Exactly. If some nutter from Wood Green(What is it with Wood Green... Its just up the road from where I live... the terrorist guys who were making ricin there) can bring down the US miltary computer network for a period of *days* then somethign is wrong.
Your post made me think of an old story I heard a while ago that is related to company worth.
There was once an English Financial COnsultcy company based in London, that was basically a startup by a grow of fin services types who were all very very good at whatever it is that fin services types do. Anyway... they became very successful enterprise.
A German company wanted to break into their particular market niche, so offered to by them out. For an obscene amount of money.... seven figures UKP. The German company was very foolish and didnt get the company founder to sign and bits of paper saying they would stay on. The Founders and Germans didnt get on, and after a while they all left. The German company was surprised to find they now owned a 7 figure business that consisted of a leased office, leased furniture and office equipment and admin and reception staff.
In complex service type industries, including software development/innovation, the most valuable asset is the talent of your employees. Having a building in the Valley means dick.
Sounds to me like ActiveX will still be enabled by default, they're just going to improve on the ability to block it on a per-domain basis instead of a per-zone basis. This isn't enough. IMO, ActiveX is the biggest (non-bug) avenue by which users become infected with all sorts of shit. It needs to be outright disabled out of the box if IE is going to get serious about security.
100% agree with you. Alas I have no mod points. And I really really hope they do rely on the old "Put a dialog box up with a Yes and No option when mysterious stuff is being downloaded from some unknown site"
Like many a geek I am a part time Windows sysadmin for friends and family. My sister in law to be is one of them... tho its remote admin(shes in US Im in UK... I got her on Skype!). She is otherwise a "savvy" net user and has her own web site... which she maintains... has taken some low level web design courses etc. But whenever a mysterious dialog box come along she has this habit of clicking on Yes. Just discovred her XP box was owned and was a nice little spammer box:(
If its geosync tethering asteriod was detached then no. The planet would keep spinning and frition would cause the elevator proper to start slowing down. Thus it would proceed to wrap itself around the planet at quite a high velocity.
First line tech support is incompetent in pretty much any country. It could be Hank in Texas, Sahil in Bangalore, Dave in Sydney, Hamish in Glasgow... Try getting a phone installed from BT in the UK. Then get back to me;)
Well the reason I asked was because Im an Australian contractor working in London that has quite a few Indian friends that contract both here in the UK and own companies in India.
Thing is, and it might just be cause I havent met the right Indians, that I think most of em would disagree. Im currently pondering going to Bangalore for a year or two. A mate of mine has just started a development company in Bangalore. Ive never lived in India and wouldnt mind it for a bit. Great people.
br>
I tend to get a little annoyed at some of the comments on/. about india. Not the grandparent in particular. But a lot of silliness.
If only Heaviside had a slashdot account. And was... you know. Like alive. The discussions we could have!
Anyway. Thanks for suddenly taking me back to Calc 1 at my first year of uni:)
Now whether it's patented or not, I don't know. But this is a _VERY_ big step for Microsoft. It's going to make translating between this and OASIS (which OpenOffice2 and a lot of others are considering/implementing as their default) as simple as an XSLT transformation.
As simple? Simple? Microsoft making it simple. Im fbaergasted at your optimism. It'll be as simple as bridging between a DCOM based component and a CORBA object:)
I cant actually get to TFA to read as the site seems to have melted. But I assume you are correct. If MS are serious, why do they not go for something like this . There is a distinct lack of Mircosoft employees on the comittee member list
SMB SUCKS. It's terribly ineffient. You might as well convert the binary to ASCII, ie 1010110110101 and then XML it, ie... and then FTP it. You'd still be more efficient than SMB.
I suspect it was designed by the same people that did the Word file format. I gotta lot of time from Trdge and the lads and ladettes in the Samba team. I wonder how they keep their sanity.
I recall that one. One of my old DOS boxes at the office I was working in had it... didnt really matter as it was our test box and we trashed it all the time anywya:)
The nasty one I recall (cant recall its name) was the one that went around looking for files ending in.cpp and.pas, but not.c, and wrote nulls to all the bytes. I often wondered who did that. A disgruntled K&R C programmer I've always imagained.
