This is a machine that has everything stripped out of it, including service releases and associated security patches, networking code, etc.
As Gates knows so well, feature competition on new systems is just as much related to security as bells-and-whistles. As long as hackers are breaking OSs, you'll need more and more code to plug the leaks. In fact, you'll probably end up with ten times as much security code as feature code. It shouldn't be that way, but there it is.
While the article was a nice feature comparison of the two, it really didn't get into the "format war" question at the top of the page here.
Besides industry support, my only question would be "which one is growing?" Which of these formats is expected to get a new version number sometime soon?
If you ask me, that is why Microsoft is talking about adding "extensions" to RSS -- by growing and adapting the standard, it gets more bells and whistles, more application support, and more momentum in the development community.
Let's see, IE7, SQL Server, Longhorn, new versin of.NET, etc -- we developers have a lot to prepare for.
It's a wonder we can get any work done. Looks like we'll just spend all of our time getting ready for 27 new versions of Microsoft products.
This doesn't seem like much of a practical thing to me. After all, most marriages have difficutly when it comes to spending money -- do you really want minute-by-minute graphs of who uses what in the house? After all, the writer admitted that at the end of this whole adventure he managed to show that his computers were using more electricity than his wife's stuff. FTA
Keep in mind that when it comes to friends and family, 'informative' is a relative term. Although you might find it very 'informative' to know that your wife left the lights on in the living room three out of four nights last week, she will probably not think so. I've found it better to save my geek points for things like "honey, don't you think we should have a raid server?"
I don't find any of that informative. Or rather, I find it detailed information about something that is trivial. Even if you have very tight budget, do you really want to argue about who leaves the lights on the most? What's next, sensors to monitor where people are at all times, and correlate electricity usage? No. Count me out on this one. But I got to admit -- the software looks cool!
I emailed the editor -- I can't find a reference to the story anywhere in the post.
Perhaps over on this side of the room it's screwed up, if we all stood somewhere over to the left, we might see how this makes sense.
Free? I'm paying over a hundred bucks a year for a print subscription.
Thanks for the info -- BTW, I like about 20% of your output, which isn't a bad ratio for the business you're in.
I think the U.N. should get involved in all aspects of the internet. After all, aren't these the same guys who want more regulation of cell phones?
After all, that's what we elected these people to do, right? Oh wait a minute. nobody elected the UN, it's a treaty organization.
I'm not trying to sound reactionary, but this sounds like a solution in search of a problem. The internet is fine the way it is. If the U.S. Congress has managed to keep its hands off it so far, the U.N. should follow suit, imo. The more politicians we get involved in managing the net, the worse it will perform for everybody.
While the CIO is more businesman than technical guy, his job has to be like herding cats. FTA
In another example, Vass received a mysterious note that a major system had been disabled and had stopped production on a hardware chip.
Although Vass had no knowledge of this, he soon discovered the system in question was in fact the desktop machine of an engineer who had recently left the company. The desktop had been reformatted following his departure, cutting off 600 users who had over the last three years depended on it for network services.
I knew a major financial company, which will remain nameless, that rolled out a new customer product a couple years ago. When I was talking to the architect, it turns out the whole thing was running off a computer under his desk! He said that one day he accidentally kicked the power switch, and the whole place went beserk. I "encouraged" him to perhaps move it to the server farm, where it would be a little safer. He declined, saying he "wanted more control" over the application until it was stable enough. And this was on a production product.
I do NOT envy the job of CIO. Those guys have a tough row to hoe. BTW, if you ever want to know how the industry is being perceived by business, CIO magazine is a great read.(but expensive) It's real eye-opener to hear things from the other side of the tracks.
Sounds like a good book. Build systems are often overlooked by the development community, in favor of "sexier" topics like technologies and standards. It's important to scale the build process with the complexity of the team and project, however -- I'm sure the author covers that. A mention of TOAD would have been nice, as well, especially when talking about DB source control.
