They should really make a small and light version of the Mozilla Suite that only does web browsing, and does it well. They could call it "Firefox", for example.
Don't you get the irony of Phoenix? It's a small and light version of Firefox which was a small and light version of Mozilla. It's turtles all the way down man.
Great, a Javascript PDF reader. Somebody has finally devised a way to make Javascript suck more resources than it currently does with Google's APIs, Yahoo's APIs, and so forth all running all the time on almost every web page.
It's not needed, it's just momentum. After all, the CIO knows from reading Gartner reports that Java is "enterprise-ready" and so that's good enough for him!
In the olden days (and I am thinking as recently as the late 1990s) the universities would bake their own IT solutions. It was considered an academic challenge, and each campus had its own peculiar requirements, culture, etc. In those days, you had two tiers of IT - the local lab support, which was generally a grad student in the department who had undergone a short training course - if they even needed it - to help lusers figure out which part of the computer is the screen, which is the keyboard, and where the any key was. Sometimes these people, despite being English majors or what have you, would write good software that might be used in the university, or even across the world, while they sat there watching the herd of cattle called students and tenured professors prance across the keyboards. OK, I jest a bit, but not much.
Then, in the old days, you had the upper tier IT folks. These were people who essentially created and maintained the university's infrastructure. At the mid-sized midwestern university that I attended, the machine room contained a few IBM Power-based systems, running a redundant hardware / software stack, all of which connected to a dedicated user store. You could log into any of the servers and it would appear to be identical from the user's view. If one went down, the other could handle the load, and your full suite of Unix software was provided. It was beautiful. The entire infrastructure (minus the cabling running around campus, that was handled by union labor scrags) was maintained by about 4 people, and this was on a campus that included about thirty thousand students and faculty! Thousands of logged-in users at once, comfortably using a couple of computers that, if you added their processing capabilities together today, wouldn't be able to outdo an iPod Touch.
Many of the classic software packages that people use today were created by and for the academic campus. TeX, BSD, the easy to use (suitable for non-techie) Pico editor, and so forth, all combined to make a system that with minimal training, one could get started on, and with man pages, one could learn about on the fly. It was good for the university that created the software, in the firm of heightened prestige and perhaps lucrative government sheckel rainstorms, and it was good for the community because most of this software was then just given away, meaning that the academic community in general benefited. Smaller schools could use the software on smaller hardware, and wouldn't have to shoulder a massive IT cost beyond some dumb terminals, some Macintoshes, and a mid-sized "super-mini." The idea that sharing and helping the broader academic community was something to be proud of, and was useful to academia as a whole, was dominant.
Let's look at the situation now. IT services are managed by geniuses called "administrators" who probably couldn't code a "hello world" in BASIC, who hold MBAs, and who get all their IT information from Gartner or other such shill operations. The services they provide on-campus are shockingly similar to those one might have accessed over a 2400 baud modem in the early 1990s, except these services represent an enormous, ongoing cost. These campuses are entirely self-insufficient. Without access to external services, nothing would work, from payroll to class registration even down to the damn door locks in some cases! IT costs are an ever-increasing drain on the school's limited coffers, and the benefits are shrinking with the dollars spent. There is no incentive to create better software for the campus or academic IT in general, and thereby the whole academic world suffers. Just shoveling dollars into Google or MS Cloud or whatever hare-brained bullshit that the MIS types read is hot this week is destroying a lot of the in-built innovative potential of the university IT department.
My wife is in the math department at a major school in the Pacific Northwest. Her school (one of the biggest in the PNW!) has changed its entire campus management software stack 3 times in the 5 years that she has been there. Other universities have similar records. I would consider this to be a monumental failure and it should be a wake-up call for universities everywhere.
Are they serious? A built in PDF reader, and this is only the start of things. Meanwhile there are Mozilla bugs that are over half a decade old.
This constant bloat of software, where a program eventually gets filled with so many features that it might as well be Ann entire OS, is one of the most dangerous diseases in the tech world. The irony is that Firefox was originally a lightweight answer to the entire Mozilla suite, because it had grown too bloated.
