The people often bitten the worst by Spyware/Malware are very smart, very computer savy people. The problem is they don't realize all of the tricks that they will use to get onto your system. Besides, it can't happen to them! Many times people will recognize they've been bitten right away by an accident misclick but by then its too late.
So while people might not be idiots, most should never be trusted with elevated privilages. But Windows does give you an option (or they are very painful) so load up the maintaince costs with all sorts of software and network monitoring because MS refuses to learn lessons painfully realized 20 years ago.
For the love of all that is good and holy, I wish MS would abandon certain technologies (Active X hosting in application frameworks), I wish MS would stop requiring user level tasks with elevated privilages, and I wish people would stop making excuses for MS. Reinstalling from a backup image is not the proper way to fix problems on a platform that is supposed to be "enterprise enabled".
Firefox as far as I have seen and seen from others using is rock solid if you do a couple of things:
- If you used any pre-release version, uninstall the previous version. Key/value pair settings can and do change causing erronious behavior. This can get goofy on Linux but you can minimize the goofiness by hanging onto backups of the ".mozilla" directory and carefully pushing in stuff you need. Of course my preference is to export the booksmarks and start over.
- Plug-ins are "the heel" for any browers including Firefox. Limit the usage of plug-ins to a bare minimum and definately don't install plug-ings you feel iffy about. If the plug-in goes south then it often has an effect on the framework. As a tangent to the first point, using pre-release FF version of a plug-in is also a receipe for disaster.
Purely anectdotal, FF seems rock solid. You can also make IE extra flakey by installing all sorts of weird things as well (the last time IE crashed it came from the Google toolbar!). At this point it seems that both products are rock solid frameworks where most problems come in from the outside.
Back before they shrunk their name, Silicon Graphics Inc. had some fun stuff to play with but even in the glory days I wouldn't believe how overpriced it was.
I've used the green boxed machines (their name escapes me), the Iris, the Indy, the O2, and a whole bunch of "oven" machines. All of them very nice to play with but all of which were very expensive. These where the guys who came up with IrisGL which was the forerunner to OpenGL. They went "64-bit" early too although they did it the wrong way (changing the OS moniker to "IRIX64" broke many Makefiles). All was right and good...as long as there was no one else in the same product space.
It was around the mid 90s when several new things started to pop up. Sun and HP noticed how SGI was a "darling" and wanted in on the action and tried to create their own "graphics workstation" both of which weren't as nice and often times a lot cheaper. Around this time, as well know, a little OS known as Linux started to get some steam and a little project known as Mesa started to actually conform to OpenGL.
So now they had pressure from the top and the bottom. I also viewed their buying Cray as a bad move because it didn't make their technology any cheaper to compete against Sun and HP let alone the cheap Windows or Linux workstation with a semi-decent AGP card.
The last SGI machine I saw ran Windows 2K. Such a shame because it was still way overpriced from what you could buy "off the shelf". Maybe things would have been different if they embraced Open Source to cut down the overhead. I honestly don't know. Retreating into the supercomputer product space made me notice how much they were the Amiga/Commedore of the 90s. They were too pretty, too expensive, too early.
Sure Intel could continue to make P2 like Seagate could continue to make 500 MB hard disk drives or like Ford can continue to make Model-Ts. The problem is the profit returns on these are horrible due to a number of problems. Even at sub $10 Intel would be hard pressed to find buyers. Technology has marched on so trying to integrate a P2 or a 500 MB drive into a "modern" system is much harder than buying "modern" components.
In the end it is about the money. Intel doesn't see any more profit coming from selling the P2 and the market isn't exactly telling them otherwise. As the manufacturers for the support components stop their production there is little use to continue production.
The problem isn't overtime. The problem is not getting paid for it. If workers were constantly getting paid 1.5x for each hour over 40 a week the higher ups in EA would be fixing their scheduling and manpower shortages in a hurry. As it stands they are under no obligation to pay any more for 35 hours a week than 95 hours a week so why not squeeze as many hours as they can?
The reward for working hard should be compsensation not more work. If the higher ups aren't willing to be liberial with "comp time" or project bonuses then expect some unhappy workers. Killing morale does not help the company at all.
To Valve companies EA, Vivendi, etc. are just leaches. They provide a minimal function for their game: they place the box on the shelf at Worst Buy and Circuit Crudy. And for their minimal input they take a bite out of that $50 for each box sold.
I see Steam as a natural reaction to this and in a good way, it is using technology to solve a problem the right way. The higher ups at Valve hate working with these big companies especially on their Source/mod projects. Why should they fork over big cash to a faceless company just to put a box on a shelf for a minor add-on when the Internet has shown to be a great distribution model on its own? Cut out the middle man and reach the gamers directly!
I suspect the stink in the summer between Vivendi and Valve was over this very feature. I suspect two events came up: either Valve wanted to undercut Vivendi's box price with a much cheaper Steam price or Vivendi felt they deserved a piece of the Steam profits as well. I would love for someone closer to the parties to reveal what happened.
Beyond all of this, Steam has the possiblity of breaking free from EA, et-al. A small company publisher can use Steam like technology to charge and deliver to gamers quality games without them. If Steam catches on, EA will go the way of the dinosaur.
