Actually, I'm not so sure that really matters? People do listen to songs much more often than they re-view a given TV program or movie (well, in 99.9% of cases anyway). But most people buy movies or TV shows because they liked them the first time they saw them, and wanted to have the "bragging rights" that it's in their personal collection, or because they intend to get friends/relatives/girlfriends/etc. to sit down with them and watch it down the road. Sometimes, people just buy a new release because they haven't seen it yet and want to, and it's cheap and convenient enough to just buy it while they're out shopping - rather than make another trip to rent it later....
In any case, I don't think there's really ever been an issue for the TV/movie industry of "How in the world can we get enough sales of these video products? Nobody buys them because they have no interest after watching it on TV once."
Your point still stands, yes - but I think it's sort of off-topic from the intent of Microsoft's original statements.
They were primarily trying to make claims about the lack of security in Linux based on missing components, plus a lack of accountability for bug fixes.
You're addressing an issue of availability of software applications for both platforms.
I do agree with you though. Linux is still pretty much an OS that's best used by application developers or as a server platform of some sort. The attempts to "hammer it into shape" as a general-use desktop environment are still "half-baked", and that's largely due to a lack of variety of applications to run on it.
After all, you can have the most elegant, powerful operating system on the planet - but if nobody writes apps to run on it, what good is it?
People can (and in the case of Windows, certainly DO) put up with a lot of problems and deficiencies in an OS as long as it allows them to use the software apps they want/need to run. Linux is sorely lacking in the games dept., the music editing/creation dept., and in some aspects of graphics design and editing. It also comes up a little short for people needing to do accounting work. (Peachtree for Linux? Quickbooks for Linux? DAC Easy Accounting for Linux, even? Perhaps a version of M.Y.O.B. for Linux? Nope.... none of 'em. And accountants like standardization. Even if you write a cool new accounting package for Linux - you better at least support imports/exports to some of these Windows packages or it won't gain much traction.)
Some may call me a "luddite" of sorts for this comment, but I'm of the belief that the current input devices of choice (gamepads, joysticks, etc.) are just fine.
There's usually a degree of backlash towards any peripheral for entertainment systems that completely immerses the user in the environment. For example, look at the headphones that completely seal out any outside sounds. Sure, they have their place and their advocates - but by and large, they didn't really catch on. Instead, all the portable music players come with a default of earbud headphones, and even back in the "Walkman" days, light headphones that didn't completely cover one's ears. As another example, look at the telephone. Despite year after year of predictions that we'd "have a video phone in the future", all the home phones I see still only offer rather low-quality mono voice receiption/transmission. Similar predictions were made about such things as 3D movies. (Soon, most programming on TV will be in 3D, and work with something much nicer than those cheap red and blue glasses!) Never panned out....
People always make excuses about it being "cost prohibitive" or promise it's still coming as soon as factor X or Y is overcome. But I think the truth is something entirely different. As a whole, we're somehow a little disturbed and/or guilty about our entertainment becoming so encompassing that the real world is "shut out" from us. We want to be "sucked in" to a good story line in a movie, or "hooked" on a good game, but we also want to feel like we're reasonably in touch with our surroundings the whole time. (EG. If there's an emergency and someone's yelling to you for help, you want to know you won't accidently tune it out.)
I think people saw VR Goggles as "cool technolgy" and fine for some 5 minute long arcade game you're paying to play - but most of us would rather just grab a hand-held controller and fire up a game on the good old, comfortable television screen in front of us - knowing we can still turn our head and see what's happening in the next room.
Man oh man... where are those mod points when I need them?
I *really* wanted to mod you up for your statement! It seems like these replies are a sea of suggestions on how to take on that new management role - yet, the best suggestion of all may well be yours.
I faced a similar problem a few years ago. I had been working in corp. I.T. for nearly 6 years at the same place, and it became apparent that management's view of me was quickly turning negative. (Basically, it went from earning respect for being a rather "senior" PC support person with lots of experience, to someone who must lack motivation because I didn't make a strong effort to "move up" into some type of leadership/management role.)
For a while there, I really had to ask myself if I was "screwing up" or "slacking" or what? But I came to my senses and realized *NO*! The real problem was/is, corporate culture tends to "promote" people to management because they don't really have any other feasible way to reward you in a tech. position once you achieve a certain level of skill/experience. It's often a really bad idea, because it takes people away from what they're truly good at... throws them into a role they're typicaly NOT good at, and hampers the ability of the people they manage to be productive workers. All this because of such things as "salary scales/ranges" which place artifical ceilings on how much they can pay someone in a given role. (In my case, they all but flat out told me they simply didn't know what to do come yearly raises next time around, because they were already paying me the most they were allowed to, according to their salary limitations.)
The only mistake *I* made was sticking around when the writing was on the wall... I guess I thought my experience would see me through, but I was wrong. When management realized they weren't going to be able to cram me into a functional management role, they eventually gave me the boot.
Know what though? Despite some initial bitterness and stress about finding another job, I'm SO much happier now. I no longer bother with coporate I.T. at all. Instead, I work for a *small* business focused on on-site PC service and support, and I get to do what I love every day for different people - with no management breathing down my neck at all. It's just me, out there each day, making or breaking it because of my own skills (or lack thereof). The pay's not quite as good, but I'm not stuck watching my life get sucked away by paperwork, meetings, telling a bunch of intelligent people how to do their job, or whatnot.
While I *do* agree that if U.S. taxpayers are already paying for the govt. to research weather conditions, then we have the right to see all of that info -- I also think private industry should feel free to "infringe" on any of these govt. functions they like.