Every platform out there already has a PDF reader. My operating system has a PDF renderer built in. It works great. Why jam another one in the browser? They're just increasing the attack surface, and if a vulnerability in the PDF format were to crop up now I have to worry about getting patches for yet another thing here.
Don't those products all support terminal controls over SSh as well?
Yeah, though, e state of "enterprise" management tools is pretty sad. These devices go for tens of thousands to perhaps even millions of dollars a pop, and the management software / GUI control options seem like they were created for people who failed elementary school.
It's not a mistake, though. It's an ironic use of a word, and one that has an agreed-upon definition in the ironic sense. People are not using the word "literally" in place of "figuratively" in error, they are doing it intentionally.
This is such a delicious day for the tech "press" because despite their constant barrage of warnings to the contrary, Apple viruses have been pretty much non-existent. Sure, OS X has had some vulnerabilities, but they were generally in various Unix packages and daemons, and those same problems generally affected Linux and BSDs and Solaris and so forth.
Anyway, my question: who the hell uses Java as a browser plugin anyway? On my rigs, it is disabled and has been for years. It's still installed (unlike Flash) because some desktop software needs it, but in the browser? Fuck that.
Using the word literally in an ironic manner to provide emphasis is something that has been done for well over a century now. I am aware that the good gatekeepers at the OED are reluctant to include the ironical definition of "literally" into their holy tome, but you can't change the trend of language by the power mere pedantry alone. Even the Oxford folks can not, and have not, stopped the ironic use of the word despite their attempts to ignore it.
No, he doesn't even ship to anywhere outside the US and Canada, and that one guy in Canada only made one order almost 8 years ago now.
For many businesses, the vague possibility of making an international sale is outweighed by the very real and persistent attacks coming from these dubious nations. For individuals, the possibility however slim of making a sale to the Ukraine or Russia or China is eliminated, also eliminating any necessity of allowing traffic from those nations.
My question to you: What is your agenda? Why are you advocating that people should engage in risky behaviors like allowing internet traffic from these dubious nations? Is there a potential benefit that you intend to exploit there, or is it based upon some misguided principle of openness?
I wouldn't say that. Groupthink around here is that Koch = evil, and Gore = good, even though they are exactly the same - profiteers who have business plans.
Doesn't matter to me who is wealthier. However, the "science" supporting AGW can not be rehabilitated any more easily than the "science" disproving it. Both are prognostication backed by jargon, and don't hit the mark of science.
Len, the nature of the Internet is that it is a global network. In many parts of the world, people are not bound by the sorts of contracts that they are bound by in the United States. Even in the USA, it is not entirely clear if clickthrough EULAs are legally valid or enforceable. While I understand that you have a dedication to computer history, and that your livelihood is partially at stake as well here, you have to realize that once something's on the internet, it will remain out there despite the wishes of the copyright holder or their agents or licensees.
While this fact may bother you, it doesn't likely bother many other people - certainly not the people who copy and share these materials.
No of course not, because Gore's lies are pious lies. He knows what's best for us and even though he stands to make billions on the carbon credit trading scheme, he is surely neutral and disinterested - just looking out for the common good.
Yes, but Phil is in Nashville, and there are closer and less expensive hobby shops available to the Ukranian shopper. In the last 12 years that Phil has been online, before he blocked all the dubious nations on Jan. 1, he never shipped internationally except to one guy in Canada.
Yes, I am advocating blocking all traffic from nations that generate the majority of these kinds of attempts. If this became a policy, and it was done by ISPs, major telecoms, etc, then these nations might clean up their act and their ISPs might respond to complaints with action and not just mocking laughter.
For most everybody, individuals and businesses, there is no reason whatsoever to allow Chinese traffic. Ditto Russian, Ukrainian, Brazilian, etc.
By eliminating those countries, you can cut down 90% of attacks or more. If you don't do business with, or have friends in, those countries anyway, there is no reason whatsoever to allow traffic from them.
