if push came to shove.
I'd like to see them do that. There's no earthly way they'd have been arrested without the police having first made sure they had seized every computer those people had even been suspected of breathing on.
I think you just created a new style of humor all on you own!
Not really. Tom Holt is an absolute master at taking demons, monsters, werewolves, gods and other mythical beings and putting them into situations we recognise from daily life.
Well worth reading some of his work if you haven't already.
So what's the problem with taxing all religions as if they were businesses? Tax them a certain proportion of their profits - no profits, no tax. I'd expect that the Cult of Scientology would be among the first to get wholly reamed via the new taxation regimen.
Because I'm absolutely certain that the CoS, with all the money it has accumulated over the years, would have a terrible time finding a suitably creative team of accountants to bring their tax bill right down.
Re:So let me get this straight...
on
Less Than Free
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· Score: 1
Nothing new there. You ever tried writing a standard document that instructs Windows XP users how to configure wireless?
Hint: Most OEMs replace Windows' own UI (which is admittedly terrible) with their own (which is invariably just as terrible but comes with the added bonus that some functionality may be impossible to configure).
Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials
on
Fedora 12 Released
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· Score: 1
You'd be astonished (and, frankly, disturbed) how many bits of documentation on the Internet start with "First download the source code...." - and I'm not referring to outdated documentation or obscure things.
Re:Ubuntu influence on marketing materials
on
Fedora 12 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
``Wait, did Fedora even have marketing materials before Ubuntu?''
They didn't need to, because they are the free version of Red Hat and Red Hat _was_ Linux in a lot of people's minds.
But when Ubuntu came around, it quickly got so popular that it scared the big distros into getting their act together. Ubuntu's killer combo was the combination of working package management with ease of use.
The only amazing thing about that was it took RedHat so long to get their act together. rpm needed some way of searching package repositories for years. Mandrake had urpmi and Debian had apt-get years before RedHat had anything comparable.
System administration is like artificial intelligence. It's a human-centric job involving a lot of common sense, and it can't always be readily automated because the rules keep changing. That ought to raise warning flags..Like vision or language recognition, a lot of scientists seem to think administration is so easy that only dumb people bother to investigate it. So they don't. But that's the opposite of the truth. Humans are still stuck doing rote maintenance precisely BECAUSE it's so tricky to do that computers can't yet do it. Which means it's very, very interesting.
I've been a sysadmin for several years, and my own view on it is a variant on yours.
IME, the sysadmins who don't automate the hell out of everything they can think of are the dumb ones. You've given them a bunch of boring, frequently repetitive tasks, a bunch of general-purpose computers that excel at boring, repetitive tasks and they don't put two and two together? Such people almost invariably spend most of the day chasing their tail.
Unfortunately there are quite a few such dumb sysadmins - so many, in fact, that it's not unusual to find that the managers that hire them have come to believe that this is the general way of IT and there is little that can be done about it.
So in other words, there's still loads of third-party software which doesn't support such large icons, may never support such large icons and will only cause trouble at high resolution?
There are numerous examples of young musicians signing very one-sided contracts and not fully grasping the implications until it's far too late.
A few of these have since gone on to become successful and have become rather more careful in their dealings with record companies. Prince immediately springs to mind, as does Courtney Love.
I cannot help but wonder - does this mean there's an entire generation of musicians who released successful work and got screwed by the record company who are now going back to their label and saying "Er... excuse me... I'd like my copyrights back, please." Could be interesting....
"As important as this the mentioned article is, it should also be pointed out that any IT staff worth their pay packet should already have port 139 blocked at the firewall, and probably port 445. too."
I respectfully disagree.
Any IT staff worth their pay packet should have EVERYTHING blocked at the firewall, then open holes for things that you can be certain you need. Ideally, those holes don't go direct to systems on the company LAN but instead to a DMZ.
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The only person who I have ever met who seemed to like Windows Mobile is my line manager - and I'm 95% certain that's because of the association with Microsoft. (He's a sucker for a name he knows - even if it later transpires the product is a load of rubbish).
Interestingly, his current phone is a blackberry and I don't recall being called upon to set up email on that.... yet we don't have BES.
Thank you.