This is the Zaphod I know. The movie Zaphod was not this. The movie Zaphod was so unhip, I was surpirsed his bums didnt fall off.
He then realized he was going to have to speak at this point.
He took a series of very shallow breaths, and then said as quickly and as quietly as he could, "Door, if you can hear me, say so very, very quietly."
Very, very quietly, the door murmured, "I can hear you."
"Good. Now, in a moment, I'm going to ask you to open. When you open I do not want you to say that you enjoyed it, OK?"
"OK."
"And I don't want you to say to me that I have made a simple door very happy, or that it is your pleasure to open for me and your satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done, OK?"
"OK."
"And I do not want you to ask me to have a nice day, understand?"
"I understand."
"OK," said Zaphod, tensing himself, "open now."
The door slid open quietly. Zaphod slipped quietly through. The door closed quietly behind him.
"Is that the way you like it, Mr Beeblebrox?" said the door out loud.
"I want you to imagine," said Zaphod to the group of white robots who swung round to stare at him at that point, "that I have an extremely powerful Kill-O-Zap blaster pistol in my hand."
There was an immensely cold and savage silence. The robots regarded him with hideously dead eyes. They stood very still. There was something intensely macabre about their appearance, especially to Zaphod who had never seen one before or even known anything about them. The Krikkit Wars belonged to the ancient past of the Galaxy, and Zaphod had spent most of his early history lessons plotting how he was going to have sex with the girl in the cybercubicle next to him, and since his teaching computer had been an integral part of this plot it had eventually had all its history circuits wiped and replaced with an entirely different set of ideas which had then resulted in it being scrapped and sent to a home for Degenerate Cybermats, whither it was followed by the girl who had inadvertently fallen deeply in love with the unfortunate machine, with the result (a) that Zaphod never got near her and (b) that he missed out on a period of ancient history that would have been of inestimable value to him at this moment.
He stared at them in shock.
It was impossible to explain why, but their smooth and sleek white bodies seemed to be the utter embodiment of clean, clinical evil. From their hideously dead eyes to their powerful lifeless feet, they were clearly the calculated product of a mind that wanted simply to kill. Zaphod gulped in cold fear.
They had been dismantling part of the rear bridge wall, and had forced a passage through some of the vital innards of the ship. Through the tangled wreckage Zaphod could see, with a further and worse sense of shock, that they were tunnelling towards the very heart of the ship, the heart of the Improbability Drive that had been so mysteriously created out of thin air, the Heart of Gold itself.
The robot closest to him was regarding him in such a way as to suggest that it was measuring every smallest particle of his body, mind and capability. And when it spoke, what it said seemed to bear this impression out. Before going on to what it actually said, it is worth recording at this point that Zaphod was the first living organic being to hear one of these creatures speak for something over ten billion years. If he had paid more attention to his ancient history lessons and less to his organic being, he might have been more impressed by this honour.
The robot's voice was like its body, cold, sleek and lifeless. It had almost a cultured rasp to it. It sounded as ancient as it was.
It said, "You do have a Kill-O-Zap blaster pistol in your hand."
Zaphod didn't know what it meant for a moment, but then he glanced down at his own hand and was relieved to see that what he had found clipped to a wall bracket
how the hell do you grow from there? BR>
I think you grow from there by reinventing what you are doing. When one source of rev starts to dry up you have to look at ways you can leverage your existing assests for use in new growth areas. Where this is for microsoft I dont know. THeir two major products, the OS and the office market theyve had sown up for a long time. But this is rapidly changing. Open source and competing OSes are coming over the horizon as threats. Their response on this front is to integrate new tech(ie.net platform/environment etc) to keep people on windows. The office suite is becoming more and more probomatic as well. I dont think Office is dying tomorrow, but there are a lot of questions being asked as to why we should use them as adefacto standard(but dont get me wrong on this. I actually really like Excel as a spread sheet... access not so much... Words OK but bloated). I find these days I use OO on linux and OSX for most things and MS office only when I have to. And why not, OO does everything I want to do with it. MS Office I only need to collaborate with people locked into them.