I'm sorry but most people, even with awareness of security, still allow password-only SSH. As long as a strong password is chosen, and the SSH daemon increases the wait time between login attempts, password-only SSH is not a security problem.
As I said, I think you're reading too much fiction.
Bids are generally awarded (in the USA) to companies that have contributed to political campaigns. After all, they expect something in return for their funding of candidates.
I think you've been reading too much fiction. The discovery and due diligence processes are there for the benefit of the customer, in order to make it appear that you know what you're doing with their project, even when their project is a mess - which is most of the time.
If you tell the customer that they are clueless, you probably lost the contract. So, you have to pussyfoot around and figure out how you can make any progress at all, despite the fact that your management, and their management are both fighting you every step of the way.
You probably believe in the ghost called Minority Shareholder Lawsuits too.
My point is that Brazil is the place where IP theft occurs. Not specifically anything regarding Apple or Nokia per se. They are also notorious for ripping off drug patents.
Since China's military industries are all state-owned, we could never have feature or progress parity with them even at 5x their budget. The state-owned model is simply much more efficient than the for-profit contractor model, dollar for dollar.
When you couple this with the fact that the defense lobby is insanely powerful, and that they are more profitable than ever, it's pretty easy to see that China can win the arms race without attempting measure their progress in money spent, unlike us. Hell, professional defense analysts still feebly argue that we are ahead simply going by the money metric!
What we need to do is turn inward, and practice isolationism. We have plenty of resources, and plenty of unemployed workers with a high skill level. The next battlefield will be somewhere in Africa, and we "have" to counter China there. I say, so what if China invades Africa? That continent has had about a half century to get their shit together. Let it burn, I say. Hell, they'd probably be better off under Chinese colonialism than they are under their current strong-man systems anyway.
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They should really make a small and light version of the Mozilla Suite that only does web browsing, and does it well. They could call it "Firefox", for example.
Don't you get the irony of Phoenix? It's a small and light version of Firefox which was a small and light version of Mozilla. It's turtles all the way down man.
Great, a Javascript PDF reader. Somebody has finally devised a way to make Javascript suck more resources than it currently does with Google's APIs, Yahoo's APIs, and so forth all running all the time on almost every web page.
God Damn Javascript to Hell!
It's not needed, it's just momentum. After all, the CIO knows from reading Gartner reports that Java is "enterprise-ready" and so that's good enough for him!
In the olden days (and I am thinking as recently as the late 1990s) the universities would bake their own IT solutions. It was considered an academic challenge, and each campus had its own peculiar requirements, culture, etc. In those days, you had two tiers of IT - the local lab support, which was generally a grad student in the department who had undergone a short training course - if they even needed it - to help lusers figure out which part of the computer is the screen, which is the keyboard, and where the any key was. Sometimes these people, despite being English majors or what have you, would write good software that might be used in the university, or even across the world, while they sat there watching the herd of cattle called students and tenured professors prance across the keyboards. OK, I jest a bit, but not much.
Then, in the old days, you had the upper tier IT folks. These were people who essentially created and maintained the university's infrastructure. At the mid-sized midwestern university that I attended, the machine room contained a few IBM Power-based systems, running a redundant hardware / software stack, all of which connected to a dedicated user store. You could log into any of the servers and it would appear to be identical from the user's view. If one went down, the other could handle the load, and your full suite of Unix software was provided. It was beautiful. The entire infrastructure (minus the cabling running around campus, that was handled by union labor scrags) was maintained by about 4 people, and this was on a campus that included about thirty thousand students and faculty! Thousands of logged-in users at once, comfortably using a couple of computers that, if you added their processing capabilities together today, wouldn't be able to outdo an iPod Touch.
Many of the classic software packages that people use today were created by and for the academic campus. TeX, BSD, the easy to use (suitable for non-techie) Pico editor, and so forth, all combined to make a system that with minimal training, one could get started on, and with man pages, one could learn about on the fly. It was good for the university that created the software, in the firm of heightened prestige and perhaps lucrative government sheckel rainstorms, and it was good for the community because most of this software was then just given away, meaning that the academic community in general benefited. Smaller schools could use the software on smaller hardware, and wouldn't have to shoulder a massive IT cost beyond some dumb terminals, some Macintoshes, and a mid-sized "super-mini." The idea that sharing and helping the broader academic community was something to be proud of, and was useful to academia as a whole, was dominant.