I don't think private industry should have any legal leverage to try to force govt. not to perform some of the functions of weather forecasting they're doing today - but I see absolutely no harm in them opting to compete with them either.
If some private firm can prove they're consistently more accurate in their forecasting than the NOAA, then great! Weather forecasting is still FAR from perfected, and the more people who want to work towards improving it - the better off we'll all eventually be.
Umm.... yes, but IMHO, this is still just a band-aid; not a real solution.
It might stop the ads, but the app itself is still there, wasting CPU cycles in the background, checking those files to see if there's a new ad to display on your screen.
If Ad-Aware didn't do a complete clean-up, it's probably best to try a different removal tool. (I suspect the new Microsoft Anti-Spyware beta would fix this for you, in fact.)
Oh, I'm not saying the Triton will quickly become undesirable or "unused" by professionals! I'm just saying, music synths tend to follow a 2 or 3 year upgrade cycle (sometimes shorter!). It's pretty rare to see a manufacturer still selling a synth as their latest model after it's been out 3 or 4 years....
The Triton has had a long, fruitful life - but it's shown signs of stagnation recently. (That whole Triton LE thing smacked of an attempt to hook a marketplace that wasn't willing to shell out the $'s for the "real" Triton Classic model, but still liked the sounds.) The latest iteration of the Triton, the "Triton Extreme" seems somewhat gimmicky. I mean, sure - we want tubes in our guitar amps, but a tube in our synths? Heck - they even had to put a hidden blue LED in the thing to simulate the tube's glow, because the actual tube in it doesn't even light up enough to look cool through a transparent window!
I figured Korg better have something seriously innovative up its sleeve, if they want to remain on top of the music workstation market... More Triton rehashes aren't going to cut it forever.
I'm more or less with you on your comments, parent poster - but I also think it's wise to be careful talking about hacking in black and white "good" vs. "evil" terms.
Like almost everything in life, there are complex shades of grey. It's fine to lecture people on how much better it would be for everyone involved if they broke security protocols on their own time and hardware, and then published "white papers" on what they found. But when you're a 15 year old kid, you probably wouldn't find any of that "interesting" at all. You aren't tinkering around with hacking/cracking because you wanted another "homework assignment" to take on. It's purely for the thrill and bragging rights to your like-minded buddies.
I'm not saying this gives them "carte blanche" to go out and destroy other people's systems... But I guess what I *am* saying is, magazines like Phrack and 2600 started out (and thrived because of) the rebellious spirit of bored teens. Sometimes, the only way you'll really get people to find flaws in a product's security is by putting it in place and seeing who ends up breaking it in order to do something you see as "evil".
Take those dial-type Master locks for example. Before kids were messing around with them, trying to figure out how they could "feel" the tumblers inside them click to find the combinations on them, most people assumed they were pretty secure locks. (Short of a bolt-cutters, you weren't likely to get by them.) After kids (obviously motivated by the "evil" desire to break into other kids' lockers in schools) leaked out the secrets to picking these things, and it got passed around the Internet, Master Lock, Inc. made improvements to the lock and started selling revised versions.
I think we'd *still* be using an older revision Master lock today if we waited around for someone to put on a "white hat" and hack their own Master lock purely to "do good" by writing up a white paper on it when they finished.
No way! As soon as I saw this and read the list of specs, I realized this is going to put a big nail in the coffin of the whole Korg Triton line of synth workstations!
The Triton made a *huge* impact in the music synth scene, with almost every major act wanting to be seen with one on stage or in their studio in photos, etc. I see no reason the Oasys won't be the same - serving as the logical upgrade path for Triton users.
I realize most of the Slashdot readers aren't necessarily that interested in following musical instruments.... but it happens I do (and I've owned 2 different Triton models in the past, as well as a Yamaha Motif).
The first thing you have to understand about synthesizers is their market. Most high-end synth purchasers are pretty techno-savvy, actually - but not necessarily experts with modern PC operating systems. They're the types who aren't scared by electronics with many levels of programmable options and parameters, but their focus is only on learning these things if it directly benefits their ability to create/compose better music. They'll use PCs and MIDI, but will pay a premium for a pre-built custom system that is already configured with optimized sound drivers for low latency, etc. etc. They don't want to mess around with all of that themselves.
(By the same token, they're still using these dedicated music workstations rather than keyboard MIDI controllers and software synth programs because of the stability. They don't want something that requires a long "boot up" time, and then might crash in the middle of a performance.)
The Triton used a fairly MS-DOS like filesystem with short filenames and such - but synth owners seemed happy enough with it. I doubt Korg would see a reason to change it much on the Oasys.
I was mildly interested in WoW, but I purposely waited for exactly this reason... It's not just Blizzard having these problems. It seems to be pretty much everyone who releases a successful MMORPG title! My ex was a big Shadowbane fanatic, and I never understood why, really. Seemed to me like she spent half the time she played complaining about lag spikes or crashes, or suddenly getting stuck someplace, or signing on and finding items missing, etc. etc. More an exercise in frustration than fun - and to top it off, you pay a monthly fee for it.
What I don't get is why these servers can't be adequately load tested with simulations before they're turned loose to human players? Is anyone really trying to do this, or do they just think it's easier/more profitable to let "beta testers" do it for them while they pay to play?
Actually, this reminds me.... Not too long ago, I was on Undernet IRC chat and out of boredom, requested the complete list of active channels. A couple channels caught my attention as being places to actively trade (or buy/sell) credit card numbers. I forget the exact channel names right now, but I suppose they may change names every so often to avoid detection anyway? They were names something like #ccard though...