The software industry is changing, and has been changing for the last 10 odd years. Companies like IBM in particular have realised this. IBM is in fact an excellent case in point when talking about MSFT. They when from the great evil monlithic corp, trying to surpress everyone, to the company that was shattered by the revolutions in the 80s/90s. Now they have had a long bad time, but have reinvented themselves. I think IBM are ahead of the game. Theyve realised the significance of the rise of open source, the collapse of rigid, production line software development and understand that service delivery, not products and boxed binaries are currently the flavour.
Software development and maintance are a service. Like law... like accountants... like plumbers etc. The industry seems to be coming around to this. There is no reason a bank or accountancy company needs to have their own software development section. They generally dont understand software development. I think the way forward is to start to unify the industry to present a united front to business(not with out competition of course). But standard ways of providing solutions... the IT business that gets the gigs are they ones that provide the best performance at the lowest bottom line.
Competition is killing long distance calls, and not just competition from VoIP. Here in New Zealand I can make a call on my cellphone to Canada, UK and various other locations for the same cost as a local call.
Im an Australian in the UK with a significant other in Dubai and friends in the US. I can actually call all those places *cheaper* than the cost of a call to a mobile in the UK:)
They are allegedly being investigated for their rebate practices and their reseller rating has gone to shit. I wouldn't doubt it if this is a last ditch attempt to remain solvent.
Indeed, what you say seems likely. The timing of the lawsuit is also significant. The OS X Tiger release has been hyping away for months now, and I find it difficult to beleieve that they were unaware of it. The lawyers have simply waited until the last possible moment, just before full release to pounce and thus put more pressure on Apple. Not an uncommon practice.
Agreed. Once the transistor limit is reached tho(which I agree with Moore will come one day) a very interesting thing should happen. Consider that for the last 30 odd years IC technology has been doing this mad dash to get smaller and smaller. And consider that because of this the big players have had to build new tech FABs for production at the cost of billions. Once we hit the barrier we should have a mature tech that no longer requires the enormous cost of FAB product. Once a FAB is built, it built(until its decomissioned of course).
Price will drop massively. Eventually who know. Perhaps one day the prices will be so ridiculously low that I can design my own CPU, submit it to open cores and have a production run of 5 chips made for like $20:) Now that would be cool. Of course after that I wanna be able to go to out and buy my own FAB in a box.
Im not sure Id agree with that 100%. A lot of Americans still study at Oxbridge if they can... Chealse(sp?) Clinton for example. Not trying to troll... America does have some of the finest universities and research centres in the world.
What normal person reads articles about computer security? Do you read articles about new studies concerning the use of various grains in dry cat foods? Why not? I do all the time.
The difference is tho that, dry cat food is quite a niche topic of interest I would think. With the popularity of computing within the work and home environment reporting of viruses and security alerts has actually become a mainstream news event.
However, that doesn't change the fact that science doesn't use the word "prove". Statistical probability with p.05 perhaps, but not prove. Creationists and ID drones often use that word with just as little understanding of its meaning in scientific circles as they do the word theory.
Thats fine. I agree with all of that. Im just a little electronics engineer and computer scientist. I never used the word prove... I used the word disproved. And I said in the grandparent that you were right, I should have used discredited/falsified. When I did use the word prove, I was using it in the context of of a creationist argument.
What are we agruing about again?
My original point(I think) was that the ramblings from groups like the Discovery Institute(or whatever theyre called) have no place in a science class room.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. If some nutter from Wood Green(What is it with Wood Green... Its just up the road from where I live... the terrorist guys who were making ricin there) can bring down the US miltary computer network for a period of *days* then somethign is wrong.
Your post made me think of an old story I heard a while ago that is related to company worth.
