The article (at least in my reading) isn't saying that they should be held legally accountable as selling a defective product. Instead it's about how companies should approach a bug report of a vulnerability. He's saying, when someone reports a vulnerability, consider it something that you're obligated to fix, not as a feature request.
But then, I think most people do. It seems like he hit a bad support person.
I ran into a similar problem once with Citrix, actually. Their software was relying on some library that it assumed was installed, even though recent Linux releases (at the time) had stopped using that library. The result was that the software didn't work until you tracked down that library, dropped it in the right place, and then it worked fine.
So I went to their website to give feedback, just to let them know. I mean, I'm sure they would have figured it out, but I thought, "may as well give them a heads up" because it was happening on major linux distros almost a year after their release. Citrix had released several updates to their software, and never fixed this problem. I couldn't find anyplace on their website to provide feedback, except for a form to give feedback about the website itself.
So I wrote up a little feedback, trying to explain the situation briefly (i.e. "I wanted to drop some feedback to your development team letting them know there's a problem, how to fix it, but I can't find any contact information on your website. Is there any way to submit this sort of feedback). The response came back quickly, "If you want support, you'll have to pay for a support contract."
I wrote back again, trying to explain, "No, see, I'm not looking for help, I'm trying to be helpful. I'm letting you know that there's a problem I already know how to fix. I was just wondering if there was a place to submit this sort of feedback."
Again, the response came in, "I'm sorry sir, but if you want us to help you with this problem, you'll need to buy our support contract."
The point is that there is definetely a group of consumers out there who don't WANT a phone with an MP3 player, a camera, lots and lots of bright, shiny surfaces, tiny buttons, etc. etc.
Yeah, sure, this is true. There are a significant number of people who don't particularly want the MP3 player, camera, etc. But most of them will take the MP3 player and camera if it's perceived to be "free", and maybe even use them occasionally. That leaves something like a whole half-percent of the cell phone market that want a phone that is just a phone+email device, and half of those people actually want just-phone, and another quarter want just-email. How much money are you going to spend developing customized devices for that niche market?
Is the hardware really that good? I thought they hadn't been updating hardware significantly for the past few years. Seems like they should either get some better hardware together or drop the price some more.
But also, their software was great for the time it was introduced... what... 10 years ago? They've been hopping between OS upgrades like Duke Nukem Forever has been hopping between game engines. They need to commit to one and build the fricken thing. It makes me sad that BeOS wasn't bought by someone with the ability to do anything with it.
The point here is that maybe someone will take an interest in it that never thought of it before or cared enough to dig around Google.
Also, Google alone doesn't always get you the best answers. I know I've had a few problems where I Google for the solution, and find 50 different solutions with little grounds to compare them as to which is the best. Sometimes you'll find that most of the pages list a solution that's 5 years old, and then you find out later that there's a brand new solution that, for whatever reason, doesn't show up on Google's first 5 pages.
Google/Wikipedia a great sources of information, but it's often hard to find a place that has comparisons of the current incarnations of the leading solutions to a given problem. Maybe that'd be a good idea for a new Wiki-based site, but until that happens, "Ask Slashdot" is a pretty good place to get a variety of technical advice. There may be a bunch of dumb-asses on this site, but there are some seriously smart people too.
If Amazon only sells 5 copies of the The "Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More" a year, it only needs to keep 5 in inventory.
Right, but they don't have to even keep 5 in inventory. All they have to be able to do is deliver each of those 5 copies shortly after they're ordered. Or where it becomes even more clear is in the Amazon MP3 store, where is costs them nothing but a relatively tiny amount of server space to keep an obscure track "in stock".
And this helps in two ways. Not only do they make lots of little profits from each obscure sale, but people are more likely to go to their site because people know that you can buy damn near anything on Amazon. It's like, "Why go to a book store and have to search around, ask someone whether something is in stock, and possibly be told they'll have to back-order it? I can go to Amazon and I *know* they'll have it."
But, yeah, I don't see that there's any reason why anyone should be telling you that you can't use an old version. Use what works for you. Hell, use version 0.1 if that's the version that has the features/functionality you want.
One thing I wonder about future development (besides the obvious "what's planned for WINE 2.0?"):
There are lots of tweaks and dependencies that have to be taken into account when installing Windows applications in WINE. There have been some attempts to address this issue in WINE-Doors, Winetricks, and Crossover, but I can't detect any systematic approach to handling this issue in WINE itself.
Are there any plans to simplify this process? Have you considered looking to package managers (e.g. apt) to take care of listing out dependencies, downloading/installing them, etc., at least for things that are available online?