The internet has been proven time and time again as a great distribution model for other forms of digital media. Why can't this work for games? Why can't there be an "iTunes" killer app for game distribution? Given how much EA and Vivendi take for just making the cardboard box and putting it on the shelf at the store, I can't blame any company looking to technology to get out from under the thumb of these guys. I dream of the day when EA is treated as the dinosaur.
Steam is far from perfect and some might consider it a failure but I see it at worst an "honorable failure". The idea of hooking into a distributed network automatically for game support is worth looking into. I'm glad Valve took a stab at it even though the results where iffy. I hope they learned a lot about how to deliver content to home computers out of all of this.
Why did it fail? I believe Steam was "half baked" where because they didn't really stress it to shake the bugs out of it. I felt they should have used Steam to give out a "HL2 Teaser Demo" to test the entire system under full load.
"We think our software is far more secure. It is more secure because we stand by it, we fixed it, because we built it. Nobody ever knows who built open-source software," he(Ballmer) said.
Wow, he has been in the buisness this long and in competition against BSD and Linux for this long and still doesn't understand how his product or Open Source functions?!
As long as I have been using MS products, they have never fixed a problem for me. Sure I don't have Torvalds at my beck and call with my Linux problems but I have a far greater unspoken and unsung mindshare to draw from.
Microsoft has never fixed a problem for me. Ever. And I know why: it isn't profitable to fix problems for me. Lets say that I have a laptop and I install Windows XP but the wireless networking doesn't work. Microsoft will say its the vendor problem, or I pray for a patch at some later undisclosed date, or call them up for a $75 an hour incident investiation (I'm sure they've upped the rate by now) which may or may not result in a hot patch.
Compare this to Linux where no one organisation will fix things for me but many people will help point me in the right direction. Install FC Core 3 on the laptop but the wireless doesn't work. I have logfiles. I have google and mailing lists. Importantly I have source code. If a fix is found I can apply it now. If no one has a fix and I feel adventureous I can jump in and start trying to fix it myself.
So go ahead and threaten to sue Mr. Ballmer. Having MS stand behind the software and fix it is a really expensive. I might still save money in the end by being sued for using Linux instead of throwing more money at MS.
ps. Why should we believe that Windows avoids the 228 patent violations? Anyone know how we check this? Oh yeah...MS says they are clean. I guess we should trust them instead of OSS.
To borrow the medical anology, pathology of a virus is important but this alone will not create a "cure". You may understand completely how a virus works but this alone does nothing to hamper it.
To even be more suscinct, if all it took to stop a virus was to reverse engineer it (ie. pathology), then we'd have things like AIDS, Herpes, etc. beat long ago. We clearly understand how these things spread yet infections still happen. Likewise, we already know a lot how virii spread on Windows and form best practices and yet comprimising still happens.
Ask Jeeves Is Interesting
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MSN Search Roundup
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· Score: 4, Interesting
First stop when searching is Google. But when I appear to have stumped Google I go over to Jeeves.
Ask Jeeves is interesting because unlike other search engines which work by assuming you at least have a hunch on what you need, AJ doesn't. The BBC's example is perfect: Searching for "raleigh" could mean the famous historical figure, multiple cities around the world, different buisness and brands, etc. Google is inclined to dump them all onto you and make you sort it out. If Google presents what you need on the first page it might be more by popularity or luck but AJ shows you a bunch of fast ways to filter out results from the huge disparaging set of matches.
This is a feature I wish Google had. If I get too many matches that appear to not be what I'm looking for I rephrase the querry which AJ does on the fly with these filters.
This is odd. Somehow, if in a turn of events MS steals some code and puts it into Windows I'm somehow guilty. I would have thought MS would be in hot water not the buyer. Why would the rightful IP owners chase the numberous consumers when a fat MS is clearly at fault.
Thanks MS but no thanks. Shielding me from IP that aren't my problem is something I don't need you to do for me.
You are correct: all vendors should release fixes and patches as soon as they've been internally "blessed". The problem with Windows however is that patching is such a pain. Almost none of their server technology can be "conditionally restarted". Almost none of their kernel modifications are actually put "installed" until the reboot. What is just as bad is you have to reboot again to roll back.
I do realize the importance of getting fixes, especially vulnerability in a very timely manner but because of the way Windows is built its nearly impossible to implement such a "patch on the fly" plan that so many other systems seem to enjoy.
Treating nuclear power (or any other new technology like Stem Cell et al) like the "boggyman" is why there are no plans to expand any use of nuclear power. To go with the analogy, if nuclear power is a boggyman then you'll never know what is under your bed because you are perpetually afraid.
People didn't just wake up one day and created a safe and efficient internal combustion engine. It took years of research, refinement, and practice making these things before it got safe, robust, and reliable enough to use regularlly without maiming people haphazardly. Why do people expect anything different from something like nuclear?
How do you make nuclear power safer? Certainly not by treating as something unholy or evil. The other current factor is money. How do you make nuclear cheaper? Once again, it isn't by shunning it. Research and refinement and studying how system behave creates better engineering and more robust designs. As noted in Europe and Japan they are many generations ahead and have some fairly safe and robust designs while in the US there are no plans to issue any more building permits for new plants...ever.