Integration into larger enterprise architectures would also be a critical subject, as most of us develop in some kind of larger environment that has it's own tools, standards, and processes. In other words, I get the feeling from the review that the book is more "blank sheet" build control than "big corporate" build control. There's a difference.
What with booting from CDs and ubiquitous internet access, the old "sneakernet" has long gone the way of the dinosaur. I use computers all the time, and haven't touched a floppy in a couple years.
Heck, now that we've working on fingernail hard drives, maybe even those USB drives will be outdated.
Downloading movies seems like a lot of bits to push over the average consumer's pipe. Tie in a pre-constructed box for it (and who exactly wants to buy yet another home appliance when the computer will do?) and it sounds like an infrastructure mess.
I wonder if consumers will be happy waiting for hours while their movie is delivered? Especially if the Blockbuster is just around the corner. Of course, it beats going out, but at what price? Something about the business model just doesn't add up to me.
I know it matters to technical people. The last cell phone I bought had Windows CE on it so I could write programs for it. But to the average consumer, are they really going to look at a list of OS qualities like that and make a purchase decision?
It was one thing when the OS was the product -- like in a PDA. But not now. Now the OS is just an add-on. What with these OSs in cars, phones, refrigerators, etc -- is the average consumer not going to buy a Lexus because of concerns with the OS?
But he's definitely no politician. People want to believe that you can get something for nothing. He sounded a little on the abrasive side.
I found it interesting that he distinguishes between different types of software, implying that there would be vastly different business models for each -- "don't try this at home" I would have liked to have seen the interviewer nail him down on this a little more -- I think there is some good stuff there but without the details its hard to know whether he knows what he's talking about or not.
Fundable.org leaves it up to the project initiator to make sure all the contributors are satisfied. "You can't really make sure someone is going to do what they're supposed to do," Pratt says. "We're working on a feedback system, but for now we let people post a link to their eBay profile and ratings, thereby implementing a degree of trustworthiness."
So I pay my money and get my software delivered. After a month, I discover it has a bug in it. Do I get my money back then? Or does the developer go back to fundable to raise more money for the fix? Seems like people would be unhappy with this system over a long period of time. For simple, atomic operations, fine. But for ongoing software development and maintenance? I don't see how it would work.
But his "prank" costs tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. FTA,
...allegedly wrecked Delta Airlines' systems in Atlanta for seven hours, leading to the cancellation of 40 flights.
Around the world, the Australian Railcorp trains stopped running because computer problems caused by Sasser made it impossible for drivers to talk to signalmen.
In Taiwan, more than 400 branches of the post office were forced to use pen and paper because Sasser crashed desktop computers...
In the USA, we're already seeing a big push to try juveniles as adults in violent crime cases. The damage caused by this worm was serious business -- its not too hard to extrapolate people one day losing their lives because of worms like this.
Being a dumb teenager is one thing. Causing world disruption is something else entirely (Yes. I know. The victims bear some responsibility)
People take the computer too lightly, like it was a TV set or something. It's more like a small nuclear bomb in each home, great for powering the house, but not so much something you want the kids mucking around with unsupervised. If you are one of those who think gun control stops gun crime, wait 20 years or so until people start advocating "computer control" to stop cyber crime. You'll have a blast with that one.
Six years ago, I was contacted by a stock brokerage company in New York. They were looking for ways to track the computer use (of their developers, I believe. I think they were concerned about Internet Surfing) Like a dummy, I rambled off some ideas that could help them track usage without the employees noticing it. At the time, I thought it was a very strange call! Why would anybody secretly want to know what their employees were doing? Didn't they trust them? I never heard back from the people, and I always thought that I had "given away too much" by specifiying the programming during the interview.
Now that weird scenario has become all too commonplace, and it's just as secret as I feared. FTA, "When the employee discovered that he had been monitored, he lodged a complaint with Alberta's information and privacy commissioner."
The guy didn't even know the software was there. Now it's one thing to tell people "We're watching you. This will go on your evaluation" It's another thing entirely to do it secretly.