There was once an English Financial COnsultcy company based in London, that was basically a startup by a grow of fin services types who were all very very good at whatever it is that fin services types do. Anyway... they became very successful enterprise.
A German company wanted to break into their particular market niche, so offered to by them out. For an obscene amount of money.... seven figures UKP. The German company was very foolish and didnt get the company founder to sign and bits of paper saying they would stay on. The Founders and Germans didnt get on, and after a while they all left. The German company was surprised to find they now owned a 7 figure business that consisted of a leased office, leased furniture and office equipment and admin and reception staff.
In complex service type industries, including software development/innovation, the most valuable asset is the talent of your employees. Having a building in the Valley means dick.
Sounds to me like ActiveX will still be enabled by default, they're just going to improve on the ability to block it on a per-domain basis instead of a per-zone basis. This isn't enough. IMO, ActiveX is the biggest (non-bug) avenue by which users become infected with all sorts of shit. It needs to be outright disabled out of the box if IE is going to get serious about security.
:(
100% agree with you. Alas I have no mod points. And I really really hope they do rely on the old "Put a dialog box up with a Yes and No option when mysterious stuff is being downloaded from some unknown site"
Like many a geek I am a part time Windows sysadmin for friends and family. My sister in law to be is one of them... tho its remote admin(shes in US Im in UK... I got her on Skype!). She is otherwise a "savvy" net user and has her own web site... which she maintains... has taken some low level web design courses etc. But whenever a mysterious dialog box come along she has this habit of clicking on Yes. Just discovred her XP box was owned and was a nice little spammer box
If its geosync tethering asteriod was detached then no. The planet would keep spinning and frition would cause the elevator proper to start slowing down. Thus it would proceed to wrap itself around the planet at quite a high velocity.
Ref: Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.
First line tech support is incompetent in pretty much any country. It could be Hank in Texas, Sahil in Bangalore, Dave in Sydney, Hamish in Glasgow... Try getting a phone installed from BT in the UK. Then get back to me ;)
Well the reason I asked was because Im an Australian contractor working in London that has quite a few Indian friends that contract both here in the UK and own companies in India.
/. about india. Not the grandparent in particular. But a lot of silliness.
Thing is, and it might just be cause I havent met the right Indians, that I think most of em would disagree. Im currently pondering going to Bangalore for a year or two. A mate of mine has just started a development company in Bangalore. Ive never lived in India and wouldnt mind it for a bit. Great people.
br> I tend to get a little annoyed at some of the comments on
If only Heaviside had a slashdot account. And was... you know. Like alive. The discussions we could have! :)
Anyway. Thanks for suddenly taking me back to Calc 1 at my first year of uni
Indeed. If find this particularly disturbing.
More than two-thirds of people surveyed also said they believed online travel sites are required by law to offer the lowest airline prices possible.
NEWS FLASH!
Companies like making as much profit as possible! Film at 11. Also in the news... 2/3 of people are apparently very naive and stupid.
Now whether it's patented or not, I don't know. But this is a _VERY_ big step for Microsoft. It's going to make translating between this and OASIS (which OpenOffice2 and a lot of others are considering/implementing as their default) as simple as an XSLT transformation.
:)
As simple? Simple? Microsoft making it simple. Im fbaergasted at your optimism. It'll be as simple as bridging between a DCOM based component and a CORBA object
This happened a few years back.
I cant actually get to TFA to read as the site seems to have melted. But I assume you are correct. If MS are serious, why do they not go for something like this . There is a distinct lack of Mircosoft employees on the comittee member list
I have a question for you? Do you actually know any Indian developers that live and work in India and other places in the world?
SMB SUCKS. It's terribly ineffient. You might as well convert the binary to ASCII, ie 1010110110101 and then XML it, ie ... and then FTP it. You'd still be more efficient than SMB.
I suspect it was designed by the same people that did the Word file format. I gotta lot of time from Trdge and the lads and ladettes in the Samba team. I wonder how they keep their sanity.
It reminds me of DaHalf.
:)
.cpp and .pas, but not .c, and wrote nulls to all the bytes. I often wondered who did that. A disgruntled K&R C programmer I've always imagained.