Make no mistake that nuclear technology is dangerous but you can't make it safer by vilifying and cursing it. Researching these types of technology should be embraced instead of shunned.
Take Everquest for instance. This game has been running so long that the people in "one age" aren't the same people in "the next age".
In the beginning the imfamous idea foisted by the creators was called "The Vision". It was basically a creedo of how they thought the game should behave in form and function. It wasn't perfect (for instance non-magic classes were left devoid of any extra skills) but it was a solid framework to start from.
But as time moved on, these people who created "The Vision" left to do other things and this was slowly dismantled. Each expansion that has come afterwards seems to have gotten more haphazard with adding features. Things are added to the game by designers who have little knowledge of the hsitory of the game (or possibly don't care) which turns the game into a hodpodge of skills and monsters that don't grow with time.
Although showing its age and probably on its last legs, Everquest at this point is shaken ever expansion due to this effect. Designers only seem to know or care about their current creation instead of creating a solid and sound system that will stand the test of time.
It isn't so much that MMOGs are designed by Newbs. They are designed by people who probably aren't going to be working on the same project a year from now.
"Sender-ID" is like a digital signature which is fine and dandy except when you read to much into it. Knowing an email comes from a particular server doesn't indicate whether or not it is spam just like signing "malware.exe" with a signature doesn't mean it is okay to run.
Signatures only verify it comes "blessed" from a source. If the source is bogus then it doesn't matter if it is signed or not. Putting too much faith in "Sender-ID" opens a whole lot of problems. For instance "Sender-ID" from "spamster@hotmail.com" just means it comes from a legit hotmail.com server. It does not clear it from being spam. I can see how malware will take over zombie machines co-oping their email servers. Instead of sending spam from the infected machine, it will just use its email settings back to "isp.com" which uses "Sender-ID" and we are back to chasing down infected machines.
Besides, isn't "Sender-ID" patented? How much will it cost to implement "Sender-ID" for my little email server so I can actually email people? The last thing the Internet needs is more patented technology running around solving social problems.
This appears to be a common problem in all softare. Development strives wirtes what is best in the time allowed while Marketing wants to promise what sounds like it will catch the eye and possibly lead to a sale. I see this all too often: Marketing makes deals and promises that Development can't sanely reach. This means either Development embraces insane amounts of work to reach the goal or they ignore Marketing and let the finger pointing begin if something goes wrong.
Marketing is constantly making deals without realizing the feasiblity of making these deals. Development wants to make the most bulletproof features available which means less features. It has gotten to the point where selling "hype" is all Marketing can do because they view Development as something they can't control. Especially if there are commisions involved Marketing doesn't really care if they are writing checks Development can't cash.
I am never surprised when this happens to games. I see this all of the time in the dull ISV sector where the markets are much smaller. Considering how much marketing there is in games now I can't imagine the insane pressures being thrown around.
There are times when people like to use the car a metaphor for PCs. I use this example a lot for showing how some of the MS's design decisions are not exactly sound:
- MS always tries to see the Windows Car as a super low maintaince, easy to use thing. All you need to do is wash it!
- MS always tries to identify messy and cumbersome tasks and then "fix" them the wrong ways. For instance chainging oil isn't exactly complex but it can get messy and some don't like to do it. So MS will implment in their Windows Car a "Oil Ejection Button" on the dashboard. Press the button, all of the oil is dumped out of the engine into a self sealed container for easy removal. All you need to do is put new oil back in. Your hands don't get dirty and it as fast as you can poor oil into your engine. Sounds great doesn't it? Except for when people are either tricked or accidently push the "Oil Ejection Button" while driving down the interstate at 80 MPH.
So the next revision puts a sticker under the button "Don't push unless you really mean too". People still push the button at the wrong times anyway.
So the next revision removes the button from the dash and puts it in the glove compartment. Out of sight out of mind! Unfortunately people will stuff their glove compartment and accidently hit the button.
So the next revision will automatically kill the engine and stop it from running if the "Oil Ejection Button" is pressed while the engine is running. Thats great for saving the engine but now you've just stranded yourself in the middle lane of the interstate and your car is now locked up.
So on and so forth. MS fails to realize that some tasks are somewhat serious, system altering tasks. Making users believe they can handle it quickly with the tools they provide without risk is lunacy. What is worse is often their "fixes" fail to realize the core of the problem. In this example putting the button anywhere near the driver invites disaster. In short: MS creates many good features with lousy implementation.
- MS likes to cram their car full of stuff that they think is handy. Some of it good and some of it bad. As time goes on they aren't agressive enough with removing "out of style" features so you end up with a car that is parts and pieces of sadan, SUV, pickup, compact that is ugly as sin if you take a close look at it. Some parts simply don't make sense together and you can't ask them to be removed. Why do you need the MS CB Radio again? Why do you need pull a trailer with the MS Hitch if you only plan to run to the grocery store with it? Trying to make a "one size fits all" car creates an ugly car.
The problem is that relic music companies only want to sell you music. We all know how easy it is to manipulate the disk into a format you want instead of the one they want to sell us. At this point there is very little value in "just music" releases.
