Who else do you want developing a compiler but the people who made the hardware it's running on.
My goodness... you can't mean... that the company which developed the hardware is in a strong position to get a few people from the hardware dev team onto the team developing software for it?! And that these people are well placed to know what's worth optimising, where and how?
No shit, Sherlock.
The only amazing thing about this is that it is such a novel insight that it is necessary for you to be modded as such.
Perhaps someone with a stronger grasp of the theory will confirm this, but I would think any reliable form of self-diagnosis is a problem which cannot be solved with a Turing machine.
In other words, it's physically impossible to produce 100% accurate diagnostics purely in software.
And what genius came up with the idea of keeping programs in memory even though you've closed them, so that eventually the phone slows to a crawl, forcing you to kill all running applications?
Makes a lot of sense on a desktop PC when disk is orders of magnitude slower than RAM and you've got the room to implement a proper memory manager to handle such behaviour.
Actually, a similar explanation works for almost any piece of poor design in Windows - ask yourself the question "does this feature make more sense on a single, probably not networked desktop PC which is used by one person?" and 9 times out of 10 the answer's "Yes".
I forgot to mention their brick heavy laptops are slow as mud.
Then don't buy one of the cheap and nasty brick heavy units.
This may come as a shock, byt a lot of hardware manufacturers - Dell included - offer a range of products which generally speaking allow the customer to make a trade off between price and functionality. You can't expect them to put the same level of effort into engineering a £300 laptop as a £900 one.
And consumers are prepared to pay so much for it that there are literally dozens of companies offering similar publications with truly unbiased reviews.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, SO LONG AS THEY OPEN UP THE DAMNED SPECS SO THE COMMUNITY CAN WORK WITH IT PROPERLY. I can only assume I'm not the only one who thinks so, either.
You are correct. But nowhere in computing is the idea of technology taking second place to marketing more prevalent than high-end graphics cards. So you wind up with two cards which are virtually identical, but one is artificially crippled in the driver.
Or, alternatively, they're just so damn embarrassed of all the screwups in the hardware that they just cannot bring themselves to release public specs. I've got strong reason to believe the same is true with a lot of hardware.
The problem is PC hardware in general terms is such a mash of thngs with varying ability to follow specifications that every once in a while you happen upon a hardware configuration which just does not work.
Old Example: Creative Labs AWE64 ISA sound card, external serial modem, Windows NT 4. Version 5 of the soundcard drivers - the modem stops working. It still dials, still sounds like it's handshaking but it can't complete the handshake.
Solution: Upgrade the soundcard drivers. Took me ages to figure that one out.
I don't think things are substantially better today. There's a reason Macs "just work", and it has just as much to do with a limited hardware platform as it has to do with Apple's amazing ability to manage projects. I would point out that every other OS in existence which has been marketed along with specific hardware (eg. Solaris, AIX, VMS) has "just worked" with its respective hardware.
Your client management suite should be able to do this in about an hour, including testing time. What, you don't push your software? Compared to the cost of 100 seat licenses for Office, a software push / update is trivial.
At the risk of being modded a troll, every time a proposal which includes "install this software on all your PCs" is made, someone pipes up with an answer along the lines of "But that would take forever!". The worst bit is they often get modded up as insightful.
Considering this is a site full of techie people, you'd think they'd got the idea that computers are very good at repetitive tasks like - I don't know - installing the same software on a bunch of computers running the same OS.
Unfortunately, all of those descriptions could be applied to Microsoft's XML format (if not right now, it wouldn't be hard for Microsoft to change that).
Despite this, the specifications for this format are next to useless so in the real world, you'll probably end up with Office (which will implement it just fine) and everything else (which will sort-of work, sort-of not work, and basically just be a pain in the backside).
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the few reasons to go out and license your entire office using volume licenses for Windows.
Even though you may only have desktops which were supplied with XP, you'll have trouble getting hold of more desktops running XP by the end of the year so you must either support both or go for the volume license which lets you downgrade how you like.
Why the hell has it been decreed that because men CAN pee standing up, they must?
Let me explain to you why it is men can pee standing up.
On the Eighth Day, God came to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and said "I've finished creating the world, and I've got a couple of things left over which I want you to have between you. Let's see... first thing I can offer you is the ability to pee standing up".
"Oh, yes, can I have that please, God?" said Adam, "That would be so cool - I could be out hunting, fishing or whatever and just pee wherever I am."
Eve smiled sweetly and said if peeing standing up is so important to Adam, let him have it.
God said "Okay. Adam, you shall be able to pee standing up. Now, what else was it I had in the bag.... oh yes. Multiple orgasms".
However, if 10,000 of your friends actually get together and march on the White House armed to the teeth (rather than the more likely scenario of 9,998 of them running off as soon as the army appears), then the government of the day will have a political problem the likes of which they have not seen in decades.
My point was that GPLv3 extends that agreement to everyone, regardless of the original agreements wording. If your agreements wording clashes with GPLv3, then you can't distribute.
