It's a fallacy that there are "many eyes" reviewing linux code. In reality for most non-kernel packages you have less than ten actual developers involved and its very rare for any outside that group to review the actual code. Sure plenty of people submit bugs and may even submit code samples, but they just are reviewing the code for possible vulnerabilities as this myth suggests. The reality is that far more people are hacking at Microsoft since they are the bigger target, and alas penetration their efforts do more often payoff.
It's somewhat naive to think that Iran hasn't already purchased some nuclear weapons from a country that is willing to sell. North Korea wasn't interested in nuclear weapons for it's own use, so much as the political clout it brings and the financial benefit of being able to sell to countries like Iran. It Israel and Iran start to duke it out, I expect Israel would use small scale nuclear weapons first.
Our govt has a very tight relationship with Microsoft, Symantec and McAfee. It's not surprising that certain things are not flagged as malicious. It's also curious that there are signatures in their database for things that have never been officially found in the wild. It's been noted a few times that Kasperasky has added signatures for virus's and trojans long before they show up in the wild.
Definitely. Just like the janitor who calls himself a sanitation engineer, you've got lots of code monkeys wanting to sound more prestigious by calling themselves software engineers. It demeans the guy who really is a sanitation engineer with a civil engineering degree designing the city's sewer and water treatment system.
Keep in mind they are saying triple the density of the anode, which is only half of the battery, so this is more like a potential for 1.5x improvement in overall battery size. SIlicon is also heavier by weight than the carbon, so this might mean minimal improvment in energy per weight.
Nominal li-Ion cell voltage is 3.7 volts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery. Which makes you wonder about the 1,000 mAh/g versus 350 mAh/g figures they quote, since they aren't the normal units for specific energy, specific power, or energy density. They also don't work out right if you assume the nominal cell voltage either.
I've never had any calibration issues with my iPad. This kind of thing is a hallmark of older touch-screens, modern devices don't have this problem.
That's because your iPad uses a capacitive screen. There are still plenty of low-end tablets and devices that use resistive type screens that are prone to this problem.
So how does this compared to the health problems created by the mining and burning coal? You realize that coal pollution is very slightly radioactive itself? Fun trivai fact - if you extracted the uranium from 1 ton of coal and used it in a reactor, it would produce more energy than burning the coal itself.
The issue is the crappy SATA driver that comes with XP. MS crippled it to make Vista look faster. Basically command queing is stripped out. Worse XP's swapping algorithm pages like a mofo too. WIth that and only one command at a time being executed by the hard drive makes I/O sssllooowww,
If you are lucky you can find a proprietary driver for XP if one exists. If not Windows 7 will run circles around XP. I can verify this with my phenomII 6 core at home. XP takes 2.5 to 3x to even boot compared to Windows 7.
I think people are making things up as an excuse to avoid change. Lighter does not mean faster with modern hardware.
NCQ/AHCI functionality came out AFTER XP, so it's more like MS didn't go back and rework drivers or pressure the vendors to update their WHQL drivers. The simple reality is that you just need to install the newer drivers from the vendor. As for boot times, if you're just measuring the time to get to a desktop that's a bit misleading. Vista and Win7 put a lot of emphasis on boot times, mostly cheating by allowing services to continue loading even after the user gets to the desktop. Networking might not be usable yet but the user has a desktop to look at.
If you're upgrading from XP, upgrade to W7. That is, if the hardware is powerful enough to run it.
Win7 actually uses fewer resources than XP and generally runs better on limited resources than XP.
Totally opposite experience here. Try running either on a P4 1.6-gig with 512-meg ram. XP is definitely faster. XP was also easier to trim down and speed up. I've got a n-lited version that boots in VirtualBox in about 8 seconds. Win7 has a few more layers of complexity but it can be trimmed down a bit as well.
Part of the upgrade problem is that Win7 64-bit driver support is rather lacking for older hardware.
The cited IT World article (http://www.itworld.com/it-consumerization/306090/apple-ios-app-review-frustrating-and-bad-your-health) is a lesson in why you don't try to use iPAD as an enterprise platform for home-grown specialized software. You simply don't have enough control over the device or the ability to get the software onto the device. Need to update the app in real time, you are at the mercy of Apple regardless of how nit-picky you think the reviewers are.