However if you start tying in special stuff like with what is going on here with U2 and Apple, people will more than happily give you money. You've now given them the music in a format they like better *and* gave them value added stuff that can't be ripped from a CD or duplicated (the black iPod).
This is the future of music and media. Just selling the music/information is not enough because it is marginalized by copying no matter what protection schemes they try to throw in. The future is "music/information" + "goodies".
Which 3 Though? (The X-Box Game Libary)
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Halo 2 Goes Gold
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· Score: 1, Insightful
One of the problems with the XBox is the lack of quality games. Sure the racks are filled with games for XBox but have you really closely inspected them?
Copying an old post I made elsewhere on this topic, here was a list of "hot games" for the beginning of Sept 8, 2004:
------- Here is what they claim is hot for XBox: - ESPN NFL 2K5 - Madden NFL 2005 - MLB SlugFest: Loaded - NCAA Football 2005 - NASCAR 2005 - Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow - Sudeki - Spider-Man 2
Here is what they claim is hot on PS2: - Dog's Life - Ghosthunter - Hot Shots Golf Fore! - NASCAR 2005 - Phantom Brave - Street Fighter Anniversary Collection - Star Ocean: Till The End of Time - Viewtiful Joe
And for laughs, Gamecube: - NCAA Football 2005 - Madden NFL 2005 - Pikmin 2 - Puyo Pop Fever - Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow - Tales of Symphonia - WWE Day of Reckoning -------
Notice something a bit odd about the XBox game selection? Now it could have been the timing of it but unless you are into sports games (many of which where available on other systems too) the XBox seems to have very little to offer. Both PS2 and GC have multiple games "epic" games while XBox has <insert org><insert sport><insert year> games.
I would rather spend the money on a good video card than 3 games for the XBox given their "massive" selection.
Anyone who is claiming that FLOSS is the perfect software development model is either trying to sell you something or simply mistaken. One of the weaknesses is simply everything is subject to interptation.
The people who find the bugs are often do not agree with the people fixing/writing the application. If you are using one of the "for profit" models, its easier to prioritorize bugs: you target the ones that are the most expensive first. With FLOSS it is the one that is most anoying. A bug might be the most anoying bug in the world but if the core team is not going to hit it they aren't inclined to fix it.
What is implied in the FLOSS development model is that the reporter is savy enough to jump into the code and either fix it themselves or give enough inside help to someone who can to cut down the fix time. When this does not happen you have problems.
In short, OSS is IMHO a better model for colaborative project development. However no one should ever believe it it is perfect. Everyone must remember that neither colaboration nor agreement are guarenteed with FLOSS.
This is a reoccuring problem all over the place in the industry. Management and the board see no capital value in the Design or Implementation or Testing phase of product development so therefore it has lower priority than things like Support. Management continues to see the entire process of Software Engineering as a "list of stuff to do to create something" instead of a continual process.
I've seen this all too often: management demands we must have something out the door even if engineering discovers a serious flaw in the current design. I'm not saying that management should always bend to engineer's time lines but it seems that almost every medium to small company has it as a "one way street".
This is really why software fails. The engineering team is just not sure the stuff works right but management sells it anyway.
Yeah you can rewrite libjpeg with a different runtime that is consider 'safer' but it will still suffer if the design patterns are the same. You can write a new libjpeg in cyclone but if the underlying reason the bug was exposed is not fixed then cyclone won't help. The new libjpeg will still malfunction maybe in not such an egregious way but still busted.
I see this pop up all of the time: People try to pin the problem on C/C++ instead of the design pattern which lead to to the exploit. You can write bulletproof code in C/C++. You can write code that can be exploited in Java/C#/Perl/etc. No runtime is safe if the code is bogus.
...is that you often need the install media to do any updates. What * the * hell? You might have had your machine setup by a central IT lab and they have the CD image install to work from. Even if the source is provided over the network is a non-savy user going to understand where to find it? I give it a 50/50 shot.
So thanks again to Microsoft they make critical functions a pain in the ass to execute which often means it does not get run at all.
This is still news worthy simply because the/. crowd is so emotional about it. Or to put it another way, many readers would be wondering what in the world the editors are doing if they didn't post a thing on this.
This may sound like an odd thing to say but realizing one has options is a prerequist to taking the option. If one doesn't realize they have the option of just sitting in Starbucks without doing work then how are they supposed to stop hypertasking?
This isn't as simple as it sounds especially in a sectors of the economy that put the emphisis on "a lot is less is a lot more!" Like IT, if one person can manage 5 machines is there a way to make one person manage 10? Off the bat I would usually say "Yes, make them work twice as much". This is how you start down the path of hypertasking. You load up workers with abnormal but do able amounts of work. You find yourself having to do things at every possible moment of your day. It becomes habitial that you must be busy else you are doing something wrong. And once it becomes habitual it becomes harder to think "should I be doing this?" Worse yet is that your boss starts behaving and expecting high workloads as the norm. Your boss doesn't see any good reason why he should have people maintain five machines when they can maintain ten.
So sure you can say "just back off" but there are behavioral and monetary reasons they can't just back off. Striving to make operational units do more work with less reason is a good thing. However if they are already as efficient as possible, the only way to boost productivity is to make them hypertask. As the article points out this productivity really isn't an improvement since it costs the "sanity" of your workers.