In the present day, clients are modeling their business practices more and more, and would like a way to track metrics. I'm all for it: if I were a businessperson or employee, I wouldn't have a problem with my boss measuring how long it took to do my work. Where I surfed during my lunch hour? Forget it. But my productivity? Sure.
I downloaded my first program with BitTorrent a few weeks ago -- a TV show that my VCR failed to record. While doing that, I accidentally clicked on a certain part of the web page. Bingo slammo, my system was infected with spyware, this nasty Aurora and nail.exe
Being a technical guy, familar with the registry, COM, and how windows works, I went about trying to kill this pesky snake. A few hours later, after saying some words I won't repeat here, I decided to wipe the machine and start over (it was a lighly loaded box, so no major loss)
I could have gotten SoftIce and gone into kernal mode to trap this bastard, but it was way beyond my effort vs. reward tolerence level. Spyware has gotten so complicated and sneaky nowadays: to me it is worse of a threat than virsuses ever were.
Now I run double anti-spyware programs in addition to my A/V and firewall. I think that we technical people are also misunderestimating the danger posed by this junk to our own machines.
Ok. So the anti-spyware program lets the spyware continue operating without flagging it, because it has become spyware itself by association? So now we obviously need to develop an anti-anti spyware program, to fix the problems caused by the anti-spyware, right? That is, until the anti-spyware people declare our anti-anti-spyware to be spyware, in which case we'll have to develop anti-anti-anti-spyware?
This makes my head hurt.
The nature of the complaint sounds awful, and AMD certainly has a very competitive product that Intel is trying to quash. I can't help but wonder, though, at how difficult it is going to be to prove the charges AMD makes, and even if they are proved, by the time years have passed and the judgement is made, the market will be way down the road. Look at the Microsoft browser case: while there was relief granted, did it really make a difference by the time it was given?
In addition, the sheer volume of paperwork requested (38 companies) indicates that this is going to be huge and take time to prosecute. While that's great for the lawyers, I'm not so sure it serves the interests of their client. Aside from a insignificant (relatively speaking) award and the lawyers getting paid, I can't remember one tech company suing another and actually coming out on top of the market years later. Perhaps they are doing this for deterrence purposes? ie, to keep Intel from continuing its practices during the trial?
Looks like the transportation network in London was targeted this morning. I wonder if there are lessons that IT can learn from transportation networks or vice-versa? Transportation networks are mostly hub-and-spoke, and dependent on the trust of the people using them. IT networks are presumably more web-like and automated.
I guess with transportation, the issue of trust can completely shut down the network, while with IT, the network mostly assumed to be trustworthy, with individual packets being suspect. Still, it seems like there should be some cross-over knowledge-sharing when it comes to network security for both types of networks.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a machine that has everything stripped out of it, including service releases and associated security patches, networking code, etc.
As Gates knows so well, feature competition on new systems is just as much related to security as bells-and-whistles. As long as hackers are breaking OSs, you'll need more and more code to plug the leaks. In fact, you'll probably end up with ten times as much security code as feature code. It shouldn't be that way, but there it is.
Politics: More Annoying Than Commercials?
Surely you jest, man. Ethanol is most certainly a worthwhile endeavor. How else would ulgy people...
Oh. You mean Ethanol energy production. Yes. Of course.
Plastic Rabbit, New Gizmo?
While the article was a nice feature comparison of the two, it really didn't get into the "format war" question at the top of the page here.
Besides industry support, my only question would be "which one is growing?" Which of these formats is expected to get a new version number sometime soon?
If you ask me, that is why Microsoft is talking about adding "extensions" to RSS -- by growing and adapting the standard, it gets more bells and whistles, more application support, and more momentum in the development community.
Oracle: More Complicated Pricing Model Needed?
Let's see, IE7, SQL Server, Longhorn, new versin of .NET, etc -- we developers have a lot to prepare for.
It's a wonder we can get any work done. Looks like we'll just spend all of our time getting ready for 27 new versions of Microsoft products.