I recall that one. One of my old DOS boxes at the office I was working in had it... didnt really matter as it was our test box and we trashed it all the time anywya
The nasty one I recall (cant recall its name) was the one that went around looking for files ending in
over 2 billion people
Small nit to pick. China doesnt have over 2 billion. From CIA worldfact book its 1,306,313,812.
Otherwise... right on brother ! Im learning Manadrin .
This is the Zaphod I know. The movie Zaphod was not this. The movie Zaphod was so unhip, I was surpirsed his bums didnt fall off.
He then realized he was going to have to speak at this point.
He took a series of very shallow breaths, and then said as quickly and as quietly as he could, "Door, if you can hear me, say so very, very quietly."
Very, very quietly, the door murmured, "I can hear you."
"Good. Now, in a moment, I'm going to ask you to open. When you open I do not want you to say that you enjoyed it, OK?"
"OK."
"And I don't want you to say to me that I have made a simple door very happy, or that it is your pleasure to open for me and your satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done, OK?"
"OK."
"And I do not want you to ask me to have a nice day, understand?"
"I understand."
"OK," said Zaphod, tensing himself, "open now."
The door slid open quietly. Zaphod slipped quietly through. The door closed quietly behind him.
"Is that the way you like it, Mr Beeblebrox?" said the door out loud.
"I want you to imagine," said Zaphod to the group of white robots who swung round to stare at him at that point, "that I have an extremely powerful Kill-O-Zap blaster pistol in my hand."
There was an immensely cold and savage silence. The robots regarded him with hideously dead eyes. They stood very still. There was something intensely macabre about their appearance, especially to Zaphod who had never seen one before or even known anything about them. The Krikkit Wars belonged to the ancient past of the Galaxy, and Zaphod had spent most of his early history lessons plotting how he was going to have sex with the girl in the cybercubicle next to him, and since his teaching computer had been an integral part of this plot it had eventually had all its history circuits wiped and replaced with an entirely different set of ideas which had then resulted in it being scrapped and sent to a home for Degenerate Cybermats, whither it was followed by the girl who had inadvertently fallen deeply in love with the unfortunate machine, with the result (a) that Zaphod never got near her and (b) that he missed out on a period of ancient history that would have been of inestimable value to him at this moment.
He stared at them in shock.
It was impossible to explain why, but their smooth and sleek white bodies seemed to be the utter embodiment of clean, clinical evil. From their hideously dead eyes to their powerful lifeless feet, they were clearly the calculated product of a mind that wanted simply to kill. Zaphod gulped in cold fear.
They had been dismantling part of the rear bridge wall, and had forced a passage through some of the vital innards of the ship. Through the tangled wreckage Zaphod could see, with a further and worse sense of shock, that they were tunnelling towards the very heart of the ship, the heart of the Improbability Drive that had been so mysteriously created out of thin air, the Heart of Gold itself.
The robot closest to him was regarding him in such a way as to suggest that it was measuring every smallest particle of his body, mind and capability. And when it spoke, what it said seemed to bear this impression out. Before going on to what it actually said, it is worth recording at this point that Zaphod was the first living organic being to hear one of these creatures speak for something over ten billion years. If he had paid more attention to his ancient history lessons and less to his organic being, he might have been more impressed by this honour.
The robot's voice was like its body, cold, sleek and lifeless. It had almost a cultured rasp to it. It sounded as ancient as it was.
It said, "You do have a Kill-O-Zap blaster pistol in your hand."
Zaphod didn't know what it meant for a moment, but then he glanced down at his own hand and was relieved to see that what he had found clipped to a wall bracket
how the hell do you grow from there? .net platform/environment etc) to keep people on windows. The office suite is becoming more and more probomatic as well. I dont think Office is dying tomorrow, but there are a lot of questions being asked as to why we should use them as adefacto standard(but dont get me wrong on this. I actually really like Excel as a spread sheet... access not so much... Words OK but bloated). I find these days I use OO on linux and OSX for most things and MS office only when I have to. And why not, OO does everything I want to do with it. MS Office I only need to collaborate with people locked into them.