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The people often bitten the worst by Spyware/Malware are very smart, very computer savy people. The problem is they don't realize all of the tricks that they will use to get onto your system. Besides, it can't happen to them! Many times people will recognize they've been bitten right away by an accident misclick but by then its too late.
So while people might not be idiots, most should never be trusted with elevated privilages. But Windows does give you an option (or they are very painful) so load up the maintaince costs with all sorts of software and network monitoring because MS refuses to learn lessons painfully realized 20 years ago.
For the love of all that is good and holy, I wish MS would abandon certain technologies (Active X hosting in application frameworks), I wish MS would stop requiring user level tasks with elevated privilages, and I wish people would stop making excuses for MS. Reinstalling from a backup image is not the proper way to fix problems on a platform that is supposed to be "enterprise enabled".
Firefox as far as I have seen and seen from others using is rock solid if you do a couple of things:
- If you used any pre-release version, uninstall the previous version. Key/value pair settings can and do change causing erronious behavior. This can get goofy on Linux but you can minimize the goofiness by hanging onto backups of the ".mozilla" directory and carefully pushing in stuff you need. Of course my preference is to export the booksmarks and start over.
- Plug-ins are "the heel" for any browers including Firefox. Limit the usage of plug-ins to a bare minimum and definately don't install plug-ings you feel iffy about. If the plug-in goes south then it often has an effect on the framework. As a tangent to the first point, using pre-release FF version of a plug-in is also a receipe for disaster.
Purely anectdotal, FF seems rock solid. You can also make IE extra flakey by installing all sorts of weird things as well (the last time IE crashed it came from the Google toolbar!). At this point it seems that both products are rock solid frameworks where most problems come in from the outside.
Back before they shrunk their name, Silicon Graphics Inc. had some fun stuff to play with but even in the glory days I wouldn't believe how overpriced it was.
I've used the green boxed machines (their name escapes me), the Iris, the Indy, the O2, and a whole bunch of "oven" machines. All of them very nice to play with but all of which were very expensive. These where the guys who came up with IrisGL which was the forerunner to OpenGL. They went "64-bit" early too although they did it the wrong way (changing the OS moniker to "IRIX64" broke many Makefiles). All was right and good...as long as there was no one else in the same product space.
It was around the mid 90s when several new things started to pop up. Sun and HP noticed how SGI was a "darling" and wanted in on the action and tried to create their own "graphics workstation" both of which weren't as nice and often times a lot cheaper. Around this time, as well know, a little OS known as Linux started to get some steam and a little project known as Mesa started to actually conform to OpenGL.
So now they had pressure from the top and the bottom. I also viewed their buying Cray as a bad move because it didn't make their technology any cheaper to compete against Sun and HP let alone the cheap Windows or Linux workstation with a semi-decent AGP card.
The last SGI machine I saw ran Windows 2K. Such a shame because it was still way overpriced from what you could buy "off the shelf". Maybe things would have been different if they embraced Open Source to cut down the overhead. I honestly don't know. Retreating into the supercomputer product space made me notice how much they were the Amiga/Commedore of the 90s. They were too pretty, too expensive, too early.
Sure Intel could continue to make P2 like Seagate could continue to make 500 MB hard disk drives or like Ford can continue to make Model-Ts. The problem is the profit returns on these are horrible due to a number of problems. Even at sub $10 Intel would be hard pressed to find buyers. Technology has marched on so trying to integrate a P2 or a 500 MB drive into a "modern" system is much harder than buying "modern" components.
In the end it is about the money. Intel doesn't see any more profit coming from selling the P2 and the market isn't exactly telling them otherwise. As the manufacturers for the support components stop their production there is little use to continue production.
The problem isn't overtime. The problem is not getting paid for it. If workers were constantly getting paid 1.5x for each hour over 40 a week the higher ups in EA would be fixing their scheduling and manpower shortages in a hurry. As it stands they are under no obligation to pay any more for 35 hours a week than 95 hours a week so why not squeeze as many hours as they can?
The reward for working hard should be compsensation not more work. If the higher ups aren't willing to be liberial with "comp time" or project bonuses then expect some unhappy workers. Killing morale does not help the company at all.
To Valve companies EA, Vivendi, etc. are just leaches. They provide a minimal function for their game: they place the box on the shelf at Worst Buy and Circuit Crudy. And for their minimal input they take a bite out of that $50 for each box sold.
I see Steam as a natural reaction to this and in a good way, it is using technology to solve a problem the right way. The higher ups at Valve hate working with these big companies especially on their Source/mod projects. Why should they fork over big cash to a faceless company just to put a box on a shelf for a minor add-on when the Internet has shown to be a great distribution model on its own? Cut out the middle man and reach the gamers directly!
I suspect the stink in the summer between Vivendi and Valve was over this very feature. I suspect two events came up: either Valve wanted to undercut Vivendi's box price with a much cheaper Steam price or Vivendi felt they deserved a piece of the Steam profits as well. I would love for someone closer to the parties to reveal what happened.