For example, with.NET you can use Visual Studio and with Java you can use IntelliJ IDEA. Both of them will give you powerful refactoring capabilities and help you navigate unfamiliar code.
And both of those will let an amateur spit out craploads of poor code. Easy to use developer tools lower the bar for generating code quickly, not well written code.
No, I've very aware of all the Adobe updates. For shear number of vulnerabilities being patch, I think Adobe/Reader have more overall. For patch frequency, flash definitely has more.
I disagree. SSDs are fantastic for things like the pagefile and database files because of their very low access times. It's part of the reason MS devised the idea of plugging in a flash drive to use as paging space. The current generation of SSDs have come way down in price and massively improved their reliability and longevity. I've not had any in my network fail in the past 1-1/2 years. The first generation, particularity the odd brands like Miton, all seemed to failed within a year no matter how hard they were used.
Wow, such vehemence. The original poster described himself as shunning Windows. You're making the assumption that I shun non-Windows which is certainly not true. I would certainly consider it flamebait.
I manage some large R&D networks running mostly Win7, XP, RHEL, Fedora, and some Debian. Having used Labview on both RHEL and Windows, I can tell from personal experience that they are not the same. On Linux it seems like you're constantly having driver issues, particularly since the drivers have to be compiled for each kernel update and they are always at least a few revisions behind the fully developed Windows drivers. The windows drivers however are painless, although Labview does like to install a wealth of services. We actually grudgingly moved some systems from RHEL to Windows after National Instruments tech support told us point blank that they would not support the drivers under RHEL, even though it's on their officially supported platforms list. One NI engineer told us that linux support would be dropped altogether within 2 years because so few customers are using it.
Yes Microsoft now has Office 2011 which is almost on par with Office 2007 and 2010 with respect to features. That's only recent and for quite sometime the Office product line on MacIntosh was not developed and poorly maintained. Perhaps I could have picked better examples. I don't want to get into a nitpick battle though, as there are plenty of other examples of software that runs either better or only under Windows.
I certainly won't argue the virus and malware aspect, because you're right that Windows has the most there.
To be honest, Microsoft did the Symantec thing and bought out GIANT in 2004 and rebranded/reworked their product into the Windows Defender/Security Essentials product. Difference though is that Symantec usually buys out a product and then slowly runs it into the ground.
Don't be a frigging nanny! We're talking about a 12-year old who is old enough to learn that there is crap out there. He's going to find it anyway. If you're worried, tell him that he can only use the computer in the living room or some other visible area. He's not likely to surf porn in the living room where anyone can walk by.
Real gamers disable swap all together on their gaming rigs i the first place - you don't want the disk slowing you down ever while playing and physical memory is cheap...
I agree dumping in more memory will enhance performance for memory hungry apps. That was especially true for XP and even more for Win7. Win 7 manages memory and swapping a whole lot better though. The reality is that you'll probably not notice any performance difference with or without a pagefile if you have enough memory to handle the normal memory commit charge, and you may cause problems with some games or apps that like to create a large memory commit even though they don't actually need it (SQL Server, Firefox, etc).
I would suggest keeping the pagefile, especially if it's on a fast SSD drive. That way the game can keep maps in memory, even if it's paged out to the fast SSD, instead of dumping and reloading from the slower spinning drive.
Actually I've found MSE to be the least intrusive and most resource sparing of all the windows anti-virus. AVG works well but they nag living hell out of you to upgrade and so do most of the others. Of course I haven't tried any of the paid versions. MSE is free and easy and I figure they built windows so should know how to protect it....I'm sure there are API's that none of the other anti-malware authors know of that Microsoft engineers use.
I agree. it's definitely been the lightest foot print so far for a basic antivirus. Symantec and McAfee are hogs. I ran AVG for a while until it started getting to be resource hungry and missed a common trojan on my wifes computer.