Because it would be great, IMO, if I could do something like set up an additional APT repository and type something like "apt-get install ie6-wine" and have it all taken care of for me.
I'm sure that's a lot to ask, but are there currently any plans in the same vein?
I'm not sure I see the problem. You want something that extremely stable and well-supported, then it's usually not a good idea to jump to the newest version of software directly after its release. That just seems to me to be a standard rule, across the board, no matter which developer you're talking about. When you're using the cutting-edge stuff, it tends to have a couple hiccups and break 3rd-party interactions.
So sure, go back and use FF2 for another 6 months. And then give FF3 another shot, see if it's up to speed for the things you need.
Well, for my part, I meant that in a way that was probably lighter/jokier than how it came off. But I'm not going to apologize either.
But yeah, WINE is awesome for me, particularly, because I run a couple of Windows tools in an otherwise Linux environment. At first, we just had a Windows server just to run the Windows tools, but it caused a little bit of annoyance in allocating resources, as well as being unstable and finicky. At some point, we were talking about putting Windows in a VM, which would help with resource allocation, but it meant an excess of hard drive space and RAM dedicated to these couple of tools, having to monitor the state of Windows within the VM, and figuring out when we were going to shut down and reboot the VM. Plus, we had no reason to believe that it would help with the problems we had with Windows being finicky, and didn't see any way in which it would help us coordinate processes (that can sometimes need to be sequential or sometimes can be parallel) across the two platforms.
For us, WINE has worked surprisingly well. Our tools run fine using WINE, which means we can run them on our Linux server, and do with those commands most of the things we can do with native Linux commands. It's (not quite, but practically) seamless.
Now, admittedly, I'm not using it for desktop applications or games. But I did try running Portal in Crossover Mac, it that also worked surprisingly well. Until Windows is dead or somehow compatible with the operating systems I use, I'll be wishing the WINE guys lots of success.
Nice question-- comes off a little like, "I think your work is useless. What do you have to say in response?"
I know it's a great fad to run everything in virtual machines, but I'd still prefer to run things natively if possible. It's less complex in a few ways, doesn't require starting and stopping virtual machines, provides better interaction between the windows applications and Unix applications. With WINE, for example, I can write a bash script that will run both Linux tools and Windows tools, and run them both at full speed, without any special magic.
It seems to me the bigger problem is not issuing new PIN codes when you *know* they've been compromised. They notified the FBI and then sat around for months doing nothing, when they could have contacted the affected customers and said, "Here is your new PIN".
I sure as hell didn't go to learn how to work. I went to get an education, and that's what I got.
Oh, yeah, and I bet you got a really great education by *not* working, right? You just sat around, putting in no effort, doing jack, and the education was just transfered to you while you passively sat around, went to frat parties, and got drunk (or whatever you did while not putting effort into your classes).
That's the dumbest thing I've heard all day. If this is the best opportunity that college can provide, there's no reason to go. Get a job! Then you can not only learn how to work your ass off in a grown-up environment, you can get paid for it too!
And then, because there will be consequences, you'll be incredibly limited in what you can do and which sorts of work you can try out. Once you're saddled with all those consequences, you really will have to focus on accomplishing things and not screwing up. You'll have to focus on the end-results specifically. And because you don't have experience and don't know how to work correctly, an awful lot of the fun work is going to be kept away from you because you can't be trusted to do it.
College, on the other hand, is the perfect place to gain the experience of working in a wide variety of contexts on a wide variety of tasks. In my job, if I'm not a good presenter, then any decent boss will keep me away from presenting. A college class that involves presentations is going to be my best opportunity to work on presentations and get good at them before it matters.
I have never met anyone who doesn't screw up royally on their first job, and sometimes that sort of thing can virtually ruin a career. If you do it right, college can be like being your own boss, running your own projects, and working in the way that work really should be done.
If you just want to say that someone can do something bad with the product of your work, or that it's possible for workers to be alienated in some way, I wouldn't disagree.
My point about work isn't whether it's "evil" in the sense that the devil is "evil", but that people treat it as an "evil", or a "bad thing". It's like, if you ask someone to work on something, you're punishing them. As though we would be best served by avoiding work whenever possible.
I'm not in favor of working stupidly or inefficiently, but some kind of "work" is essential for a healthy psyche. It actually isn't good for people to have nothing to do, no goals to achieve. It's often bad for people to take the "easy way out", and failing to "try your best" for an extended period of time will make a person deficient in a number of ways.
Work is good. Work is healthy. Having accomplished something after a lot of work with bring about the most satisfying feeling you'll ever feel in your life. And we're depriving ourselves of that by considering people "lucky" who can sit around on their ass without a care in the world.