HP To Lay Off 15,000 Workers
NASA: Beats us
I emailed the editor -- I can't find a reference to the story anywhere in the post.
Perhaps over on this side of the room it's screwed up, if we all stood somewhere over to the left, we might see how this makes sense.
Chicken Mind-Reading Study Concludes
Free? I'm paying over a hundred bucks a year for a print subscription.
Thanks for the info -- BTW, I like about 20% of your output, which isn't a bad ratio for the business you're in.
Chickens: Smarter Than We Thought"
Don't listen to that man, he's obviously line!
Chicken Mind Reading Study Concludes
Maybe it's just me, but I would think that people with 2-Dimensional faces would be easy to spot. Look! Over there! The guy without the nose!
Spiderman Joining Microsoft? It's on the web!
I think the U.N. should get involved in all aspects of the internet. After all, aren't these the same guys who want more regulation of cell phones?
After all, that's what we elected these people to do, right? Oh wait a minute. nobody elected the UN, it's a treaty organization.
I'm not trying to sound reactionary, but this sounds like a solution in search of a problem. The internet is fine the way it is. If the U.S. Congress has managed to keep its hands off it so far, the U.N. should follow suit, imo. The more politicians we get involved in managing the net, the worse it will perform for everybody.
Being Your Own Customer
I do NOT envy the job of CIO. Those guys have a tough row to hoe. BTW, if you ever want to know how the industry is being perceived by business, CIO magazine is a great read.(but expensive) It's real eye-opener to hear things from the other side of the tracks.
Moore's Law: Not the Only Game in Town
Sounds like a good book. Build systems are often overlooked by the development community, in favor of "sexier" topics like technologies and standards. It's important to scale the build process with the complexity of the team and project, however -- I'm sure the author covers that. A mention of TOAD would have been nice, as well, especially when talking about DB source control.
Integration into larger enterprise architectures would also be a critical subject, as most of us develop in some kind of larger environment that has it's own tools, standards, and processes. In other words, I get the feeling from the review that the book is more "blank sheet" build control than "big corporate" build control. There's a difference.
Giant Bathroom Sponge Found Orbiting Saturn! Film at Eleven
What with booting from CDs and ubiquitous internet access, the old "sneakernet" has long gone the way of the dinosaur. I use computers all the time, and haven't touched a floppy in a couple years.
Heck, now that we've working on fingernail hard drives, maybe even those USB drives will be outdated.
Don't ride the bus? Get sued!
Downloading movies seems like a lot of bits to push over the average consumer's pipe. Tie in a pre-constructed box for it (and who exactly wants to buy yet another home appliance when the computer will do?) and it sounds like an infrastructure mess.
I wonder if consumers will be happy waiting for hours while their movie is delivered? Especially if the Blockbuster is just around the corner. Of course, it beats going out, but at what price? Something about the business model just doesn't add up to me.
Night Of The Living Parrots
He's pining for the fjords
I know it matters to technical people. The last cell phone I bought had Windows CE on it so I could write programs for it. But to the average consumer, are they really going to look at a list of OS qualities like that and make a purchase decision?
It was one thing when the OS was the product -- like in a PDA. But not now. Now the OS is just an add-on. What with these OSs in cars, phones, refrigerators, etc -- is the average consumer not going to buy a Lexus because of concerns with the OS?
Surf's Up, Dude
But he's definitely no politician. People want to believe that you can get something for nothing. He sounded a little on the abrasive side.
I found it interesting that he distinguishes between different types of software, implying that there would be vastly different business models for each -- "don't try this at home" I would have liked to have seen the interviewer nail him down on this a little more -- I think there is some good stuff there but without the details its hard to know whether he knows what he's talking about or not.
What's spaghetti got to do with hurricanes?
In addition to the comet mission, they are going to build their fourth space launch center , and they've also announced plans to militarize their space program.
I wonder, when they finally land someone on the moon, will they say "We came in peace for all mankind"?