The slightly scary part is, they seemed to be populated with at least 50 or 60 users each. Even if these were mostly just "bots", it stlll surprised me that this activity could be carried on this blatantly in a public chat room. I guess the authorities are still focused too strictly on "the web" and haven't fully realized what goes on in other areas of the net.
Excellent points you brought up, but I think the *real* issue (that some men AND women don't want to admit) is that men tend to juggle things differently than women do - given the same set of circumstances and time constraints.
Let me preface this by saying I'm a divorced guy, with custody of a 2 year old daughter.
In my own situation, I'm very concerned about my job/career - and I guess when it comes right down to it, yes - I "put my job first", in that when my boss calls and says "Can you come in now?" or "Can you take care of this for me A.S.A.P.?", I find a way to do it.
That doesn't mean I have to "compromise" by not "having kids" though. It just means I have to do such things as find good childcare for her during the day, and even someone I can drop her off with pretty much "as needed" over a weekend or evening. In the long haul, I don't really see many negatives to this approach. She gets to spend time around more kids her age this way, and experiences several different people's methods of teaching her things -- but she still knows who "dad" is. Hopefully, she's also learning that time is a valuable thing, and that people need to work for a living.
By contrast, I've met quite a few single mothers who seem to feel as though they're "falling down on the job" if they don't spend most of their waking moments near their kid(s), and still expect people to give them good career jobs with advancement opportunities. It's just not going to work that way....
True... that's a point I hadn't really considered. But I think my initial statement would still tend to hold true for the "intermediates". If you're in charge of buying/selling stocks as part of a portfolio for peoples' retirement plans and you're bound by a rule that anything you buy can't be resold for 1-2 years, that's going to change the way you think about your purchasing decisions.
Perhaps, but I think anti-virus software itself is mostly a band-aid for the real problem; weaknesses in the operating system.
If people like Benny *really* want to be useful in helping prevent viruses - they need to become employed at corporations like Microsoft, on a team that works to improve the security of the OS itself.
That said, I also find it rather interesting that with very FEW exceptions (like AVG AntiVirus), almost all antivirus makers insist on their customers paying a fairly substantial amount of money for subscription renewals, after paying out $50-89 or so up-front for the product, in order to keep their PC "safe". If these people really weren't "self-serving" and truly had the interests of "creating a more secure PC" at the forefront, it'd only be logical to make sure this protection was available to the masses either for free, or very inexpensively.
There are a lot of people using the Internet nowdays on "hand me down" PCs that are worth little more than the price of a copy of Norton Anti-Virus 2005.....
Well, it is still a first beta - so I don't doubt that can happen. Hasn't been a problem for me *yet* though, but good to know it's something to look out for.
I can give you a great tip for fixing a damaged/ripped up TCP/IP stack quickly though. I found a little utility called "WinsockXPfix" that you just double-click, and it rebuilds the whole stack and prompts you to reboot when it's done. Despite its name, it works with pretty much any version of Windows. (It'll auto-detect your version when you first run it, and display what it found in its window.)
I used to be irritated by this too, but it's probably not realistic to expect anything different.
"Wall Street" isn't some conglomerate of business people who sit around making decisions on whether or not company X deserves "reward" or some "punishment" for their latest business moves.
A company's stock simply moves up or down based on the "knee jerk reactions" of the majority of people holding shares when anything changes in the company.
Of course, this is obvious - but sometimes it's easy to lose sight of it when you hear all the debate/discussion by "Wall Street analyists" on the news. They're sort of like weathermen; making the best predictions they can based on what's happened in the past and what they observe. But ultimately, still not too much better than random guessing if they're projecting more than 1 or 2 days ahead.
If you could somehow *require* all stockholders to keep their stocks for at least a couple years before selling, then you'd see people thinking more "long-term". But things like "job cuts = profit!" are a result of shorter-term thinking. "This move means my stock is goin' up so it'll be ready to sell next month!"
I have to say, I'm basically at a loss to explain why there's been a lot of positive press about Webroot's Spy Sweeper 3.0 recently. This PC Mag. review is just the latest in "shoot-outs" and reviews I've read that gave Spy Sweeper top (or near top) honors.
My personal experience, doing on-site PC service calls for a living, is completely different. I've cleaned literally hundreds of spyware infested PCs for customers in the last year or so, and I *often* find they have Spy Sweeper already installed and running, despite all their problems.
People occasionally ask me if Spy Sweeper is "any good" since companies like Gateway like to try selling it to them over the phone when they call with problems. I've been advising to save the money and skip it.
It may have a nice interface and claimed "feature set" - but from what I've observed, it doesn't really seem to be that effective at keeping spyware out, or detecting it after the fact.
In the past, I've been an advocate of the SpyBot and Ad-Aware SE combo, but the new Giant/MS Anti-Spyware solution has done an impressive job for me so far. Just last night, I had a PC that both SpyBot 1.4 beta (w/latest update sigs) and Ad-Aware SE with latest update sigs. reported completely clean of spyware problems. Despite that, ads were randomly popping open in IE windows every 15 seconds or so. MS Anti-Spyware completely cleaned it up.
Absolutely - but this tends to be self-perpetuating, because our society is filled with more people of "average" or even "below average" intelligence than intelligent people. These people are going to be able to grasp why some Hollywood actor or actress, or pro athlete is "cool" and is someone they want to "look up to". The media caters to whatever is of the greatest interest, because it sells the most - so they keep hyping up the superficial.