... this is what you get in a competitive society where everyone is taught that "work" is an evil thing to be avoided at all costs.
That assumes we're talking about the US of course. We Americans are really proud of our work ethic, yet we teach our children that work is evil, struggling is stupid, and the ideal situation is one where everyone is handed everything on a silver platter.
Really, if you look at what's being taught by parents and by the public school system, that's one of the chief messages we send to our kids. It wasn't until I got into college (a small private college) that I realized that there was actually value in the work itself. That sometimes (particularly in education) end-result (i.e. good grades and eventually a degree) isn't the most important thing.
I mean, you listen to people talk, and they talk about how college is great because it opens so many doors, and a college diploma provides so many opportunities. That's all backwards. College is great because it is, in itself, a great opportunity to learn how to work your ass off in a grown-up environment, but before consequences really come into play. If you're not working your ass off, you're missing out on the best opportunity college can provide.
That is funny and all, but it still points you to Windows Update, which means you're still going to spend 20 minutes waiting for the pages to load, get prompted to install a bunch of other updates, and probably reboot a few times.
Incidentally, the same search gives you the same link on Microsoft's Live search.
Cince when does the Head executive of the company refer to the company as "they" instead of "we"?
When he's talking about one part of the company to another? Like if I were talking to someone in accounting, and said, "Over in R&D, they are developing a new product."
Right, and we might even consider that study to have some degree of validity. However, I can't take that data, say 94% of women prefer goatees. It would be a much more proper conclusion to 94% of women prefer a goatee on *you*.
Yeah, I don't know what "paradigm agnostic" means specifically, but I think it's a mistake to think that "data is data".
Not all data is created equally. You have to ask how it was collected, according to what rules, and with what purpose. I can collect all sorts of data by stupid means, and have it be unsuitable for proving anything. It's even possible that I could collect a bunch of data in an appropriate way, accounting for the variables which matter for my particular experiment, and have that data be inappropriate for other uses.
Of course, if what's intended by "paradigm agnostic" is that we no longer pay attention to those things, then I hope we're not becoming paradigm agnostic. I'm just bringing this up because I think some people think numbers don't lie, and that when you analyze data, either your conclusions will be infallible or your analysis is flawed. On the contrary, data can not only be bad, but it can be inappropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
Um... you know the two are connected, right?
What about customer satisfaction, and the financial detriment of losing your customers?
The article (at least in my reading) isn't saying that they should be held legally accountable as selling a defective product. Instead it's about how companies should approach a bug report of a vulnerability. He's saying, when someone reports a vulnerability, consider it something that you're obligated to fix, not as a feature request.
But then, I think most people do. It seems like he hit a bad support person.
I ran into a similar problem once with Citrix, actually. Their software was relying on some library that it assumed was installed, even though recent Linux releases (at the time) had stopped using that library. The result was that the software didn't work until you tracked down that library, dropped it in the right place, and then it worked fine.
So I went to their website to give feedback, just to let them know. I mean, I'm sure they would have figured it out, but I thought, "may as well give them a heads up" because it was happening on major linux distros almost a year after their release. Citrix had released several updates to their software, and never fixed this problem. I couldn't find anyplace on their website to provide feedback, except for a form to give feedback about the website itself.
So I wrote up a little feedback, trying to explain the situation briefly (i.e. "I wanted to drop some feedback to your development team letting them know there's a problem, how to fix it, but I can't find any contact information on your website. Is there any way to submit this sort of feedback). The response came back quickly, "If you want support, you'll have to pay for a support contract."
I wrote back again, trying to explain, "No, see, I'm not looking for help, I'm trying to be helpful. I'm letting you know that there's a problem I already know how to fix. I was just wondering if there was a place to submit this sort of feedback."
Again, the response came in, "I'm sorry sir, but if you want us to help you with this problem, you'll need to buy our support contract."
At that point, I gave up.
The point is that there is definetely a group of consumers out there who don't WANT a phone with an MP3 player, a camera, lots and lots of bright, shiny surfaces, tiny buttons, etc. etc.
Yeah, sure, this is true. There are a significant number of people who don't particularly want the MP3 player, camera, etc. But most of them will take the MP3 player and camera if it's perceived to be "free", and maybe even use them occasionally. That leaves something like a whole half-percent of the cell phone market that want a phone that is just a phone+email device, and half of those people actually want just-phone, and another quarter want just-email. How much money are you going to spend developing customized devices for that niche market?
Is the hardware really that good? I thought they hadn't been updating hardware significantly for the past few years. Seems like they should either get some better hardware together or drop the price some more.
