I fully agree with that. It also has always been my standpoint in this matter. I had no say in the original decision to go for OpenOffice, and I believed it was a bold move. The general state of "computer education for the end-user" is quite sad. Indeed, focus is so much on a single environment that people think they know a lot, while in fact they only learned a bag of tricks.
However, after seeing how common this problem was in our organization, I think anyone trying to make this switch will be in for quite a rough time.
About 3 years ago, at work (a Dutch semi-government company) we decided to switch from MS Office to OpenOffice. Version 1.0.1 was installed on all workstations (before, only part of the workstations had MS Office because it was too expensive).
It was used for about a year, but there were continuing complaints from people who "knew how to work with MS Office and had no time to learn OpenOffice". Those were often higher-paid employees and external consultants working in the company, and when their claims about lost hours were really true, one could argue that no money was ever saved by switching.
It was decided to go back to MS Office and buy extra licenses for the remainder of the systems. OpenOffice is still installed, and sometimes it is useful (and used) for things like converting to PDF or repairing documents that make MS Office crash, but it no longer is the generally used package.
This clearly shows the effectiviness of "student licenses" and other pricing schemes: by making sure that the average person "knows how to use Office" (I type it in quotes because I believe the average knowledge of Office features is only skin-deep, maybe "familiar with" is a better description) you can frustrate any attempt to switch to other packages.
I guess the Groningen people will also meet this obstacle.
I am not saying they don't supply patches. Of course they don't. What I am saying is that they distribute security advisiories, and tell that they don't apply to 9x. I.e. most of the code affected by security advisories appears in the NT line, not in the 9x line.
There can be several explanations for that. One is that the NT line contains more code. More code equals more bugs. Another is that the security people in the team developing NT were entirely focused on their OS security model (rings, ACLs, etc) and were not paying attention to other aspects anymore. 9x had no builtin security, so its developers were not distracted by a (false) sense of a security model.
This normally works ok for sites that provide only content, and limited formatting. But most websites try to provide "pixel-perfect layout" and define many measurements in pixel units. Telltale signs of this are often the dreaded "this website was designed for a resolution of 1024x768" or similar.
Such websites are causing difficulty when printing, because "pixels" have to be scaled to the printer output. This process will be helped by a stylesheet that provides the relevant measurements in "points" and/or as percentages of total width. Similar for font sizes.
(of course it would be ideal when the normal display version could use "point" sizes as well, but there are too many browser and os bugs around to do that now)
I really think it is time for people running those platforms to upgrade to something more modern, just for the reason of security.
Is this based on feeling or on actual facts? Looking at the monthly updates, it seems like most updates that a required for 2000 and XP list 9x as "not affected". So what is more secure? 9x in the state it is now, or 2000/XP before next month's updates?
Printing is overlooked in Linux in general. Windows has integrated printing support in its GUI system, Linux hasn't. That makes it much harder for Linux software do have acceptable and consistent (between applications) printing.
And indeed, printing works better in Windows Firefox than in Linux Firefox.
It is usually possible to make websites print decently in many different browsers, including Firefox and MSIE. Just define a separate stylesheet for printing. This stylesheet can hide the navigation items and specify how the fixed page layout has to be scaled on the paper when printing.
Of course, not every site designer is careful enough to include a printing stylesheet.
You can also mostly solve that problem with some access control in your DHCP server. When it does not hand out a lease to everyone, a newly plugged-in laptop will not get an IP adress, will use a 169.254 address, and you block that at your routers and servers.
The main problem with NAT is that it breaks end-to-end networking.
But will we need end-to-end networking forever? Sure it was one of the design motifs when the Internet was set up. But then, it was not viewed as a consumer network.
Right now, we have a network with very many "consumer" type clients, and fewer content providers that they want to connect to. The consumers do not see much need to contact eachother, and in fact want to limit such contacts because of security risks.
Governments want to listen-in on everything and don't like peer-to-peer networking, because it potentially bypasses their interception points and makes it easier for the communicating parties to circumvent laws they have set up to protect some industries, or to "fight a war against terrorism".
Of course you can argue that you want an ideal network where such motivations play no role, but in practice it is better to build a network that satisfies the big brothers, if you do not want it to be shutdown alltogether. In that case, a hierarchical network may not be that bad, after all.
"Currently there's four billion addresses available and there are six billion humans on Earth, so there's obviously an issue there,"
Yes, but what is the issue? That we don't have enough addresses to assign one to every human? Perhaps the biggest issue is, that this has not led to immediate problems yet. Obviously there is a large number of humans living in too poor circumstances to ever get close to Internet.
They have a new model, and you have an example of a situation where it cannot be applied. Fine. But how relevant is this? Your "impression ads" are not covered by pay-per-clicktrough either, aren't they? And that is what the new model attempts to replace or extend.
What you are saying is like radio ads are failing because they cannot convey an image of the product. It is just a different situation, different solution for a different problem.
Fraudsters "own" farms of millions of poorly managed PCs in the average household that they can control to do anything they like, including sending spam, visiting webpages (clickfraud) and spreading worms to infect other PCs to join the farm.