Contrary to what a 1998 level of experience with Window might infer, Windows has gotten a lot more secure. The best protection is good habits and using known safe software. To help avoid infections I would recommend using Chrome or Firefox, as there are still zero-days out there for IE. Avoid crap from Adobe if at all possible. Teach the kids not to install or run random programs from the internet (yea, I guess your safer there on Linux). Install Windows 7 with the UAC enabled and either run the kids with a non-admin account or teach them that the UAC prompt is important, same as you'd do under Linux.
I think you've done yourself and the kids a mild disservice by avoiding windows with such a passion. When they get into the real world, it won't be just WOW that they need to run. It'll be business apps like MS Office, LabView, or something else that's truly Windows-only and having Windows experience (even if they prefer Linux) will be invaluable.
They already do that. Bouncer scans all apps in the Google Play store for malicious software for known malware, spyware and trojans and also for behavior that may indicate an application is up to no good. It supposedly led to a 40% decrease in malware within the first few months of them running it.
I presume the scanner they are integrating within the Play store client app is aimed at doing the same but with the benefit of also checking apps downloaded from other markets and sources.
Exactly. It's been shown that the majority of malicious apps are loaded from outside of the Google store, so this is an attempt to protect users who are using other sources. Google is taking a reputation hit, even though they aren't serving up the malicious apps.
Bouncer is more like traditional antivirus, looking for specific known signatures and looking harder at apps that are requesting unusually high privileges. Most windows antivirus software has the ability to monitor and report suspicious activity to the antivirus vendor (eg an app writing to the bootsector or altering specific files). Doing something similar with Android on the devices themselves would let Google watch the statistics to see which apps are doing things that look suspicious and investigate them further.
sophos isn't a security app. it's something you install that you believe provides security. that's actually different.
However, if you aren't installing from 3rd party app stores chances are low that there's anything of risk.
Except that malicious or sneaky apps have been found in the regular Google Market. Some app manufacturers are even being sued for collecting and selling your contact data (http://www.veracode.com/blog/2011/04/mobile-apps-invading-your-privacy/ as an example). Most of these are just invading your privacy in the background and not doing overt malicious things. Much of the problem stems from apps asking (and secretly using) permissions they don't need. For example does a game really need access to your contacts or to know what phone number you just dialed?
I'm glad that Google is taking a more proactive response, instead of simply showing a list of permissions to the user who given the all-or-nothing choice usually just hit accept.
First, stop calling yourself a Computer Engineer unless you are actually designing computers. People who write software are called programmers. I loath the term software engineer for the same reason I don't call the janitor a sanitation engineer. Promoted every three years at the same company isn't all that bad, but you don't say how the salary is progressing. If you really want to move up quickly you probably need to move to a different company.
I'm will to bet that you are not "in any sort of leadership/management" because you lack either good personnel, business, or project management skills. Work on improving those areas rather than technical skills, because technical skills rarely get you promoted up to higher paying management positions. Being the most technically savvy guy on the floor usually just gets you extra work. Having seniority isn't a guarantee of getting the managers job when he retires either.
I think you totally missed the fact that they were in such a hurry to release this new feature that they missed a major security bug. Their focus was on adding new features and not verifying that any code that was changed is still working correctly and securely. They should be embarrassed that the user community had to point out this glaring issue. Also FF16 apparently broken a number of add-ins as well. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Firefox-16-Bug-Causes-Some-Add-ons-to-Malfunction-298217.shtml
Obviously they do have functionality testing as evidenced by https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Firefox_16/Test_Plan, but security testing seems to be lacking. Interesting to note btw, that FF17 is due out next month. Also interesting to flip through the test plans and see that they regularly (re)break things that were previously working.
Mozilla has lost it's focus and instead of making a good, fast, secure browser they are trying to turn it into a social API with every gee-whiz-bang feature most users don't want or need.
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It's a fallacy that there are "many eyes" reviewing linux code. In reality for most non-kernel packages you have less than ten actual developers involved and its very rare for any outside that group to review the actual code. Sure plenty of people submit bugs and may even submit code samples, but they just are reviewing the code for possible vulnerabilities as this myth suggests. The reality is that far more people are hacking at Microsoft since they are the bigger target, and alas penetration their efforts do more often payoff.