I think it requires a certain level of intelligence to start appreciating what "knowledge workers" do, whether they be physicists, researchers, or even computer specialists.
Umm.... I've done *many* myself over the years, and I assure you, I've seen quite a few cards BSOD an NT 4 box if you don't get the settings exactly right.
Example 1: Dell Latitude laptops such as the CPi. These came pre-loaded with NT 4 and were "certified for NT 4" use by Dell. Install a Xircom PCMCIA ethernet card in one. You'll immediately get asked which I/O address and IRQ it's on. Pick incorrectly and blam - BSOD.
Example 2: NT 4 on older hardware with ISA slots and NE-2000 cards.
MS has a policy of harassing eBay sellers and cancelling their auction listings every time they attempt to resell *unopened, shrink-wrapped* copies of their OS's - just because they were "originally bundled with a new PC". MS claims that these OEM versions of Windows are somehow intangibly "tied to the original computer" they came with, and it's illegal for you to attempt to resell them seperately. If you continue to relist these types of cancelled auctions more than 1 or 2 times, you get nasty letters from Microsoft's legal dept. and threats of a lawsuit.
On the other hand, I've *never* seen Apple cancel eBay auctions for unopened Apple software.
I don't disagree with the fact that the DOJ found MS guilty of being a monopoly. That doesn't mean I agree that it's correct, or even that the Sherman Antitrust Act isn't subject to some question in and of itself....
From that standpoint, the Republicans coming in and basically tossing the issue aside isn't necessarily a bad thing at all.
This (obviously) gets into complete subjective opinion here -- but the way I see it, government interference in the interest of "saving us from monopolies" hasn't ever really been proven to accomplish much good. Look at all the government regulation of public utilities and the fiascos that have come of it afterwards. We seem to always end up crying for deregulation at some point, and often that causes more "cans of worms" to open up because we dump what was long little more than another govt. agency back into the pool of truly competitive businesses, and wonder why it doesn't function smoothly.
Most of the issues MS was tried on were of relatively little consequence anyway. The whole "bundling the browser with the OS" argument was superfluous at best, IMHO. Every major OS picked a specific browser to bundle around that time. OS/2 Warp had "WebExplorer/2" and Netscape with it. If OS/2 had marketed itself better around the time of Warp 3.0 and 4.0 - maybe MS would be crying about Netscape's market dominance instead?
Ok, I gotcha.... Yeah, for some dumb reason, I forgot all about that possibility.
Again, I may be wrong here, but I *think* most of these routers still issue IPs in a different range via DHCP to their wireless clients than to their wired ones? I recall mine giving my wireless connections IPs in the 192.168.1.x range while actual wired LAN connected clients were given 192.168.0.x range IPs.
Not like it'd be hard to just set up a static address on your PC for the purpose of hacking in, but at least it wouldn't happen by pure accident with this configuration.
Novell was pretty darn stable, and as it was a dedicated back-end server product, wasn't really seen by its normal users.
The workstations can be upgraded all the time, and still share files/printers with an old Netware 3 or 4 server - and to the users, everything's brand new after each update.
NT 4, on the other hand, was known for crashing on its own, over time, due to memory leaks by a plethora of 3rd. party apps you were likely to run on it. (Yeah, it could be pretty stable if you only used what came with the OS itself, but how many people really did that? You couldn't even so much as manage disk quotas on user accounts without 3rd. party add-ons.)
Furthermore, lots of the NT 4 installs were on *workstations*, not just servers... So lack of features quickly becomes obvious to people in that environment. (Try installing something like a new network card in NT 4. Forget plug and play... Better pick the right driver on the first try too, or you're likely to get an instant blue screen of death you can only recover from with a full NT reinstall!)
Just finishing up with an extremely messy/difficult divorce myself, I fully understand the problems "bad credit" can bring - and the unfortunately necessity of "professional legal assistance" in some cases.
Still, I find you speaking out of the mouth of an attorney with your arguments here.
1. This guy already made it abundantly clear that he aspires to go into the *medical profession*. The fact that a bankruptcy might prevent him from passing background checks for government or financial jobs is probably not too high on his list of concerns. Moreover, I suspect our nation is at its peak of "background checking" right now. Before much longer, the pendulum almost has to swing back the opposite direction - because too many excellent job candidates are being denied jobs based on "credit history". (If you have poor credit and you're trying hard to get a good job, what does that tell you? It tells me you're an individual trying to do the right thing, and get back on his/her feet again! You can't very well expect someone to fix previous credit problems while remaining unemployed!)
2. Given the facts presented, Apple's desire to press criminal copyright infringement charges against this guy for distributing a developer *beta* of their product should be slim to none. Yeah, it COULD happen - but talk about backlash! Heck, I personally own 3 newer Mac systems and I'd dump them all in a heartbeat if I saw Apple do that to this guy! As I said before, consider the "intent of the law" as well as just the "letter of the law". The REAL reason for an NDA on this stuff in the first place is to avoid bad press about bugs that are still in the process of being fixed, and to prevent headaches of the general public running the OS well before it's ready for "prime time" and requesting support for it.
A Mac fanatic passing a Tiger build to "5 or 6" other Mac fanatics is hardly worthy of a criminal charge. If someone, in turn, made the torrent file publically available and thousands downloaded it - so what? That's completely out of this guy's control. He's not the one who did that!