Let's look at the situation now. IT services are managed by geniuses called "administrators" who probably couldn't code a "hello world" in BASIC, who hold MBAs, and who get all their IT information from Gartner or other such shill operations. The services they provide on-campus are shockingly similar to those one might have accessed over a 2400 baud modem in the early 1990s, except these services represent an enormous, ongoing cost. These campuses are entirely self-insufficient. Without access to external services, nothing would work, from payroll to class registration even down to the damn door locks in some cases! IT costs are an ever-increasing drain on the school's limited coffers, and the benefits are shrinking with the dollars spent. There is no incentive to create better software for the campus or academic IT in general, and thereby the whole academic world suffers. Just shoveling dollars into Google or MS Cloud or whatever hare-brained bullshit that the MIS types read is hot this week is destroying a lot of the in-built innovative potential of the university IT department.
My wife is in the math department at a major school in the Pacific Northwest. Her school (one of the biggest in the PNW!) has changed its entire campus management software stack 3 times in the 5 years that she has been there. Other universities have similar records. I would consider this to be a monumental failure and it should be a wake-up call for universities everywhere.
And one that includes a plug for the stillborn NFC technology too! WHERE'S THE FUCKING IRDA PORT BITCHES?
Are they serious? A built in PDF reader, and this is only the start of things. Meanwhile there are Mozilla bugs that are over half a decade old.
This constant bloat of software, where a program eventually gets filled with so many features that it might as well be Ann entire OS, is one of the most dangerous diseases in the tech world. The irony is that Firefox was originally a lightweight answer to the entire Mozilla suite, because it had grown too bloated.
Every platform out there already has a PDF reader. My operating system has a PDF renderer built in. It works great. Why jam another one in the browser? They're just increasing the attack surface, and if a vulnerability in the PDF format were to crop up now I have to worry about getting patches for yet another thing here.
Don't those products all support terminal controls over SSh as well?
Yeah, though, e state of "enterprise" management tools is pretty sad. These devices go for tens of thousands to perhaps even millions of dollars a pop, and the management software / GUI control options seem like they were created for people who failed elementary school.
It's not a mistake, though. It's an ironic use of a word, and one that has an agreed-upon definition in the ironic sense. People are not using the word "literally" in place of "figuratively" in error, they are doing it intentionally.
The mere fact that it is called a "charms bar" just makes me squirm in disgust. What the fuck were they thinking?
This is such a delicious day for the tech "press" because despite their constant barrage of warnings to the contrary, Apple viruses have been pretty much non-existent. Sure, OS X has had some vulnerabilities, but they were generally in various Unix packages and daemons, and those same problems generally affected Linux and BSDs and Solaris and so forth.
Anyway, my question: who the hell uses Java as a browser plugin anyway? On my rigs, it is disabled and has been for years. It's still installed (unlike Flash) because some desktop software needs it, but in the browser? Fuck that.
Using the word literally in an ironic manner to provide emphasis is something that has been done for well over a century now. I am aware that the good gatekeepers at the OED are reluctant to include the ironical definition of "literally" into their holy tome, but you can't change the trend of language by the power mere pedantry alone. Even the Oxford folks can not, and have not, stopped the ironic use of the word despite their attempts to ignore it.
No, he doesn't even ship to anywhere outside the US and Canada, and that one guy in Canada only made one order almost 8 years ago now.
For many businesses, the vague possibility of making an international sale is outweighed by the very real and persistent attacks coming from these dubious nations. For individuals, the possibility however slim of making a sale to the Ukraine or Russia or China is eliminated, also eliminating any necessity of allowing traffic from those nations.