But also, their software was great for the time it was introduced... what... 10 years ago? They've been hopping between OS upgrades like Duke Nukem Forever has been hopping between game engines. They need to commit to one and build the fricken thing. It makes me sad that BeOS wasn't bought by someone with the ability to do anything with it.
The point here is that maybe someone will take an interest in it that never thought of it before or cared enough to dig around Google.
Also, Google alone doesn't always get you the best answers. I know I've had a few problems where I Google for the solution, and find 50 different solutions with little grounds to compare them as to which is the best. Sometimes you'll find that most of the pages list a solution that's 5 years old, and then you find out later that there's a brand new solution that, for whatever reason, doesn't show up on Google's first 5 pages.
Google/Wikipedia a great sources of information, but it's often hard to find a place that has comparisons of the current incarnations of the leading solutions to a given problem. Maybe that'd be a good idea for a new Wiki-based site, but until that happens, "Ask Slashdot" is a pretty good place to get a variety of technical advice. There may be a bunch of dumb-asses on this site, but there are some seriously smart people too.
If Amazon only sells 5 copies of the The "Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More" a year, it only needs to keep 5 in inventory.
Right, but they don't have to even keep 5 in inventory. All they have to be able to do is deliver each of those 5 copies shortly after they're ordered. Or where it becomes even more clear is in the Amazon MP3 store, where is costs them nothing but a relatively tiny amount of server space to keep an obscure track "in stock".
And this helps in two ways. Not only do they make lots of little profits from each obscure sale, but people are more likely to go to their site because people know that you can buy damn near anything on Amazon. It's like, "Why go to a book store and have to search around, ask someone whether something is in stock, and possibly be told they'll have to back-order it? I can go to Amazon and I *know* they'll have it."
If you need an old version, you should be able to go to ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/.
But, yeah, I don't see that there's any reason why anyone should be telling you that you can't use an old version. Use what works for you. Hell, use version 0.1 if that's the version that has the features/functionality you want.
One thing I wonder about future development (besides the obvious "what's planned for WINE 2.0?"):
There are lots of tweaks and dependencies that have to be taken into account when installing Windows applications in WINE. There have been some attempts to address this issue in WINE-Doors, Winetricks, and Crossover, but I can't detect any systematic approach to handling this issue in WINE itself.
Are there any plans to simplify this process? Have you considered looking to package managers (e.g. apt) to take care of listing out dependencies, downloading/installing them, etc., at least for things that are available online?
Because it would be great, IMO, if I could do something like set up an additional APT repository and type something like "apt-get install ie6-wine" and have it all taken care of for me.
I'm sure that's a lot to ask, but are there currently any plans in the same vein?
I'm not sure I see the problem. You want something that extremely stable and well-supported, then it's usually not a good idea to jump to the newest version of software directly after its release. That just seems to me to be a standard rule, across the board, no matter which developer you're talking about. When you're using the cutting-edge stuff, it tends to have a couple hiccups and break 3rd-party interactions.
So sure, go back and use FF2 for another 6 months. And then give FF3 another shot, see if it's up to speed for the things you need.
Well, for my part, I meant that in a way that was probably lighter/jokier than how it came off. But I'm not going to apologize either.
But yeah, WINE is awesome for me, particularly, because I run a couple of Windows tools in an otherwise Linux environment. At first, we just had a Windows server just to run the Windows tools, but it caused a little bit of annoyance in allocating resources, as well as being unstable and finicky. At some point, we were talking about putting Windows in a VM, which would help with resource allocation, but it meant an excess of hard drive space and RAM dedicated to these couple of tools, having to monitor the state of Windows within the VM, and figuring out when we were going to shut down and reboot the VM. Plus, we had no reason to believe that it would help with the problems we had with Windows being finicky, and didn't see any way in which it would help us coordinate processes (that can sometimes need to be sequential or sometimes can be parallel) across the two platforms.
For us, WINE has worked surprisingly well. Our tools run fine using WINE, which means we can run them on our Linux server, and do with those commands most of the things we can do with native Linux commands. It's (not quite, but practically) seamless.
Now, admittedly, I'm not using it for desktop applications or games. But I did try running Portal in Crossover Mac, it that also worked surprisingly well. Until Windows is dead or somehow compatible with the operating systems I use, I'll be wishing the WINE guys lots of success.
Nice question-- comes off a little like, "I think your work is useless. What do you have to say in response?"
I know it's a great fad to run everything in virtual machines, but I'd still prefer to run things natively if possible. It's less complex in a few ways, doesn't require starting and stopping virtual machines, provides better interaction between the windows applications and Unix applications. With WINE, for example, I can write a bash script that will run both Linux tools and Windows tools, and run them both at full speed, without any special magic.