The answer is: when you go from city A to B via express highway there will be a different tariff than when going via secondary road, even though the endpoints of the route may be the same. To avoid having to have tollpoints or other forms of detection at every intersection (which was the original implementation idea) it is now considered to track the vehicle movement and base the toll on that.
Of course it had privacy problems, in the past. That is why global terrorism is so convenient: it comes in to help as an excuse to track everyone's movement anyway, and some people even believe that this is a good idea. So it removes the privacy problem.
"Imagine someone builds a lighthouse," argued Psiaki. "And I've gone by and see how often the light flashes and measured where the coordinates are. Can the owner charge me a licensing fee for looking at the light?... No. How is looking at the Galileo satellite any different?"
You would expect it to work that way, but NO. Today, it really is possible to transmit information into publicly receivable media and still be able to prohibit the use of it and to do the research necessary to make the signal useful (in the above case: measure the coordinates).
For example, when someone sends a TV signal from a satellite you can look at the signal but it would be illegal without the proper license to try to find out how the bits sent down can be reconstructed into a viewable TV picture. Sure this used to be legal, and that is what you would expect, but the big media companies have convinced the politicians to pass laws that prohibit this.
The article linked to tells us how the click-trough ratios differ for three different types of spam. Fine.
But how does the/. abstract arrive at the conclusion that this clicktrough rate determines what type of spam you get? This is unclear to me.
Will I get more porn spam, because that spam is more successful? Or will I get more rolex advertisements, because that has a lower clickthrough ratio and thus needs more spam messages to arrive at the same shop turnover?
Why do you insist that Microsoft would have to produce anything?
It says "Microsoft will supply". This is only a sponsorship deal. The Microsoft name will appear somewhere on the car and will be mentioned by commenters when talking about ECUs, but of course Microsoft will not get a Windows CE copy and hack it to be used in an ECU.
They will just outsource the coding to an established manufacturer, or even buy one.
It is just like all the "engine manufacturers". There are many big car makes that "supply engines" for Formula 1, but in reality they are being designed, at least initially, by specialist companies like Ilmore and Cosworth.
Why is that so special? The Russian "Buran" shuttle, which made only one flight, landed fully automatically in conditions that NASA never would have considered in such a situation.
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I fully agree with that. It also has always been my standpoint in this matter.
I had no say in the original decision to go for OpenOffice, and I believed it was a bold move.
The general state of "computer education for the end-user" is quite sad. Indeed, focus is so much on a single environment that people think they know a lot, while in fact they only learned a bag of tricks.
However, after seeing how common this problem was in our organization, I think anyone trying to make this switch will be in for quite a rough time.
About 3 years ago, at work (a Dutch semi-government company) we decided to switch from MS Office to OpenOffice.
Version 1.0.1 was installed on all workstations (before, only part of the workstations had MS Office because it was too expensive).
It was used for about a year, but there were continuing complaints from people who "knew how to work with MS Office and had no time to learn OpenOffice".
Those were often higher-paid employees and external consultants working in the company, and when their claims about lost hours were really true, one could argue that no money was ever saved by switching.
It was decided to go back to MS Office and buy extra licenses for the remainder of the systems.
OpenOffice is still installed, and sometimes it is useful (and used) for things like converting to PDF or repairing documents that make MS Office crash, but it no longer is the generally used package.
This clearly shows the effectiviness of "student licenses" and other pricing schemes: by making sure that the average person "knows how to use Office" (I type it in quotes because I believe the average knowledge of Office features is only skin-deep, maybe "familiar with" is a better description) you can frustrate any attempt to switch to other packages.
I guess the Groningen people will also meet this obstacle.
I am not saying they don't supply patches. Of course they don't.
What I am saying is that they distribute security advisiories, and tell that they don't apply to 9x.
I.e. most of the code affected by security advisories appears in the NT line, not in the 9x line.
There can be several explanations for that. One is that the NT line contains more code. More code equals more bugs.
Another is that the security people in the team developing NT were entirely focused on their OS security model (rings, ACLs, etc) and were not paying attention to other aspects anymore. 9x had no builtin security, so its developers were not distracted by a (false) sense of a security model.
What you may not know is that many local versions of google (google.countrycode) have this art for their local holidays as well.
So, there is more than the few holidays you know about.
This normally works ok for sites that provide only content, and limited formatting.
But most websites try to provide "pixel-perfect layout" and define many measurements in pixel units.
Telltale signs of this are often the dreaded "this website was designed for a resolution of 1024x768" or similar.
Such websites are causing difficulty when printing, because "pixels" have to be scaled to the printer output.
This process will be helped by a stylesheet that provides the relevant measurements in "points" and/or as percentages of total width.
Similar for font sizes.
(of course it would be ideal when the normal display version could use "point" sizes as well, but there are too many browser and os bugs around to do that now)
I really think it is time for people running those platforms to upgrade to something more modern, just for the reason of security.
Is this based on feeling or on actual facts?
Looking at the monthly updates, it seems like most updates that a required for 2000 and XP list 9x as "not affected".
So what is more secure? 9x in the state it is now, or 2000/XP before next month's updates?