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Actually, I'm not so sure that really matters? People do listen to songs much more often than they re-view a given TV program or movie (well, in 99.9% of cases anyway). But most people buy movies or TV shows because they liked them the first time they saw them, and wanted to have the "bragging rights" that it's in their personal collection, or because they intend to get friends/relatives/girlfriends/etc. to sit down with them and watch it down the road. Sometimes, people just buy a new release because they haven't seen it yet and want to, and it's cheap and convenient enough to just buy it while they're out shopping - rather than make another trip to rent it later....
In any case, I don't think there's really ever been an issue for the TV/movie industry of "How in the world can we get enough sales of these video products? Nobody buys them because they have no interest after watching it on TV once."
Your point still stands, yes - but I think it's sort of off-topic from the intent of Microsoft's original statements.
They were primarily trying to make claims about the lack of security in Linux based on missing components, plus a lack of accountability for bug fixes.
You're addressing an issue of availability of software applications for both platforms.
I do agree with you though. Linux is still pretty much an OS that's best used by application developers or as a server platform of some sort. The attempts to "hammer it into shape" as a general-use desktop environment are still "half-baked", and that's largely due to a lack of variety of applications to run on it.
After all, you can have the most elegant, powerful operating system on the planet - but if nobody writes apps to run on it, what good is it?
People can (and in the case of Windows, certainly DO) put up with a lot of problems and deficiencies in an OS as long as it allows them to use the software apps they want/need to run. Linux is sorely lacking in the games dept., the music editing/creation dept., and in some aspects of graphics design and editing. It also comes up a little short for people needing to do accounting work. (Peachtree for Linux? Quickbooks for Linux? DAC Easy Accounting for Linux, even? Perhaps a version of M.Y.O.B. for Linux? Nope.... none of 'em. And accountants like standardization. Even if you write a cool new accounting package for Linux - you better at least support imports/exports to some of these Windows packages or it won't gain much traction.)
Some may call me a "luddite" of sorts for this comment, but I'm of the belief that the current input devices of choice (gamepads, joysticks, etc.) are just fine.
There's usually a degree of backlash towards any peripheral for entertainment systems that completely immerses the user in the environment. For example, look at the headphones that completely seal out any outside sounds. Sure, they have their place and their advocates - but by and large, they didn't really catch on. Instead, all the portable music players come with a default of earbud headphones, and even back in the "Walkman" days, light headphones that didn't completely cover one's ears. As another example, look at the telephone. Despite year after year of predictions that we'd "have a video phone in the future", all the home phones I see still only offer rather low-quality mono voice receiption/transmission. Similar predictions were made about such things as 3D movies. (Soon, most programming on TV will be in 3D, and work with something much nicer than those cheap red and blue glasses!) Never panned out....
People always make excuses about it being "cost prohibitive" or promise it's still coming as soon as factor X or Y is overcome. But I think the truth is something entirely different. As a whole, we're somehow a little disturbed and/or guilty about our entertainment becoming so encompassing that the real world is "shut out" from us. We want to be "sucked in" to a good story line in a movie, or "hooked" on a good game, but we also want to feel like we're reasonably in touch with our surroundings the whole time. (EG. If there's an emergency and someone's yelling to you for help, you want to know you won't accidently tune it out.)
I think people saw VR Goggles as "cool technolgy" and fine for some 5 minute long arcade game you're paying to play - but most of us would rather just grab a hand-held controller and fire up a game on the good old, comfortable television screen in front of us - knowing we can still turn our head and see what's happening in the next room.
Man oh man... where are those mod points when I need them?
I *really* wanted to mod you up for your statement! It seems like these replies are a sea of suggestions on how to take on that new management role - yet, the best suggestion of all may well be yours.
I faced a similar problem a few years ago. I had been working in corp. I.T. for nearly 6 years at the same place, and it became apparent that management's view of me was quickly turning negative. (Basically, it went from earning respect for being a rather "senior" PC support person with lots of experience, to someone who must lack motivation because I didn't make a strong effort to "move up" into some type of leadership/management role.)
For a while there, I really had to ask myself if I was "screwing up" or "slacking" or what? But I came to my senses and realized *NO*! The real problem was/is, corporate culture tends to "promote" people to management because they don't really have any other feasible way to reward you in a tech. position once you achieve a certain level of skill/experience. It's often a really bad idea, because it takes people away from what they're truly good at... throws them into a role they're typicaly NOT good at, and hampers the ability of the people they manage to be productive workers. All this because of such things as "salary scales/ranges" which place artifical ceilings on how much they can pay someone in a given role. (In my case, they all but flat out told me they simply didn't know what to do come yearly raises next time around, because they were already paying me the most they were allowed to, according to their salary limitations.)
The only mistake *I* made was sticking around when the writing was on the wall... I guess I thought my experience would see me through, but I was wrong. When management realized they weren't going to be able to cram me into a functional management role, they eventually gave me the boot.
Know what though? Despite some initial bitterness and stress about finding another job, I'm SO much happier now. I no longer bother with coporate I.T. at all. Instead, I work for a *small* business focused on on-site PC service and support, and I get to do what I love every day for different people - with no management breathing down my neck at all. It's just me, out there each day, making or breaking it because of my own skills (or lack thereof). The pay's not quite as good, but I'm not stuck watching my life get sucked away by paperwork, meetings, telling a bunch of intelligent people how to do their job, or whatnot.
While I *do* agree that if U.S. taxpayers are already paying for the govt. to research weather conditions, then we have the right to see all of that info -- I also think private industry should feel free to "infringe" on any of these govt. functions they like.