It's somewhat naive to think that Iran hasn't already purchased some nuclear weapons from a country that is willing to sell. North Korea wasn't interested in nuclear weapons for it's own use, so much as the political clout it brings and the financial benefit of being able to sell to countries like Iran. It Israel and Iran start to duke it out, I expect Israel would use small scale nuclear weapons first.
Our govt has a very tight relationship with Microsoft, Symantec and McAfee. It's not surprising that certain things are not flagged as malicious. It's also curious that there are signatures in their database for things that have never been officially found in the wild. It's been noted a few times that Kasperasky has added signatures for virus's and trojans long before they show up in the wild.
Definitely. Just like the janitor who calls himself a sanitation engineer, you've got lots of code monkeys wanting to sound more prestigious by calling themselves software engineers. It demeans the guy who really is a sanitation engineer with a civil engineering degree designing the city's sewer and water treatment system.
Keep in mind they are saying triple the density of the anode, which is only half of the battery, so this is more like a potential for 1.5x improvement in overall battery size. SIlicon is also heavier by weight than the carbon, so this might mean minimal improvment in energy per weight.
Nominal li-Ion cell voltage is 3.7 volts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery. Which makes you wonder about the 1,000 mAh/g versus 350 mAh/g figures they quote, since they aren't the normal units for specific energy, specific power, or energy density. They also don't work out right if you assume the nominal cell voltage either.
I've never had any calibration issues with my iPad. This kind of thing is a hallmark of older touch-screens, modern devices don't have this problem.
That's because your iPad uses a capacitive screen. There are still plenty of low-end tablets and devices that use resistive type screens that are prone to this problem.
Nuke zealots actually think that their Magic Power Source has never killed anybody.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-17/fukushima-radiation-may-cause-1-300-cancer-deaths-study-finds
There's also the people who weren't hurt, but can never return to their homes or land:
http://www.japantoday.com/smartphone/view/opinions/pure-land-lost-for-fukushima-evacuees
And then there's the contamination issue:
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2012/10/2012102510561941251.html
So how does this compared to the health problems created by the mining and burning coal? You realize that coal pollution is very slightly radioactive itself? Fun trivai fact - if you extracted the uranium from 1 ton of coal and used it in a reactor, it would produce more energy than burning the coal itself.
The issue is the crappy SATA driver that comes with XP. MS crippled it to make Vista look faster. Basically command queing is stripped out. Worse XP's swapping algorithm pages like a mofo too. WIth that and only one command at a time being executed by the hard drive makes I/O sssllooowww,
If you are lucky you can find a proprietary driver for XP if one exists. If not Windows 7 will run circles around XP. I can verify this with my phenomII 6 core at home. XP takes 2.5 to 3x to even boot compared to Windows 7.
I think people are making things up as an excuse to avoid change. Lighter does not mean faster with modern hardware.
NCQ/AHCI functionality came out AFTER XP, so it's more like MS didn't go back and rework drivers or pressure the vendors to update their WHQL drivers. The simple reality is that you just need to install the newer drivers from the vendor. As for boot times, if you're just measuring the time to get to a desktop that's a bit misleading. Vista and Win7 put a lot of emphasis on boot times, mostly cheating by allowing services to continue loading even after the user gets to the desktop. Networking might not be usable yet but the user has a desktop to look at.
If you're upgrading from XP, upgrade to W7. That is, if the hardware is powerful enough to run it.
Win7 actually uses fewer resources than XP and generally runs better on limited resources than XP.
Totally opposite experience here. Try running either on a P4 1.6-gig with 512-meg ram. XP is definitely faster. XP was also easier to trim down and speed up. I've got a n-lited version that boots in VirtualBox in about 8 seconds. Win7 has a few more layers of complexity but it can be trimmed down a bit as well.
Part of the upgrade problem is that Win7 64-bit driver support is rather lacking for older hardware.