Thanks to the magic of calculus, as long as you have less than two children (on average) per couple, the population will stabilize eventually.
If everyone were immortal, wouldn't any children mean population growth?
Sure, why do they care? It's not their money.
It seems to me the bigger problem is not issuing new PIN codes when you *know* they've been compromised. They notified the FBI and then sat around for months doing nothing, when they could have contacted the affected customers and said, "Here is your new PIN".
Oh, yeah, and I bet you got a really great education by *not* working, right? You just sat around, putting in no effort, doing jack, and the education was just transfered to you while you passively sat around, went to frat parties, and got drunk (or whatever you did while not putting effort into your classes).
Right?
And then, because there will be consequences, you'll be incredibly limited in what you can do and which sorts of work you can try out. Once you're saddled with all those consequences, you really will have to focus on accomplishing things and not screwing up. You'll have to focus on the end-results specifically. And because you don't have experience and don't know how to work correctly, an awful lot of the fun work is going to be kept away from you because you can't be trusted to do it.
College, on the other hand, is the perfect place to gain the experience of working in a wide variety of contexts on a wide variety of tasks. In my job, if I'm not a good presenter, then any decent boss will keep me away from presenting. A college class that involves presentations is going to be my best opportunity to work on presentations and get good at them before it matters.
I have never met anyone who doesn't screw up royally on their first job, and sometimes that sort of thing can virtually ruin a career. If you do it right, college can be like being your own boss, running your own projects, and working in the way that work really should be done.
If you just want to say that someone can do something bad with the product of your work, or that it's possible for workers to be alienated in some way, I wouldn't disagree.
My point about work isn't whether it's "evil" in the sense that the devil is "evil", but that people treat it as an "evil", or a "bad thing". It's like, if you ask someone to work on something, you're punishing them. As though we would be best served by avoiding work whenever possible.
I'm not in favor of working stupidly or inefficiently, but some kind of "work" is essential for a healthy psyche. It actually isn't good for people to have nothing to do, no goals to achieve. It's often bad for people to take the "easy way out", and failing to "try your best" for an extended period of time will make a person deficient in a number of ways.
Work is good. Work is healthy. Having accomplished something after a lot of work with bring about the most satisfying feeling you'll ever feel in your life. And we're depriving ourselves of that by considering people "lucky" who can sit around on their ass without a care in the world.
How does that follow from what I said? I wouldn't equate "working cooperatively" with "being lazy" or anything. Maybe you would?
I would have said something more like:
That assumes we're talking about the US of course. We Americans are really proud of our work ethic, yet we teach our children that work is evil, struggling is stupid, and the ideal situation is one where everyone is handed everything on a silver platter.
Really, if you look at what's being taught by parents and by the public school system, that's one of the chief messages we send to our kids. It wasn't until I got into college (a small private college) that I realized that there was actually value in the work itself. That sometimes (particularly in education) end-result (i.e. good grades and eventually a degree) isn't the most important thing.
I mean, you listen to people talk, and they talk about how college is great because it opens so many doors, and a college diploma provides so many opportunities. That's all backwards. College is great because it is, in itself, a great opportunity to learn how to work your ass off in a grown-up environment, but before consequences really come into play. If you're not working your ass off, you're missing out on the best opportunity college can provide.
That is funny and all, but it still points you to Windows Update, which means you're still going to spend 20 minutes waiting for the pages to load, get prompted to install a bunch of other updates, and probably reboot a few times.
Incidentally, the same search gives you the same link on Microsoft's Live search.
When he's talking about one part of the company to another? Like if I were talking to someone in accounting, and said, "Over in R&D, they are developing a new product."
I don't see why not.
Right, and we might even consider that study to have some degree of validity. However, I can't take that data, say 94% of women prefer goatees. It would be a much more proper conclusion to 94% of women prefer a goatee on *you*.
Yeah, I don't know what "paradigm agnostic" means specifically, but I think it's a mistake to think that "data is data".
Not all data is created equally. You have to ask how it was collected, according to what rules, and with what purpose. I can collect all sorts of data by stupid means, and have it be unsuitable for proving anything. It's even possible that I could collect a bunch of data in an appropriate way, accounting for the variables which matter for my particular experiment, and have that data be inappropriate for other uses.
Of course, if what's intended by "paradigm agnostic" is that we no longer pay attention to those things, then I hope we're not becoming paradigm agnostic. I'm just bringing this up because I think some people think numbers don't lie, and that when you analyze data, either your conclusions will be infallible or your analysis is flawed. On the contrary, data can not only be bad, but it can be inappropriate.
You can OCR stuff, store the text in the PDF.