I don't think private industry should have any legal leverage to try to force govt. not to perform some of the functions of weather forecasting they're doing today - but I see absolutely no harm in them opting to compete with them either.
If some private firm can prove they're consistently more accurate in their forecasting than the NOAA, then great! Weather forecasting is still FAR from perfected, and the more people who want to work towards improving it - the better off we'll all eventually be.
Umm.... yes, but IMHO, this is still just a band-aid; not a real solution.
It might stop the ads, but the app itself is still there, wasting CPU cycles in the background, checking those files to see if there's a new ad to display on your screen.
If Ad-Aware didn't do a complete clean-up, it's probably best to try a different removal tool. (I suspect the new Microsoft Anti-Spyware beta would fix this for you, in fact.)
Oh, I'm not saying the Triton will quickly become undesirable or "unused" by professionals! I'm just saying, music synths tend to follow a 2 or 3 year upgrade cycle (sometimes shorter!). It's pretty rare to see a manufacturer still selling a synth as their latest model after it's been out 3 or 4 years....
The Triton has had a long, fruitful life - but it's shown signs of stagnation recently. (That whole Triton LE thing smacked of an attempt to hook a marketplace that wasn't willing to shell out the $'s for the "real" Triton Classic model, but still liked the sounds.) The latest iteration of the Triton, the "Triton Extreme" seems somewhat gimmicky. I mean, sure - we want tubes in our guitar amps, but a tube in our synths? Heck - they even had to put a hidden blue LED in the thing to simulate the tube's glow, because the actual tube in it doesn't even light up enough to look cool through a transparent window!
I figured Korg better have something seriously innovative up its sleeve, if they want to remain on top of the music workstation market... More Triton rehashes aren't going to cut it forever.
I'm more or less with you on your comments, parent poster - but I also think it's wise to be careful talking about hacking in black and white "good" vs. "evil" terms.
Like almost everything in life, there are complex shades of grey. It's fine to lecture people on how much better it would be for everyone involved if they broke security protocols on their own time and hardware, and then published "white papers" on what they found. But when you're a 15 year old kid, you probably wouldn't find any of that "interesting" at all. You aren't tinkering around with hacking/cracking because you wanted another "homework assignment" to take on. It's purely for the thrill and bragging rights to your like-minded buddies.
I'm not saying this gives them "carte blanche" to go out and destroy other people's systems... But I guess what I *am* saying is, magazines like Phrack and 2600 started out (and thrived because of) the rebellious spirit of bored teens. Sometimes, the only way you'll really get people to find flaws in a product's security is by putting it in place and seeing who ends up breaking it in order to do something you see as "evil".
Take those dial-type Master locks for example. Before kids were messing around with them, trying to figure out how they could "feel" the tumblers inside them click to find the combinations on them, most people assumed they were pretty secure locks. (Short of a bolt-cutters, you weren't likely to get by them.) After kids (obviously motivated by the "evil" desire to break into other kids' lockers in schools) leaked out the secrets to picking these things, and it got passed around the Internet, Master Lock, Inc. made improvements to the lock and started selling revised versions.
I think we'd *still* be using an older revision Master lock today if we waited around for someone to put on a "white hat" and hack their own Master lock purely to "do good" by writing up a white paper on it when they finished.
No way! As soon as I saw this and read the list of specs, I realized this is going to put a big nail in the coffin of the whole Korg Triton line of synth workstations!
.... but it happens I do (and I've owned 2 different Triton models in the past, as well as a Yamaha Motif).
The Triton made a *huge* impact in the music synth scene, with almost every major act wanting to be seen with one on stage or in their studio in photos, etc. I see no reason the Oasys won't be the same - serving as the logical upgrade path for Triton users.
I realize most of the Slashdot readers aren't necessarily that interested in following musical instruments
The first thing you have to understand about synthesizers is their market. Most high-end synth purchasers are pretty techno-savvy, actually - but not necessarily experts with modern PC operating systems. They're the types who aren't scared by electronics with many levels of programmable options and parameters, but their focus is only on learning these things if it directly benefits their ability to create/compose better music. They'll use PCs and MIDI, but will pay a premium for a pre-built custom system that is already configured with optimized sound drivers for low latency, etc. etc. They don't want to mess around with all of that themselves.
(By the same token, they're still using these dedicated music workstations rather than keyboard MIDI controllers and software synth programs because of the stability. They don't want something that requires a long "boot up" time, and then might crash in the middle of a performance.)
The Triton used a fairly MS-DOS like filesystem with short filenames and such - but synth owners seemed happy enough with it. I doubt Korg would see a reason to change it much on the Oasys.
I was mildly interested in WoW, but I purposely waited for exactly this reason... It's not just Blizzard having these problems. It seems to be pretty much everyone who releases a successful MMORPG title! My ex was a big Shadowbane fanatic, and I never understood why, really. Seemed to me like she spent half the time she played complaining about lag spikes or crashes, or suddenly getting stuck someplace, or signing on and finding items missing, etc. etc. More an exercise in frustration than fun - and to top it off, you pay a monthly fee for it.
What I don't get is why these servers can't be adequately load tested with simulations before they're turned loose to human players? Is anyone really trying to do this, or do they just think it's easier/more profitable to let "beta testers" do it for them while they pay to play?
Actually, this reminds me.... Not too long ago, I was on Undernet IRC chat and out of boredom, requested the complete list of active channels. A couple channels caught my attention as being places to actively trade (or buy/sell) credit card numbers. I forget the exact channel names right now, but I suppose they may change names every so often to avoid detection anyway? They were names something like #ccard though...