I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone who's dealing with a bunch of people using Windows on the desktop - though TBH if I were to give a Unix desktop to anyone who knows enough to know what it is, they'd probably scream blue murder if they were forced to jump through the "run ./configure, spend half an hour sorting out dependencies" hoops - that's exactly what package managers were invented for, FFS.
Having said all that, an office of Windows users I used to deal with had the greatest difficulty in understanding they could have admin rights without actually logging in as admin, despite having it explained to them in simple terms several times. Several PCs they actually rebuilt with dodgy copies of XP as a result of this.
Maybe they'll add cool televisions to their targets when they invade our privies.
Why are they invading your toilets?
The idea of allowing normal users to install signed software is actually not all that bad.
Frankly, the most common alternatives - either users have to ask IT to do it (which neither the users like nor does the IT department necessarily want to spend its days messing around with) or giving them local admin (or, this being Linux, local root) privileges are both awful.
Off the top of my head, I can think of a few sane solutions to the problem - none of which appear to have been given serious thought:
1. Provide a list of software which anyone can install. (Oh look, that's more or less what Fedora did, though obviously if you depend on signatures you don't need to compile and maintain a list. Might have been nice if they'd made it so the admin had to decide in advance what software could be allowed, rather than just sticking the entire repository in there, but the idea's sound)
2. Provide a sandbox of some sort that can be wiped on demand and install software into that.
Guy Fawkes? The man burned in effigy to underline his failure to accomplish his goals? I can think of better symbols!
Yet people complain that we need another one every year.
In fact, I recall when I was a kid reading the Just William books where William mentioned that his father "thought we needed someone to do the same again" (or words to that effect) - and they were mostly written in the 1930's-50s.
They've proposed a list of legislation as long as your arm and there has to be an election at some point before July next year - which means any legislation realistically needs to be passed before then. My guess is they'll have to prioritise and I'm not sure how high this would be on the priorities list.
It's not a vote winner, but at the same time it's being put forward by Mandelson, who is the original zombie politician - just when you thought he was dead he comes back again.
The consensus of opinion is, IMO, that this government will lose the next election. But don't count your chickens - it wouldn't be the first time a government which most people thought was in its dying gasps somehow got re-elected.
We still do, and it historically worked surprisingly well for a number of reasons.
The Lords can't pass laws on their own. In fact, I don't think they can even propose laws under normal circumstances (though there's no law stopping them from making a suggestion to the right people, I suppose...). What they can do is debate and amend laws which are going through the parliamentary process.
Most of the lords were from well-off families (which made them harder to bribe), had been educated in top schools (best education money can buy, and frankly in most cases money can buy a much better education than the state can provide) and because they weren't elected, they didn't have to worry about whether their stance on an issue would impact their re-election. Of course, in the strict sense of the word it is elitist but there's no intrinsic reason an elitist system can't work pretty well.
The Labour government has got rid of most of the hereditary seats in the House of Lords, replacing them with people appointed by, er, the Labour government.
I dunno. I'd imagine that if you're committing a felony and concerned enough to set up encryption that you're going to protect it a little better than your webmail account. But maybe I'm overestimating people here.
I rather fear you may be. Encryption isn't terribly well understood outside the IT industry - a lot of people only know it's a way to make something hard(er) to read.
The various other issues at stake - choosing a secure password, not writing it anywhere, not using the same password for anything else - are frequently overlooked and it's only relatively recently that clear warnings about such things have started to appear in user interfaces.
The keys could be stored on a 2nd secure device, something like a TPM chip that nukes it storage after 3 invalid password attempts.
Would never fly in most corporate environments. Nobody wants to tell the sales director that when they said "don't forget the password", they really weren't kidding.
This leaves you with the personal market for encryption (miniscule), military and government.
GIMP I'd class as one of the staunchly old-school apps in terms of its development team.
The sort from the bad old days of Linux where anyone who couldn't figure out how to compile a kernel from scratch and have it work first time without so much as a README was openly described as a drooling moron and worse on public mailing lists.
The sort where anyone saying "I've read and searched and still I can't understand ...." may as well paint a target on their chest and carry around a big sign saying "Shoot here!". Though if you'd joined the list to say "GIMP can't do ...." you'd be almost guaranteed to get at least three sets of step-by-step instructions to do exactly what you wanted.