Beyond all of this, Steam has the possiblity of breaking free from EA, et-al. A small company publisher can use Steam like technology to charge and deliver to gamers quality games without them. If Steam catches on, EA will go the way of the dinosaur.
The internet has been proven time and time again as a great distribution model for other forms of digital media. Why can't this work for games? Why can't there be an "iTunes" killer app for game distribution? Given how much EA and Vivendi take for just making the cardboard box and putting it on the shelf at the store, I can't blame any company looking to technology to get out from under the thumb of these guys. I dream of the day when EA is treated as the dinosaur.
Steam is far from perfect and some might consider it a failure but I see it at worst an "honorable failure". The idea of hooking into a distributed network automatically for game support is worth looking into. I'm glad Valve took a stab at it even though the results where iffy. I hope they learned a lot about how to deliver content to home computers out of all of this.
Why did it fail? I believe Steam was "half baked" where because they didn't really stress it to shake the bugs out of it. I felt they should have used Steam to give out a "HL2 Teaser Demo" to test the entire system under full load.
Also said:
"We think our software is far more secure. It is more secure because we stand by it, we fixed it, because we built it. Nobody ever knows who built open-source software," he(Ballmer) said.
Wow, he has been in the buisness this long and in competition against BSD and Linux for this long and still doesn't understand how his product or Open Source functions?!
As long as I have been using MS products, they have never fixed a problem for me. Sure I don't have Torvalds at my beck and call with my Linux problems but I have a far greater unspoken and unsung mindshare to draw from.
Microsoft has never fixed a problem for me. Ever. And I know why: it isn't profitable to fix problems for me. Lets say that I have a laptop and I install Windows XP but the wireless networking doesn't work. Microsoft will say its the vendor problem, or I pray for a patch at some later undisclosed date, or call them up for a $75 an hour incident investiation (I'm sure they've upped the rate by now) which may or may not result in a hot patch.
Compare this to Linux where no one organisation will fix things for me but many people will help point me in the right direction. Install FC Core 3 on the laptop but the wireless doesn't work. I have logfiles. I have google and mailing lists. Importantly I have source code. If a fix is found I can apply it now. If no one has a fix and I feel adventureous I can jump in and start trying to fix it myself.
So go ahead and threaten to sue Mr. Ballmer. Having MS stand behind the software and fix it is a really expensive. I might still save money in the end by being sued for using Linux instead of throwing more money at MS.
ps. Why should we believe that Windows avoids the 228 patent violations? Anyone know how we check this? Oh yeah...MS says they are clean. I guess we should trust them instead of OSS.
To borrow the medical anology, pathology of a virus is important but this alone will not create a "cure". You may understand completely how a virus works but this alone does nothing to hamper it.
To even be more suscinct, if all it took to stop a virus was to reverse engineer it (ie. pathology), then we'd have things like AIDS, Herpes, etc. beat long ago. We clearly understand how these things spread yet infections still happen. Likewise, we already know a lot how virii spread on Windows and form best practices and yet comprimising still happens.
First stop when searching is Google. But when I appear to have stumped Google I go over to Jeeves.
Ask Jeeves is interesting because unlike other search engines which work by assuming you at least have a hunch on what you need, AJ doesn't. The BBC's example is perfect: Searching for "raleigh" could mean the famous historical figure, multiple cities around the world, different buisness and brands, etc. Google is inclined to dump them all onto you and make you sort it out. If Google presents what you need on the first page it might be more by popularity or luck but AJ shows you a bunch of fast ways to filter out results from the huge disparaging set of matches.
This is a feature I wish Google had. If I get too many matches that appear to not be what I'm looking for I rephrase the querry which AJ does on the fly with these filters.
This is odd. Somehow, if in a turn of events MS steals some code and puts it into Windows I'm somehow guilty. I would have thought MS would be in hot water not the buyer. Why would the rightful IP owners chase the numberous consumers when a fat MS is clearly at fault.
Thanks MS but no thanks. Shielding me from IP that aren't my problem is something I don't need you to do for me.
You are correct: all vendors should release fixes and patches as soon as they've been internally "blessed". The problem with Windows however is that patching is such a pain. Almost none of their server technology can be "conditionally restarted". Almost none of their kernel modifications are actually put "installed" until the reboot. What is just as bad is you have to reboot again to roll back.
I do realize the importance of getting fixes, especially vulnerability in a very timely manner but because of the way Windows is built its nearly impossible to implement such a "patch on the fly" plan that so many other systems seem to enjoy.
Treating nuclear power (or any other new technology like Stem Cell et al) like the "boggyman" is why there are no plans to expand any use of nuclear power. To go with the analogy, if nuclear power is a boggyman then you'll never know what is under your bed because you are perpetually afraid.
People didn't just wake up one day and created a safe and efficient internal combustion engine. It took years of research, refinement, and practice making these things before it got safe, robust, and reliable enough to use regularlly without maiming people haphazardly. Why do people expect anything different from something like nuclear?
How do you make nuclear power safer? Certainly not by treating as something unholy or evil. The other current factor is money. How do you make nuclear cheaper? Once again, it isn't by shunning it. Research and refinement and studying how system behave creates better engineering and more robust designs. As noted in Europe and Japan they are many generations ahead and have some fairly safe and robust designs while in the US there are no plans to issue any more building permits for new plants...ever.