However, another poster has pointed out that the clause says "any agreement made after a certain date", so it gives Novell a chance to redeem themselves while effectively preventing Microsoft from making any further, similar deals.
From the summary:
The draft also does not prohibit Novell from distributing software under GPLv3 'because the patent protection they arranged with Microsoft last November can be turned against Microsoft to the community's benefit,' FSF executive director Peter Brown said." Quite correct. But that doesn't quite work if the deal with Microsoft says "this agreement is exclusive". In that case, the only way Novell can abide by that is to distribute nothing under GPLv3, and very possibly nothing under "GPLv2 or later".
I can't see any other reading of this. Which raises the question: what were Novell smoking when they signed the deal? If Microsoft predicted this kind of clause in GPLv3 (which you can be fairly sure they did), they essentially tricked Novell into signing a contract saying "We're going to stop distributing the very software which is core to our business" and Novell went on record saying how great this contract is.
I have a lot of trouble believing that. In which case, exactly what patent protection does this contract provide?
if i saw a problem i'd probably report it to my old boss with a suggested fix.
As one IT pro to another... if your former boss doesn't know this, don't do it. There's a strong chance you'll cause far more trouble for yourself than you ever dreamed possible.
Keylogger was probably installed through some kind of widespread trojan - be it email or compromised website. My favourite is website, because that requires slightly more sophisticated monitoring to do the job properly than an email system, particularly if you give people laptops and let them take the laptop home and connect to their employer through a VPN.
One of two things is possible from this point:
1. Hacker was specifically targeting the treasurer's department. Regardless of the methodology you can use, there's only so much you can do against a really determined hacker, and they'll probably never catch the perpetrator unless they made a really basic error. 2. Keylogger is/was very widespread, and phones home with details of what it's logged on a regular basis. Tie that up with a bit of judicious grepping back home, and you've got a very effective mechanism for finding all sorts of interesting information. The person/team behind this keylogger saw details coming in from a computer owned by a city in California and thought all their Christmases had come at once - access to a public purse which they didn't expect to be very well protected.
if you see them coming and can ignite it before they get to you,
That's a pretty big if. They may or may not be any good at data recovery, but most police forces have spent many years perfecting the art of bursting in the door taking the occupant completely by surprise, screaming at them to get on the floor.
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Why not? They already include such tools in a bootable partition on the hard disk, what's wrong with the idea of sticking them on a CD?
Who else do you want developing a compiler but the people who made the hardware it's running on.
My goodness... you can't mean... that the company which developed the hardware is in a strong position to get a few people from the hardware dev team onto the team developing software for it?! And that these people are well placed to know what's worth optimising, where and how?
No shit, Sherlock.
The only amazing thing about this is that it is such a novel insight that it is necessary for you to be modded as such.
which makes it extremely difficult to determine whether an issue is a hardware or a software problem.
I'm sorry, I'm going to have to interrupt you there and shout BOLLOCKS very loudly.
Solution: Bootable CD with diagnostic tools.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
Perhaps someone with a stronger grasp of the theory will confirm this, but I would think any reliable form of self-diagnosis is a problem which cannot be solved with a Turing machine.
In other words, it's physically impossible to produce 100% accurate diagnostics purely in software.
And what genius came up with the idea of keeping programs in memory even though you've closed them, so that eventually the phone slows to a crawl, forcing you to kill all running applications?
Makes a lot of sense on a desktop PC when disk is orders of magnitude slower than RAM and you've got the room to implement a proper memory manager to handle such behaviour.
Actually, a similar explanation works for almost any piece of poor design in Windows - ask yourself the question "does this feature make more sense on a single, probably not networked desktop PC which is used by one person?" and 9 times out of 10 the answer's "Yes".
If they carried on down that path, ultimately the review would read "It is blue and it sucks".
But it's pretty hard to justify your pay if that's your idea of a review.
I forgot to mention their brick heavy laptops are slow as mud.
Then don't buy one of the cheap and nasty brick heavy units.
This may come as a shock, byt a lot of hardware manufacturers - Dell included - offer a range of products which generally speaking allow the customer to make a trade off between price and functionality. You can't expect them to put the same level of effort into engineering a £300 laptop as a £900 one.
If Virgin records had a radio station
Erm... they do.
If quality had the remotest bearing on marketability of a song, there would be no such thing as Britney Spears.
Instead, there would be a wide range of genuine artists who spend their time and energy writing songs, playing instruments and singing.
And consumers are prepared to pay so much for it that there are literally dozens of companies offering similar publications with truly unbiased reviews.
Aren't there?
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, SO LONG AS THEY OPEN UP THE DAMNED SPECS SO THE COMMUNITY CAN WORK WITH IT PROPERLY. I can only assume I'm not the only one who thinks so, either.
You are correct. But nowhere in computing is the idea of technology taking second place to marketing more prevalent than high-end graphics cards. So you wind up with two cards which are virtually identical, but one is artificially crippled in the driver.
Or, alternatively, they're just so damn embarrassed of all the screwups in the hardware that they just cannot bring themselves to release public specs. I've got strong reason to believe the same is true with a lot of hardware.