The cited IT World article (http://www.itworld.com/it-consumerization/306090/apple-ios-app-review-frustrating-and-bad-your-health) is a lesson in why you don't try to use iPAD as an enterprise platform for home-grown specialized software. You simply don't have enough control over the device or the ability to get the software onto the device. Need to update the app in real time, you are at the mercy of Apple regardless of how nit-picky you think the reviewers are.
For example, with .NET you can use Visual Studio and with Java you can use IntelliJ IDEA. Both of them will give you powerful refactoring capabilities and help you navigate unfamiliar code.
And both of those will let an amateur spit out craploads of poor code. Easy to use developer tools lower the bar for generating code quickly, not well written code.
No, I've very aware of all the Adobe updates. For shear number of vulnerabilities being patch, I think Adobe/Reader have more overall. For patch frequency, flash definitely has more.
I disagree. SSDs are fantastic for things like the pagefile and database files because of their very low access times. It's part of the reason MS devised the idea of plugging in a flash drive to use as paging space. The current generation of SSDs have come way down in price and massively improved their reliability and longevity. I've not had any in my network fail in the past 1-1/2 years. The first generation, particularity the odd brands like Miton, all seemed to failed within a year no matter how hard they were used.
Wow, such vehemence. The original poster described himself as shunning Windows. You're making the assumption that I shun non-Windows which is certainly not true. I would certainly consider it flamebait.
I manage some large R&D networks running mostly Win7, XP, RHEL, Fedora, and some Debian. Having used Labview on both RHEL and Windows, I can tell from personal experience that they are not the same. On Linux it seems like you're constantly having driver issues, particularly since the drivers have to be compiled for each kernel update and they are always at least a few revisions behind the fully developed Windows drivers. The windows drivers however are painless, although Labview does like to install a wealth of services. We actually grudgingly moved some systems from RHEL to Windows after National Instruments tech support told us point blank that they would not support the drivers under RHEL, even though it's on their officially supported platforms list. One NI engineer told us that linux support would be dropped altogether within 2 years because so few customers are using it.
Yes Microsoft now has Office 2011 which is almost on par with Office 2007 and 2010 with respect to features. That's only recent and for quite sometime the Office product line on MacIntosh was not developed and poorly maintained. Perhaps I could have picked better examples. I don't want to get into a nitpick battle though, as there are plenty of other examples of software that runs either better or only under Windows.
I certainly won't argue the virus and malware aspect, because you're right that Windows has the most there.
To be honest, Microsoft did the Symantec thing and bought out GIANT in 2004 and rebranded/reworked their product into the Windows Defender/Security Essentials product. Difference though is that Symantec usually buys out a product and then slowly runs it into the ground.
It's flash that's the perpetual security problem. I really wish there were a safer alternative.
If you're worried about your kid getting access to inappropriate things on the net, try K9: http://www1.k9webprotection.com/
Don't be a frigging nanny! We're talking about a 12-year old who is old enough to learn that there is crap out there. He's going to find it anyway. If you're worried, tell him that he can only use the computer in the living room or some other visible area. He's not likely to surf porn in the living room where anyone can walk by.
Real gamers disable swap all together on their gaming rigs i the first place - you don't want the disk slowing you down ever while playing and physical memory is cheap...
I agree dumping in more memory will enhance performance for memory hungry apps. That was especially true for XP and even more for Win7. Win 7 manages memory and swapping a whole lot better though. The reality is that you'll probably not notice any performance difference with or without a pagefile if you have enough memory to handle the normal memory commit charge, and you may cause problems with some games or apps that like to create a large memory commit even though they don't actually need it (SQL Server, Firefox, etc).
I would suggest keeping the pagefile, especially if it's on a fast SSD drive. That way the game can keep maps in memory, even if it's paged out to the fast SSD, instead of dumping and reloading from the slower spinning drive.
Actually I've found MSE to be the least intrusive and most resource sparing of all the windows anti-virus. AVG works well but they nag living hell out of you to upgrade and so do most of the others. Of course I haven't tried any of the paid versions. MSE is free and easy and I figure they built windows so should know how to protect it....I'm sure there are API's that none of the other anti-malware authors know of that Microsoft engineers use.