Make no mistake that nuclear technology is dangerous but you can't make it safer by vilifying and cursing it. Researching these types of technology should be embraced instead of shunned.
Take Everquest for instance. This game has been running so long that the people in "one age" aren't the same people in "the next age".
In the beginning the imfamous idea foisted by the creators was called "The Vision". It was basically a creedo of how they thought the game should behave in form and function. It wasn't perfect (for instance non-magic classes were left devoid of any extra skills) but it was a solid framework to start from.
But as time moved on, these people who created "The Vision" left to do other things and this was slowly dismantled. Each expansion that has come afterwards seems to have gotten more haphazard with adding features. Things are added to the game by designers who have little knowledge of the hsitory of the game (or possibly don't care) which turns the game into a hodpodge of skills and monsters that don't grow with time.
Although showing its age and probably on its last legs, Everquest at this point is shaken ever expansion due to this effect. Designers only seem to know or care about their current creation instead of creating a solid and sound system that will stand the test of time.
It isn't so much that MMOGs are designed by Newbs. They are designed by people who probably aren't going to be working on the same project a year from now.
"Sender-ID" is like a digital signature which is fine and dandy except when you read to much into it. Knowing an email comes from a particular server doesn't indicate whether or not it is spam just like signing "malware.exe" with a signature doesn't mean it is okay to run.
Signatures only verify it comes "blessed" from a source. If the source is bogus then it doesn't matter if it is signed or not. Putting too much faith in "Sender-ID" opens a whole lot of problems. For instance "Sender-ID" from "spamster@hotmail.com" just means it comes from a legit hotmail.com server. It does not clear it from being spam. I can see how malware will take over zombie machines co-oping their email servers. Instead of sending spam from the infected machine, it will just use its email settings back to "isp.com" which uses "Sender-ID" and we are back to chasing down infected machines.
Besides, isn't "Sender-ID" patented? How much will it cost to implement "Sender-ID" for my little email server so I can actually email people? The last thing the Internet needs is more patented technology running around solving social problems.
This appears to be a common problem in all softare. Development strives wirtes what is best in the time allowed while Marketing wants to promise what sounds like it will catch the eye and possibly lead to a sale. I see this all too often: Marketing makes deals and promises that Development can't sanely reach. This means either Development embraces insane amounts of work to reach the goal or they ignore Marketing and let the finger pointing begin if something goes wrong.
Marketing is constantly making deals without realizing the feasiblity of making these deals. Development wants to make the most bulletproof features available which means less features. It has gotten to the point where selling "hype" is all Marketing can do because they view Development as something they can't control. Especially if there are commisions involved Marketing doesn't really care if they are writing checks Development can't cash.
I am never surprised when this happens to games. I see this all of the time in the dull ISV sector where the markets are much smaller. Considering how much marketing there is in games now I can't imagine the insane pressures being thrown around.
There are times when people like to use the car a metaphor for PCs. I use this example a lot for showing how some of the MS's design decisions are not exactly sound:
- MS always tries to see the Windows Car as a super low maintaince, easy to use thing. All you need to do is wash it!
- MS always tries to identify messy and cumbersome tasks and then "fix" them the wrong ways. For instance chainging oil isn't exactly complex but it can get messy and some don't like to do it. So MS will implment in their Windows Car a "Oil Ejection Button" on the dashboard. Press the button, all of the oil is dumped out of the engine into a self sealed container for easy removal. All you need to do is put new oil back in. Your hands don't get dirty and it as fast as you can poor oil into your engine. Sounds great doesn't it? Except for when people are either tricked or accidently push the "Oil Ejection Button" while driving down the interstate at 80 MPH.
So the next revision puts a sticker under the button "Don't push unless you really mean too". People still push the button at the wrong times anyway.
So the next revision removes the button from the dash and puts it in the glove compartment. Out of sight out of mind! Unfortunately people will stuff their glove compartment and accidently hit the button.
So the next revision will automatically kill the engine and stop it from running if the "Oil Ejection Button" is pressed while the engine is running. Thats great for saving the engine but now you've just stranded yourself in the middle lane of the interstate and your car is now locked up.
So on and so forth. MS fails to realize that some tasks are somewhat serious, system altering tasks. Making users believe they can handle it quickly with the tools they provide without risk is lunacy. What is worse is often their "fixes" fail to realize the core of the problem. In this example putting the button anywhere near the driver invites disaster. In short: MS creates many good features with lousy implementation.
- MS likes to cram their car full of stuff that they think is handy. Some of it good and some of it bad. As time goes on they aren't agressive enough with removing "out of style" features so you end up with a car that is parts and pieces of sadan, SUV, pickup, compact that is ugly as sin if you take a close look at it. Some parts simply don't make sense together and you can't ask them to be removed. Why do you need the MS CB Radio again? Why do you need pull a trailer with the MS Hitch if you only plan to run to the grocery store with it? Trying to make a "one size fits all" car creates an ugly car.
The problem is that relic music companies only want to sell you music. We all know how easy it is to manipulate the disk into a format you want instead of the one they want to sell us. At this point there is very little value in "just music" releases.