My question to you: What is your agenda? Why are you advocating that people should engage in risky behaviors like allowing internet traffic from these dubious nations? Is there a potential benefit that you intend to exploit there, or is it based upon some misguided principle of openness?
I wouldn't say that. Groupthink around here is that Koch = evil, and Gore = good, even though they are exactly the same - profiteers who have business plans.
Doesn't matter to me who is wealthier. However, the "science" supporting AGW can not be rehabilitated any more easily than the "science" disproving it. Both are prognostication backed by jargon, and don't hit the mark of science.
Len, the nature of the Internet is that it is a global network. In many parts of the world, people are not bound by the sorts of contracts that they are bound by in the United States. Even in the USA, it is not entirely clear if clickthrough EULAs are legally valid or enforceable. While I understand that you have a dedication to computer history, and that your livelihood is partially at stake as well here, you have to realize that once something's on the internet, it will remain out there despite the wishes of the copyright holder or their agents or licensees.
While this fact may bother you, it doesn't likely bother many other people - certainly not the people who copy and share these materials.
No of course not, because Gore's lies are pious lies. He knows what's best for us and even though he stands to make billions on the carbon credit trading scheme, he is surely neutral and disinterested - just looking out for the common good.
Yes, but Phil is in Nashville, and there are closer and less expensive hobby shops available to the Ukranian shopper. In the last 12 years that Phil has been online, before he blocked all the dubious nations on Jan. 1, he never shipped internationally except to one guy in Canada.
Yes, I am advocating blocking all traffic from nations that generate the majority of these kinds of attempts. If this became a policy, and it was done by ISPs, major telecoms, etc, then these nations might clean up their act and their ISPs might respond to complaints with action and not just mocking laughter.
This keeps in practice with their policy of never allowing any human contact with a Google employee.
For most everybody, individuals and businesses, there is no reason whatsoever to allow Chinese traffic. Ditto Russian, Ukrainian, Brazilian, etc.
By eliminating those countries, you can cut down 90% of attacks or more. If you don't do business with, or have friends in, those countries anyway, there is no reason whatsoever to allow traffic from them.
I'm sorry but most people, even with awareness of security, still allow password-only SSH. As long as a strong password is chosen, and the SSH daemon increases the wait time between login attempts, password-only SSH is not a security problem.
As I said, I think you're reading too much fiction.
Bids are generally awarded (in the USA) to companies that have contributed to political campaigns. After all, they expect something in return for their funding of candidates.
It worked just fine from the founding of America until we foolishly entered WWI. I suppose ou already knew this, which is why you posted AC.
I think you've been reading too much fiction. The discovery and due diligence processes are there for the benefit of the customer, in order to make it appear that you know what you're doing with their project, even when their project is a mess - which is most of the time.
If you tell the customer that they are clueless, you probably lost the contract. So, you have to pussyfoot around and figure out how you can make any progress at all, despite the fact that your management, and their management are both fighting you every step of the way.
You probably believe in the ghost called Minority Shareholder Lawsuits too.
My point is that Brazil is the place where IP theft occurs. Not specifically anything regarding Apple or Nokia per se. They are also notorious for ripping off drug patents.
We aren't even paying down the principle, we are simply making minimum payments on the interest alone.
But what are you going to do, the banks and financial services sector are some of the biggest political donors.
Since China's military industries are all state-owned, we could never have feature or progress parity with them even at 5x their budget. The state-owned model is simply much more efficient than the for-profit contractor model, dollar for dollar.
When you couple this with the fact that the defense lobby is insanely powerful, and that they are more profitable than ever, it's pretty easy to see that China can win the arms race without attempting measure their progress in money spent, unlike us. Hell, professional defense analysts still feebly argue that we are ahead simply going by the money metric!
What we need to do is turn inward, and practice isolationism. We have plenty of resources, and plenty of unemployed workers with a high skill level. The next battlefield will be somewhere in Africa, and we "have" to counter China there. I say, so what if China invades Africa? That continent has had about a half century to get their shit together. Let it burn, I say. Hell, they'd probably be better off under Chinese colonialism than they are under their current strong-man systems anyway.