BR> I think you grow from there by reinventing what you are doing. When one source of rev starts to dry up you have to look at ways you can leverage your existing assests for use in new growth areas. Where this is for microsoft I dont know. THeir two major products, the OS and the office market theyve had sown up for a long time. But this is rapidly changing. Open source and competing OSes are coming over the horizon as threats. Their response on this front is to integrate new tech(ie
The software industry is changing, and has been changing for the last 10 odd years. Companies like IBM in particular have realised this. IBM is in fact an excellent case in point when talking about MSFT. They when from the great evil monlithic corp, trying to surpress everyone, to the company that was shattered by the revolutions in the 80s/90s. Now they have had a long bad time, but have reinvented themselves. I think IBM are ahead of the game. Theyve realised the significance of the rise of open source, the collapse of rigid, production line software development and understand that service delivery, not products and boxed binaries are currently the flavour.
Software development and maintance are a service. Like law... like accountants... like plumbers etc. The industry seems to be coming around to this. There is no reason a bank or accountancy company needs to have their own software development section. They generally dont understand software development. I think the way forward is to start to unify the industry to present a united front to business(not with out competition of course). But standard ways of providing solutions... the IT business that gets the gigs are they ones that provide the best performance at the lowest bottom line.
Competition is killing long distance calls, and not just competition from VoIP. Here in New Zealand I can make a call on my cellphone to Canada, UK and various other locations for the same cost as a local call.
:)
Im an Australian in the UK with a significant other in Dubai and friends in the US. I can actually call all those places *cheaper* than the cost of a call to a mobile in the UK
They are allegedly being investigated for their rebate practices and their reseller rating has gone to shit. I wouldn't doubt it if this is a last ditch attempt to remain solvent.
Indeed, what you say seems likely. The timing of the lawsuit is also significant. The OS X Tiger release has been hyping away for months now, and I find it difficult to beleieve that they were unaware of it. The lawyers have simply waited until the last possible moment, just before full release to pounce and thus put more pressure on Apple. Not an uncommon practice.
I think my players has been drinking too much beer.
Agreed. Once the transistor limit is reached tho(which I agree with Moore will come one day) a very interesting thing should happen. Consider that for the last 30 odd years IC technology has been doing this mad dash to get smaller and smaller. And consider that because of this the big players have had to build new tech FABs for production at the cost of billions. Once we hit the barrier we should have a mature tech that no longer requires the enormous cost of FAB product. Once a FAB is built, it built(until its decomissioned of course).
:) Now that would be cool. Of course after that I wanna be able to go to out and buy my own FAB in a box.
Price will drop massively. Eventually who know. Perhaps one day the prices will be so ridiculously low that I can design my own CPU, submit it to open cores and have a production run of 5 chips made for like $20
Im not sure Id agree with that 100%. A lot of Americans still study at Oxbridge if they can... Chealse(sp?) Clinton for example. Not trying to troll... America does have some of the finest universities and research centres in the world.
What normal person reads articles about computer security? Do you read articles about new studies concerning the use of various grains in dry cat foods? Why not? I do all the time.
The difference is tho that, dry cat food is quite a niche topic of interest I would think. With the popularity of computing within the work and home environment reporting of viruses and security alerts has actually become a mainstream news event.
The iDeathRobot
However, that doesn't change the fact that science doesn't use the word "prove". Statistical probability with p .05 perhaps, but not prove. Creationists and ID drones often use that word with just as little understanding of its meaning in scientific circles as they do the word theory.
Thats fine. I agree with all of that. Im just a little electronics engineer and computer scientist. I never used the word prove... I used the word disproved. And I said in the grandparent that you were right, I should have used discredited/falsified. When I did use the word prove, I was using it in the context of of a creationist argument.
What are we agruing about again?
My original point(I think) was that the ramblings from groups like the Discovery Institute(or whatever theyre called) have no place in a science class room.