However if you start tying in special stuff like with what is going on here with U2 and Apple, people will more than happily give you money. You've now given them the music in a format they like better *and* gave them value added stuff that can't be ripped from a CD or duplicated (the black iPod).
This is the future of music and media. Just selling the music/information is not enough because it is marginalized by copying no matter what protection schemes they try to throw in. The future is "music/information" + "goodies".
One of the problems with the XBox is the lack of quality games. Sure the racks are filled with games for XBox but have you really closely inspected them?
Copying an old post I made elsewhere on this topic, here was a list of "hot games" for the beginning of Sept 8, 2004:
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Here is what they claim is hot for XBox:
- ESPN NFL 2K5
- Madden NFL 2005
- MLB SlugFest: Loaded
- NCAA Football 2005
- NASCAR 2005
- Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow
- Sudeki
- Spider-Man 2
Here is what they claim is hot on PS2:
- Dog's Life
- Ghosthunter
- Hot Shots Golf Fore!
- NASCAR 2005
- Phantom Brave
- Street Fighter Anniversary Collection
- Star Ocean: Till The End of Time
- Viewtiful Joe
And for laughs, Gamecube:
- NCAA Football 2005
- Madden NFL 2005
- Pikmin 2
- Puyo Pop Fever
- Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
- Tales of Symphonia
- WWE Day of Reckoning
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Notice something a bit odd about the XBox game selection? Now it could have been the timing of it but unless you are into sports games (many of which where available on other systems too) the XBox seems to have very little to offer. Both PS2 and GC have multiple games "epic" games while XBox has <insert org> <insert sport> <insert year> games.
I would rather spend the money on a good video card than 3 games for the XBox given their "massive" selection.
Anyone who is claiming that FLOSS is the perfect software development model is either trying to sell you something or simply mistaken. One of the weaknesses is simply everything is subject to interptation.
The people who find the bugs are often do not agree with the people fixing/writing the application. If you are using one of the "for profit" models, its easier to prioritorize bugs: you target the ones that are the most expensive first. With FLOSS it is the one that is most anoying. A bug might be the most anoying bug in the world but if the core team is not going to hit it they aren't inclined to fix it.
What is implied in the FLOSS development model is that the reporter is savy enough to jump into the code and either fix it themselves or give enough inside help to someone who can to cut down the fix time. When this does not happen you have problems.
In short, OSS is IMHO a better model for colaborative project development. However no one should ever believe it it is perfect. Everyone must remember that neither colaboration nor agreement are guarenteed with FLOSS.
This is a reoccuring problem all over the place in the industry. Management and the board see no capital value in the Design or Implementation or Testing phase of product development so therefore it has lower priority than things like Support. Management continues to see the entire process of Software Engineering as a "list of stuff to do to create something" instead of a continual process.
I've seen this all too often: management demands we must have something out the door even if engineering discovers a serious flaw in the current design. I'm not saying that management should always bend to engineer's time lines but it seems that almost every medium to small company has it as a "one way street".
This is really why software fails. The engineering team is just not sure the stuff works right but management sells it anyway.
Yeah you can rewrite libjpeg with a different runtime that is consider 'safer' but it will still suffer if the design patterns are the same. You can write a new libjpeg in cyclone but if the underlying reason the bug was exposed is not fixed then cyclone won't help. The new libjpeg will still malfunction maybe in not such an egregious way but still busted.
I see this pop up all of the time: People try to pin the problem on C/C++ instead of the design pattern which lead to to the exploit. You can write bulletproof code in C/C++. You can write code that can be exploited in Java/C#/Perl/etc. No runtime is safe if the code is bogus.
...is that you often need the install media to do any updates. What * the * hell? You might have had your machine setup by a central IT lab and they have the CD image install to work from. Even if the source is provided over the network is a non-savy user going to understand where to find it? I give it a 50/50 shot.
So thanks again to Microsoft they make critical functions a pain in the ass to execute which often means it does not get run at all.
This is still news worthy simply because the /. crowd is so emotional about it. Or to put it another way, many readers would be wondering what in the world the editors are doing if they didn't post a thing on this.
This may sound like an odd thing to say but realizing one has options is a prerequist to taking the option. If one doesn't realize they have the option of just sitting in Starbucks without doing work then how are they supposed to stop hypertasking?
This isn't as simple as it sounds especially in a sectors of the economy that put the emphisis on "a lot is less is a lot more!" Like IT, if one person can manage 5 machines is there a way to make one person manage 10? Off the bat I would usually say "Yes, make them work twice as much". This is how you start down the path of hypertasking. You load up workers with abnormal but do able amounts of work. You find yourself having to do things at every possible moment of your day. It becomes habitial that you must be busy else you are doing something wrong. And once it becomes habitual it becomes harder to think "should I be doing this?" Worse yet is that your boss starts behaving and expecting high workloads as the norm. Your boss doesn't see any good reason why he should have people maintain five machines when they can maintain ten.
So sure you can say "just back off" but there are behavioral and monetary reasons they can't just back off. Striving to make operational units do more work with less reason is a good thing. However if they are already as efficient as possible, the only way to boost productivity is to make them hypertask. As the article points out this productivity really isn't an improvement since it costs the "sanity" of your workers.