Printing is overlooked in Linux in general. Windows has integrated printing support in its GUI system, Linux hasn't.
That makes it much harder for Linux software do have acceptable and consistent (between applications) printing.
And indeed, printing works better in Windows Firefox than in Linux Firefox.
It will not even run on Windows 2000.
It is usually possible to make websites print decently in many different browsers, including Firefox and MSIE.
Just define a separate stylesheet for printing. This stylesheet can hide the navigation items and specify how the fixed page layout has to be scaled on the paper when printing.
Of course, not every site designer is careful enough to include a printing stylesheet.
You can also mostly solve that problem with some access control in your DHCP server.
When it does not hand out a lease to everyone, a newly plugged-in laptop will not get an IP adress, will use a 169.254 address, and you block that at your routers and servers.
And all this while billions of people have no milk to drink, not to mention a frying pan...
The main problem with NAT is that it breaks end-to-end networking.
But will we need end-to-end networking forever?
Sure it was one of the design motifs when the Internet was set up. But then, it was not viewed as a consumer network.
Right now, we have a network with very many "consumer" type clients, and fewer content providers that they want to connect to.
The consumers do not see much need to contact eachother, and in fact want to limit such contacts because of security risks.
Governments want to listen-in on everything and don't like peer-to-peer networking, because it potentially bypasses their interception points and makes it easier for the communicating parties to circumvent laws they have set up to protect some industries, or to "fight a war against terrorism".
Of course you can argue that you want an ideal network where such motivations play no role, but in practice it is better to build a network that satisfies the big brothers, if you do not want it to be shutdown alltogether.
In that case, a hierarchical network may not be that bad, after all.
"Currently there's four billion addresses available and there are six billion humans on Earth, so there's obviously an issue there,"
Yes, but what is the issue? That we don't have enough addresses to assign one to every human?
Perhaps the biggest issue is, that this has not led to immediate problems yet.
Obviously there is a large number of humans living in too poor circumstances to ever get close to Internet.
When reading the pdf, I already wondered if that is what happened to the tapes already...
They have a new model, and you have an example of a situation where it cannot be applied. Fine.
But how relevant is this? Your "impression ads" are not covered by pay-per-clicktrough either, aren't they?
And that is what the new model attempts to replace or extend.
What you are saying is like radio ads are failing because they cannot convey an image of the product. It is just a different situation, different solution for a different problem.
Have you ever heard of zombie PCs?
Fraudsters "own" farms of millions of poorly managed PCs in the average household that they can control to do anything they like, including sending spam, visiting webpages (clickfraud) and spreading worms to infect other PCs to join the farm.
Then maybe you don't understand the difference between VMware and Xen?
For your work you should probably use Xen, others need VMware.
Strange. Today it works, yesterday it didn't. I even retried the same query I used yesterday...
Did you try that? It does not work, at least here it doesn't.
The answer is: when you go from city A to B via express highway there will be a different tariff than when going via secondary road, even though the endpoints of the route may be the same.
To avoid having to have tollpoints or other forms of detection at every intersection (which was the original implementation idea) it is now considered to track the vehicle movement and base the toll on that.
Of course it had privacy problems, in the past. That is why global terrorism is so convenient: it comes in to help as an excuse to track everyone's movement anyway, and some people even believe that this is a good idea. So it removes the privacy problem.
"Imagine someone builds a lighthouse," argued Psiaki. "And I've gone by and see how often the light flashes and measured where the coordinates are. Can the owner charge me a licensing fee for looking at the light? ... No. How is looking at the Galileo satellite any different?"
You would expect it to work that way, but NO. Today, it really is possible to transmit information into publicly receivable media and still be able to prohibit the use of it and to do the research necessary to make the signal useful (in the above case: measure the coordinates).
For example, when someone sends a TV signal from a satellite you can look at the signal but it would be illegal without the proper license to try to find out how the bits sent down can be reconstructed into a viewable TV picture.
Sure this used to be legal, and that is what you would expect, but the big media companies have convinced the politicians to pass laws that prohibit this.
The article linked to tells us how the click-trough ratios differ for three different types of spam. Fine.
/. abstract arrive at the conclusion that this clicktrough rate determines what type of spam you get?
But how does the
This is unclear to me.
Will I get more porn spam, because that spam is more successful? Or will I get more rolex advertisements, because that has a lower clickthrough ratio and thus needs more spam messages to arrive at the same shop turnover?
Why don't you throw away the account?
Why do you insist that Microsoft would have to produce anything?
It says "Microsoft will supply". This is only a sponsorship deal. The Microsoft name will appear somewhere on the car and will be mentioned by commenters when talking about ECUs, but of course Microsoft will not get a Windows CE copy and hack it to be used in an ECU.
They will just outsource the coding to an established manufacturer, or even buy one.
It is just like all the "engine manufacturers". There are many big car makes that "supply engines" for Formula 1, but in reality they are being designed, at least initially, by specialist companies like Ilmore and Cosworth.
Why is that so special? The Russian "Buran" shuttle, which made only one flight, landed fully automatically in conditions that NASA never would have considered in such a situation.