I'm told that things are much better now. But I wonder how much carries over..... IME most such projects may do a perfectly good job at achieving what they need to technically, but seldom produce anything you'd really want to use if push came to shove.
Where do you draw the line though? You can't possibly put icons for everything on the desktop - you'd need a 50" screen.
I'd like to see them do that. There's no earthly way they'd have been arrested without the police having first made sure they had seized every computer those people had even been suspected of breathing on.
If your bank has any Windows PCs or servers, you probably should care.
Can it lick its own arse in polite company?
True, but how the mighty have fallen over the years.
Twelve years ago AltaVista was king.
I think you just created a new style of humor all on you own!
Not really. Tom Holt is an absolute master at taking demons, monsters, werewolves, gods and other mythical beings and putting them into situations we recognise from daily life.
Well worth reading some of his work if you haven't already.
So what's the problem with taxing all religions as if they were businesses? Tax them a certain proportion of their profits - no profits, no tax. I'd expect that the Cult of Scientology would be among the first to get wholly reamed via the new taxation regimen.
Because I'm absolutely certain that the CoS, with all the money it has accumulated over the years, would have a terrible time finding a suitably creative team of accountants to bring their tax bill right down.
Nothing new there. You ever tried writing a standard document that instructs Windows XP users how to configure wireless?
Hint: Most OEMs replace Windows' own UI (which is admittedly terrible) with their own (which is invariably just as terrible but comes with the added bonus that some functionality may be impossible to configure).
You'd be astonished (and, frankly, disturbed) how many bits of documentation on the Internet start with "First download the source code...." - and I'm not referring to outdated documentation or obscure things.
``Wait, did Fedora even have marketing materials before Ubuntu?''
They didn't need to, because they are the free version of Red Hat and Red Hat _was_ Linux in a lot of people's minds.
But when Ubuntu came around, it quickly got so popular that it scared the big distros into getting their act together. Ubuntu's killer combo was the combination of working package management with ease of use.
The only amazing thing about that was it took RedHat so long to get their act together. rpm needed some way of searching package repositories for years. Mandrake had urpmi and Debian had apt-get years before RedHat had anything comparable.
The FA deals with that by proposing you include version numbering in the interface itself.
System administration is like artificial intelligence. It's a human-centric job involving a lot of common sense, and it can't always be readily automated because the rules keep changing. That ought to raise warning flags. .Like vision or language recognition, a lot of scientists seem to think administration is so easy that only dumb people bother to investigate it. So they don't. But that's the opposite of the truth. Humans are still stuck doing rote maintenance precisely BECAUSE it's so tricky to do that computers can't yet do it. Which means it's very, very interesting.
I've been a sysadmin for several years, and my own view on it is a variant on yours.
IME, the sysadmins who don't automate the hell out of everything they can think of are the dumb ones. You've given them a bunch of boring, frequently repetitive tasks, a bunch of general-purpose computers that excel at boring, repetitive tasks and they don't put two and two together? Such people almost invariably spend most of the day chasing their tail.
Unfortunately there are quite a few such dumb sysadmins - so many, in fact, that it's not unusual to find that the managers that hire them have come to believe that this is the general way of IT and there is little that can be done about it.
So in other words, there's still loads of third-party software which doesn't support such large icons, may never support such large icons and will only cause trouble at high resolution?
There are numerous examples of young musicians signing very one-sided contracts and not fully grasping the implications until it's far too late.
A few of these have since gone on to become successful and have become rather more careful in their dealings with record companies. Prince immediately springs to mind, as does Courtney Love.
I cannot help but wonder - does this mean there's an entire generation of musicians who released successful work and got screwed by the record company who are now going back to their label and saying "Er... excuse me... I'd like my copyrights back, please." Could be interesting....
"As important as this the mentioned article is, it should also be pointed out that any IT staff worth their pay packet should already have port 139 blocked at the firewall, and probably port 445. too."
I respectfully disagree.
Any IT staff worth their pay packet should have EVERYTHING blocked at the firewall, then open holes for things that you can be certain you need. Ideally, those holes don't go direct to systems on the company LAN but instead to a DMZ.