The slightly scary part is, they seemed to be populated with at least 50 or 60 users each. Even if these were mostly just "bots", it stlll surprised me that this activity could be carried on this blatantly in a public chat room. I guess the authorities are still focused too strictly on "the web" and haven't fully realized what goes on in other areas of the net.
Excellent points you brought up, but I think the *real* issue (that some men AND women don't want to admit) is that men tend to juggle things differently than women do - given the same set of circumstances and time constraints.
....
Let me preface this by saying I'm a divorced guy, with custody of a 2 year old daughter.
In my own situation, I'm very concerned about my job/career - and I guess when it comes right down to it, yes - I "put my job first", in that when my boss calls and says "Can you come in now?" or "Can you take care of this for me A.S.A.P.?", I find a way to do it.
That doesn't mean I have to "compromise" by not "having kids" though. It just means I have to do such things as find good childcare for her during the day, and even someone I can drop her off with pretty much "as needed" over a weekend or evening. In the long haul, I don't really see many negatives to this approach. She gets to spend time around more kids her age this way, and experiences several different people's methods of teaching her things -- but she still knows who "dad" is. Hopefully, she's also learning that time is a valuable thing, and that people need to work for a living.
By contrast, I've met quite a few single mothers who seem to feel as though they're "falling down on the job" if they don't spend most of their waking moments near their kid(s), and still expect people to give them good career jobs with advancement opportunities. It's just not going to work that way
True... that's a point I hadn't really considered. But I think my initial statement would still tend to hold true for the "intermediates". If you're in charge of buying/selling stocks as part of a portfolio for peoples' retirement plans and you're bound by a rule that anything you buy can't be resold for 1-2 years, that's going to change the way you think about your purchasing decisions.
Perhaps, but I think anti-virus software itself is mostly a band-aid for the real problem; weaknesses in the operating system.
If people like Benny *really* want to be useful in helping prevent viruses - they need to become employed at corporations like Microsoft, on a team that works to improve the security of the OS itself.
That said, I also find it rather interesting that with very FEW exceptions (like AVG AntiVirus), almost all antivirus makers insist on their customers paying a fairly substantial amount of money for subscription renewals, after paying out $50-89 or so up-front for the product, in order to keep their PC "safe". If these people really weren't "self-serving" and truly had the interests of "creating a more secure PC" at the forefront, it'd only be logical to make sure this protection was available to the masses either for free, or very inexpensively.
There are a lot of people using the Internet nowdays on "hand me down" PCs that are worth little more than the price of a copy of Norton Anti-Virus 2005.....
Well, it is still a first beta - so I don't doubt that can happen. Hasn't been a problem for me *yet* though, but good to know it's something to look out for.
s oc kxpfix.html
I can give you a great tip for fixing a damaged/ripped up TCP/IP stack quickly though. I found a little utility called "WinsockXPfix" that you just double-click, and it rebuilds the whole stack and prompts you to reboot when it's done. Despite its name, it works with pretty much any version of Windows. (It'll auto-detect your version when you first run it, and display what it found in its window.)
http://www.spychecker.com/download/download_win
I used to be irritated by this too, but it's probably not realistic to expect anything different.
"Wall Street" isn't some conglomerate of business people who sit around making decisions on whether or not company X deserves "reward" or some "punishment" for their latest business moves.
A company's stock simply moves up or down based on the "knee jerk reactions" of the majority of people holding shares when anything changes in the company.
Of course, this is obvious - but sometimes it's easy to lose sight of it when you hear all the debate/discussion by "Wall Street analyists" on the news. They're sort of like weathermen; making the best predictions they can based on what's happened in the past and what they observe. But ultimately, still not too much better than random guessing if they're projecting more than 1 or 2 days ahead.
If you could somehow *require* all stockholders to keep their stocks for at least a couple years before selling, then you'd see people thinking more "long-term". But things like "job cuts = profit!" are a result of shorter-term thinking. "This move means my stock is goin' up so it'll be ready to sell next month!"
I have to say, I'm basically at a loss to explain why there's been a lot of positive press about Webroot's Spy Sweeper 3.0 recently. This PC Mag. review is just the latest in "shoot-outs" and reviews I've read that gave Spy Sweeper top (or near top) honors.
My personal experience, doing on-site PC service calls for a living, is completely different. I've cleaned literally hundreds of spyware infested PCs for customers in the last year or so, and I *often* find they have Spy Sweeper already installed and running, despite all their problems.
People occasionally ask me if Spy Sweeper is "any good" since companies like Gateway like to try selling it to them over the phone when they call with problems. I've been advising to save the money and skip it.
It may have a nice interface and claimed "feature set" - but from what I've observed, it doesn't really seem to be that effective at keeping spyware out, or detecting it after the fact.
In the past, I've been an advocate of the SpyBot and Ad-Aware SE combo, but the new Giant/MS Anti-Spyware solution has done an impressive job for me so far. Just last night, I had a PC that both SpyBot 1.4 beta (w/latest update sigs) and Ad-Aware SE with latest update sigs. reported completely clean of spyware problems. Despite that, ads were randomly popping open in IE windows every 15 seconds or so. MS Anti-Spyware completely cleaned it up.
Absolutely - but this tends to be self-perpetuating, because our society is filled with more people of "average" or even "below average" intelligence than intelligent people. These people are going to be able to grasp why some Hollywood actor or actress, or pro athlete is "cool" and is someone they want to "look up to". The media caters to whatever is of the greatest interest, because it sells the most - so they keep hyping up the superficial.