The problem is PC hardware in general terms is such a mash of thngs with varying ability to follow specifications that every once in a while you happen upon a hardware configuration which just does not work.
Old Example: Creative Labs AWE64 ISA sound card, external serial modem, Windows NT 4. Version 5 of the soundcard drivers - the modem stops working. It still dials, still sounds like it's handshaking but it can't complete the handshake.
Solution: Upgrade the soundcard drivers. Took me ages to figure that one out.
I don't think things are substantially better today. There's a reason Macs "just work", and it has just as much to do with a limited hardware platform as it has to do with Apple's amazing ability to manage projects. I would point out that every other OS in existence which has been marketed along with specific hardware (eg. Solaris, AIX, VMS) has "just worked" with its respective hardware.
Disparaging your competitors or their products without offering any evidence is illegal.
You'd better tell Pepsi that.
Your client management suite should be able to do this in about an hour, including testing time. What, you don't push your software? Compared to the cost of 100 seat licenses for Office, a software push / update is trivial.
At the risk of being modded a troll, every time a proposal which includes "install this software on all your PCs" is made, someone pipes up with an answer along the lines of "But that would take forever!". The worst bit is they often get modded up as insightful.
Considering this is a site full of techie people, you'd think they'd got the idea that computers are very good at repetitive tasks like - I don't know - installing the same software on a bunch of computers running the same OS.
Unfortunately, all of those descriptions could be applied to Microsoft's XML format (if not right now, it wouldn't be hard for Microsoft to change that).
Despite this, the specifications for this format are next to useless so in the real world, you'll probably end up with Office (which will implement it just fine) and everything else (which will sort-of work, sort-of not work, and basically just be a pain in the backside).
Yeah, but if it's a school network it's probably set through GPO so it's not quite there.
But thanks for playing.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the few reasons to go out and license your entire office using volume licenses for Windows.
Even though you may only have desktops which were supplied with XP, you'll have trouble getting hold of more desktops running XP by the end of the year so you must either support both or go for the volume license which lets you downgrade how you like.
Why the hell has it been decreed that because men CAN pee standing up, they must?
Let me explain to you why it is men can pee standing up.
On the Eighth Day, God came to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and said "I've finished creating the world, and I've got a couple of things left over which I want you to have between you. Let's see... first thing I can offer you is the ability to pee standing up".
"Oh, yes, can I have that please, God?" said Adam, "That would be so cool - I could be out hunting, fishing or whatever and just pee wherever I am."
Eve smiled sweetly and said if peeing standing up is so important to Adam, let him have it.
God said "Okay. Adam, you shall be able to pee standing up. Now, what else was it I had in the bag.... oh yes. Multiple orgasms".
Technically, you are quite correct.
However, if 10,000 of your friends actually get together and march on the White House armed to the teeth (rather than the more likely scenario of 9,998 of them running off as soon as the army appears), then the government of the day will have a political problem the likes of which they have not seen in decades.
My point was that GPLv3 extends that agreement to everyone, regardless of the original agreements wording. If your agreements wording clashes with GPLv3, then you can't distribute.
However, another poster has pointed out that the clause says "any agreement made after a certain date", so it gives Novell a chance to redeem themselves while effectively preventing Microsoft from making any further, similar deals.
I can't see any other reading of this. Which raises the question: what were Novell smoking when they signed the deal? If Microsoft predicted this kind of clause in GPLv3 (which you can be fairly sure they did), they essentially tricked Novell into signing a contract saying "We're going to stop distributing the very software which is core to our business" and Novell went on record saying how great this contract is.
I have a lot of trouble believing that. In which case, exactly what patent protection does this contract provide?
if i saw a problem i'd probably report it to my old boss with a suggested fix.
As one IT pro to another... if your former boss doesn't know this, don't do it. There's a strong chance you'll cause far more trouble for yourself than you ever dreamed possible.
You know what I reckon?
Keylogger was probably installed through some kind of widespread trojan - be it email or compromised website. My favourite is website, because that requires slightly more sophisticated monitoring to do the job properly than an email system, particularly if you give people laptops and let them take the laptop home and connect to their employer through a VPN.
One of two things is possible from this point:
1. Hacker was specifically targeting the treasurer's department. Regardless of the methodology you can use, there's only so much you can do against a really determined hacker, and they'll probably never catch the perpetrator unless they made a really basic error.
2. Keylogger is/was very widespread, and phones home with details of what it's logged on a regular basis. Tie that up with a bit of judicious grepping back home, and you've got a very effective mechanism for finding all sorts of interesting information. The person/team behind this keylogger saw details coming in from a computer owned by a city in California and thought all their Christmases had come at once - access to a public purse which they didn't expect to be very well protected.
My money's on 2.
And both of the people who have been let out of Guantanemo Bay will confirm that this method is effective for regaining your freedom.
if you see them coming and can ignite it before they get to you,
That's a pretty big if. They may or may not be any good at data recovery, but most police forces have spent many years perfecting the art of bursting in the door taking the occupant completely by surprise, screaming at them to get on the floor.