New Star Trek Film Planned by Fans
Under The Hood
Being a dumb teenager is one thing. Causing world disruption is something else entirely (Yes. I know. The victims bear some responsibility)
People take the computer too lightly, like it was a TV set or something. It's more like a small nuclear bomb in each home, great for powering the house, but not so much something you want the kids mucking around with unsupervised. If you are one of those who think gun control stops gun crime, wait 20 years or so until people start advocating "computer control" to stop cyber crime. You'll have a blast with that one.
WTF? How About CSS Implementation?
Six years ago, I was contacted by a stock brokerage company in New York. They were looking for ways to track the computer use (of their developers, I believe. I think they were concerned about Internet Surfing) Like a dummy, I rambled off some ideas that could help them track usage without the employees noticing it. At the time, I thought it was a very strange call! Why would anybody secretly want to know what their employees were doing? Didn't they trust them? I never heard back from the people, and I always thought that I had "given away too much" by specifiying the programming during the interview.
Now that weird scenario has become all too commonplace, and it's just as secret as I feared. FTA, "When the employee discovered that he had been monitored, he lodged a complaint with Alberta's information and privacy commissioner."
The guy didn't even know the software was there. Now it's one thing to tell people "We're watching you. This will go on your evaluation" It's another thing entirely to do it secretly.
In the present day, clients are modeling their business practices more and more, and would like a way to track metrics. I'm all for it: if I were a businessperson or employee, I wouldn't have a problem with my boss measuring how long it took to do my work. Where I surfed during my lunch hour? Forget it. But my productivity? Sure.
Welcome To My World
I downloaded my first program with BitTorrent a few weeks ago -- a TV show that my VCR failed to record. While doing that, I accidentally clicked on a certain part of the web page. Bingo slammo, my system was infected with spyware, this nasty Aurora and nail.exe
Being a technical guy, familar with the registry, COM, and how windows works, I went about trying to kill this pesky snake. A few hours later, after saying some words I won't repeat here, I decided to wipe the machine and start over (it was a lighly loaded box, so no major loss)
I could have gotten SoftIce and gone into kernal mode to trap this bastard, but it was way beyond my effort vs. reward tolerence level. Spyware has gotten so complicated and sneaky nowadays: to me it is worse of a threat than virsuses ever were.
Now I run double anti-spyware programs in addition to my A/V and firewall. I think that we technical people are also misunderestimating the danger posed by this junk to our own machines.
Run With the Bulls, Swim With the Sharks
Ok. So the anti-spyware program lets the spyware continue operating without flagging it, because it has become spyware itself by association? So now we obviously need to develop an anti-anti spyware program, to fix the problems caused by the anti-spyware, right? That is, until the anti-spyware people declare our anti-anti-spyware to be spyware, in which case we'll have to develop anti-anti-anti-spyware?
This makes my head hurt.
The nature of the complaint sounds awful, and AMD certainly has a very competitive product that Intel is trying to quash. I can't help but wonder, though, at how difficult it is going to be to prove the charges AMD makes, and even if they are proved, by the time years have passed and the judgement is made, the market will be way down the road. Look at the Microsoft browser case: while there was relief granted, did it really make a difference by the time it was given?
In addition, the sheer volume of paperwork requested (38 companies) indicates that this is going to be huge and take time to prosecute. While that's great for the lawyers, I'm not so sure it serves the interests of their client. Aside from a insignificant (relatively speaking) award and the lawyers getting paid, I can't remember one tech company suing another and actually coming out on top of the market years later. Perhaps they are doing this for deterrence purposes? ie, to keep Intel from continuing its practices during the trial?
Easy For You to Say
Looks like the transportation network in London was targeted this morning. I wonder if there are lessons that IT can learn from transportation networks or vice-versa? Transportation networks are mostly hub-and-spoke, and dependent on the trust of the people using them. IT networks are presumably more web-like and automated.
I guess with transportation, the issue of trust can completely shut down the network, while with IT, the network mostly assumed to be trustworthy, with individual packets being suspect. Still, it seems like there should be some cross-over knowledge-sharing when it comes to network security for both types of networks.