I think it requires a certain level of intelligence to start appreciating what "knowledge workers" do, whether they be physicists, researchers, or even computer specialists.
Umm.... I've done *many* myself over the years, and I assure you, I've seen quite a few cards BSOD an NT 4 box if you don't get the settings exactly right.
Example 1: Dell Latitude laptops such as the CPi. These came pre-loaded with NT 4 and were "certified for NT 4" use by Dell. Install a Xircom PCMCIA ethernet card in one. You'll immediately get asked which I/O address and IRQ it's on. Pick incorrectly and blam - BSOD.
Example 2: NT 4 on older hardware with ISA slots and NE-2000 cards.
I beg to differ.
MS has a policy of harassing eBay sellers and cancelling their auction listings every time they attempt to resell *unopened, shrink-wrapped* copies of their OS's - just because they were "originally bundled with a new PC". MS claims that these OEM versions of Windows are somehow intangibly "tied to the original computer" they came with, and it's illegal for you to attempt to resell them seperately. If you continue to relist these types of cancelled auctions more than 1 or 2 times, you get nasty letters from Microsoft's legal dept. and threats of a lawsuit.
On the other hand, I've *never* seen Apple cancel eBay auctions for unopened Apple software.
I don't disagree with the fact that the DOJ found MS guilty of being a monopoly. That doesn't mean I agree that it's correct, or even that the Sherman Antitrust Act isn't subject to some question in and of itself....
From that standpoint, the Republicans coming in and basically tossing the issue aside isn't necessarily a bad thing at all.
This (obviously) gets into complete subjective opinion here -- but the way I see it, government interference in the interest of "saving us from monopolies" hasn't ever really been proven to accomplish much good. Look at all the government regulation of public utilities and the fiascos that have come of it afterwards. We seem to always end up crying for deregulation at some point, and often that causes more "cans of worms" to open up because we dump what was long little more than another govt. agency back into the pool of truly competitive businesses, and wonder why it doesn't function smoothly.
Most of the issues MS was tried on were of relatively little consequence anyway. The whole "bundling the browser with the OS" argument was superfluous at best, IMHO. Every major OS picked a specific browser to bundle around that time. OS/2 Warp had "WebExplorer/2" and Netscape with it. If OS/2 had marketed itself better around the time of Warp 3.0 and 4.0 - maybe MS would be crying about Netscape's market dominance instead?
Ok, I gotcha.... Yeah, for some dumb reason, I forgot all about that possibility.
Again, I may be wrong here, but I *think* most of these routers still issue IPs in a different range via DHCP to their wireless clients than to their wired ones? I recall mine giving my wireless connections IPs in the 192.168.1.x range while actual wired LAN connected clients were given 192.168.0.x range IPs.
Not like it'd be hard to just set up a static address on your PC for the purpose of hacking in, but at least it wouldn't happen by pure accident with this configuration.
Novell was pretty darn stable, and as it was a dedicated back-end server product, wasn't really seen by its normal users.
The workstations can be upgraded all the time, and still share files/printers with an old Netware 3 or 4 server - and to the users, everything's brand new after each update.
NT 4, on the other hand, was known for crashing on its own, over time, due to memory leaks by a plethora of 3rd. party apps you were likely to run on it. (Yeah, it could be pretty stable if you only used what came with the OS itself, but how many people really did that? You couldn't even so much as manage disk quotas on user accounts without 3rd. party add-ons.)
Furthermore, lots of the NT 4 installs were on *workstations*, not just servers... So lack of features quickly becomes obvious to people in that environment. (Try installing something like a new network card in NT 4. Forget plug and play... Better pick the right driver on the first try too, or you're likely to get an instant blue screen of death you can only recover from with a full NT reinstall!)
The thing I don't understand about this is, by default, most Linksys (and other) wireless access points default to not allowing remote comfiguration?
Just finishing up with an extremely messy/difficult divorce myself, I fully understand the problems "bad credit" can bring - and the unfortunately necessity of "professional legal assistance" in some cases.
Still, I find you speaking out of the mouth of an attorney with your arguments here.
1. This guy already made it abundantly clear that he aspires to go into the *medical profession*. The fact that a bankruptcy might prevent him from passing background checks for government or financial jobs is probably not too high on his list of concerns. Moreover, I suspect our nation is at its peak of "background checking" right now. Before much longer, the pendulum almost has to swing back the opposite direction - because too many excellent job candidates are being denied jobs based on "credit history". (If you have poor credit and you're trying hard to get a good job, what does that tell you? It tells me you're an individual trying to do the right thing, and get back on his/her feet again! You can't very well expect someone to fix previous credit problems while remaining unemployed!)
2. Given the facts presented, Apple's desire to press criminal copyright infringement charges against this guy for distributing a developer *beta* of their product should be slim to none. Yeah, it COULD happen - but talk about backlash! Heck, I personally own 3 newer Mac systems and I'd dump them all in a heartbeat if I saw Apple do that to this guy! As I said before, consider the "intent of the law" as well as just the "letter of the law". The REAL reason for an NDA on this stuff in the first place is to avoid bad press about bugs that are still in the process of being fixed, and to prevent headaches of the general public running the OS well before it's ready for "prime time" and requesting support for it.
A Mac fanatic passing a Tiger build to "5 or 6" other Mac fanatics is hardly worthy of a criminal charge. If someone, in turn, made the torrent file publically available and thousands downloaded it - so what? That's completely out of this guy's control. He's not the one who did that!