I agree. it's definitely been the lightest foot print so far for a basic antivirus. Symantec and McAfee are hogs. I ran AVG for a while until it started getting to be resource hungry and missed a common trojan on my wifes computer.
Contrary to what a 1998 level of experience with Window might infer, Windows has gotten a lot more secure. The best protection is good habits and using known safe software. To help avoid infections I would recommend using Chrome or Firefox, as there are still zero-days out there for IE. Avoid crap from Adobe if at all possible. Teach the kids not to install or run random programs from the internet (yea, I guess your safer there on Linux). Install Windows 7 with the UAC enabled and either run the kids with a non-admin account or teach them that the UAC prompt is important, same as you'd do under Linux.
I think you've done yourself and the kids a mild disservice by avoiding windows with such a passion. When they get into the real world, it won't be just WOW that they need to run. It'll be business apps like MS Office, LabView, or something else that's truly Windows-only and having Windows experience (even if they prefer Linux) will be invaluable.
They already do that. Bouncer scans all apps in the Google Play store for malicious software for known malware, spyware and trojans and also for behavior that may indicate an application is up to no good. It supposedly led to a 40% decrease in malware within the first few months of them running it.
I presume the scanner they are integrating within the Play store client app is aimed at doing the same but with the benefit of also checking apps downloaded from other markets and sources.
Exactly. It's been shown that the majority of malicious apps are loaded from outside of the Google store, so this is an attempt to protect users who are using other sources. Google is taking a reputation hit, even though they aren't serving up the malicious apps.
Bouncer is more like traditional antivirus, looking for specific known signatures and looking harder at apps that are requesting unusually high privileges. Most windows antivirus software has the ability to monitor and report suspicious activity to the antivirus vendor (eg an app writing to the bootsector or altering specific files). Doing something similar with Android on the devices themselves would let Google watch the statistics to see which apps are doing things that look suspicious and investigate them further.
sophos isn't a security app. it's something you install that you believe provides security. that's actually different.
However, if you aren't installing from 3rd party app stores chances are low that there's anything of risk.
Except that malicious or sneaky apps have been found in the regular Google Market. Some app manufacturers are even being sued for collecting and selling your contact data (http://www.veracode.com/blog/2011/04/mobile-apps-invading-your-privacy/ as an example). Most of these are just invading your privacy in the background and not doing overt malicious things. Much of the problem stems from apps asking (and secretly using) permissions they don't need. For example does a game really need access to your contacts or to know what phone number you just dialed?
I'm glad that Google is taking a more proactive response, instead of simply showing a list of permissions to the user who given the all-or-nothing choice usually just hit accept.
First, stop calling yourself a Computer Engineer unless you are actually designing computers. People who write software are called programmers. I loath the term software engineer for the same reason I don't call the janitor a sanitation engineer. Promoted every three years at the same company isn't all that bad, but you don't say how the salary is progressing. If you really want to move up quickly you probably need to move to a different company.
I'm will to bet that you are not "in any sort of leadership/management" because you lack either good personnel, business, or project management skills. Work on improving those areas rather than technical skills, because technical skills rarely get you promoted up to higher paying management positions. Being the most technically savvy guy on the floor usually just gets you extra work. Having seniority isn't a guarantee of getting the managers job when he retires either.
I think you totally missed the fact that they were in such a hurry to release this new feature that they missed a major security bug. Their focus was on adding new features and not verifying that any code that was changed is still working correctly and securely. They should be embarrassed that the user community had to point out this glaring issue. Also FF16 apparently broken a number of add-ins as well. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Firefox-16-Bug-Causes-Some-Add-ons-to-Malfunction-298217.shtml
Obviously they do have functionality testing as evidenced by https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Firefox_16/Test_Plan, but security testing seems to be lacking. Interesting to note btw, that FF17 is due out next month. Also interesting to flip through the test plans and see that they regularly (re)break things that were previously working.
Mozilla has lost it's focus and instead of making a good, fast, secure browser they are trying to turn it into a social API with every gee-whiz-bang feature most users don't want or need.