What would really help is if someone would make more professional-grade apps for Linux. Hell, Adobe would make a big difference all by itself. If Adobe ported their entire product line to Linux, that alone would increase the feasibility of switching people to Linux to an incredible degree.
I agree. I've got several small business clients that would could save lots of cash on Windows SBS 2003, XP, Office 2003, SAV Enterprise, Veritas, etc. licenses if they switched to Linux. However, one is an accounting firm that does the vast (70+%) bulk of their work in Windows only payroll and tax prep software. I have not found anything comparable in terms of functionality for *NIX, free or not. Another is a convenience store chain and they need to use the software that integrates with their gas pumps, again, Windows only. Yet another... Well, you get the point.
I have found very few offices that use solely generic apps like Office/OpenOffice. Vertical industry applications seem to have almost completely transitioned away from UNIX to Windows in the SMB sector; and, that means that Windows is really the only option for those businesses. After all, the consulting fees to get a vertical app working under wine (which would kill any sort of vendor support) would cost more than the app itself.
I don't have any idea what will make Linux a viable platform to develop vertical apps for, but, I think that is the one thing necessary to make it appealing to business users.
From the article, it seems that he was creating something to satisfy his personal curiosity. He put together a good simple plan and actually made it work. That is interesting, fun, and admirable. I did not get the feeling that he set out to save the world from pseudo-randomness; as many have noted, it does not need saving. If he made some over-enthusiastic claims about the utility of his creation, who cares, he made it and it works; and, that is cool.
Now, if next week, he starts hawking them at $250.00 each for the Ultimate Internet Privacy Shield, then give him hell.:)
I am actually a consultant; working by myself. Most of the clients I work with are very small businesses. By that I mean that they are 1-10 person businesses, often without a dedicated receptionist/secretary, let alone an in-house IT shop.
If they need something that cannot be affordably purchased off the shelf, or, is too small to interest a serious developer, I can and do provide the bits of custom code that they need.
I have worked for a large consultancy; and, for their Fortune 100 clients; and, in that case, I did not do any coding; as there were programmers on the team for that purpose. In the very small town I live in now, though, there are no large corporate installations; and, no large consultancies.
So, I do everything from evaluating problems and writing proposals to walking end users though the process of picking a different printer from their default in MS Word.
Because of the diversity of requests and client businesses; and, because I am not motivated to be a hands-off consultant or a developer, this is the nature of my experience.
I am not a developer; that is, I do not do development full time professionally. I am an IT consultant, which means that I end up being a jack of all (PR related) trades. In addition to helping clients find the , I occassionally do web development.
I am a functional programmer. I can write code that does the task at hand; and, I try to write clear maintainable code. I am not an expert in any particular development language; and, I do not have the time or interest to become fully conversant in the state of the art of web security.
Although I have no data to back this up; I believe that there are a huge number of people like me writing code for sites. We need to get something up that looks good and works reliably, but, we do not have the knowledge or time to make sure that it is truly secure.
It seems that the ideal place for security is not with individual site developers; but, rather with language standards bodies and browser makers. If the language and the runtime environment is secure, the site will be secure independent of the skill and resources of the developer.
When I took Java at my local University a few years ago, the professor provided us with a programmers' text editor, like Crimson Editor. I ended up doing my work in NetBeans because I was a lot more productive than with a "dumb" editor; so, the prof's strategy did not play out, at least in my case.
Since, I use a variety of IDE's, Visual Studio, Eclipse, PHP Designer for significant projects; and, I always have Crimson Editor close at hand for things that can be solved quicker than Visual Studio takes to load.
My recommendation to you is to give your students the option, letting them know that you are not going to spend class time answering questions about how to configure their IDE of choice.
I am primarily a Windows user and a Windows Server network administrator. I am a fan of open-source software; and, when possible, I use free and/or open source packages like MySQL, Apache HTTPD and Tomcat in preference to IIS and the closed source alternatives. I am putting together a media PC and will try MythTV as well as Media Center Edition and given equivalent functionality will stick with the OSS.
However, for most open source projects, the biggest problem I have is that there is no single, comprehensive source of documentation. Wikis, man pages, forums, html help, IRC, mailing lists, etc. are great; but, the amount of time spent googling to find the relevant documentation is often overwhelming.
I love MySQL and the Apache projects because the documentation and organization are absoutely world class. With other projects, like coLinux (which I just installed yesterday), the documentation is haphazard and often immprecisely written. Now, I understand that this documentation is the uncompensated labor of generous and very skilled people, and I am grateful to them for all they have done.
But, since these individuals are just that, loosely affiliated coders working on a project as cooperating peers, there is no organization to follow up behind them and clean up and flesh out the documentation, provide quality control testing, and just handle the interface with the newbies like me. This means that when time is of the essence, Windows is something I can guarantee to work and work quickly.
Now, to address the snobbery part of this. I have experienced very little in either the windows or linux worlds. My guess is that I have developed the habit of:
Check out what is in front of me, i.e., read the readme, see what foo -help says, look carefully at the command/menu options, etc. Half the time, I made a wrong assumption about how the controls worked and this step is a remedy.
Record the error codes, check the log files, etc. and then google thoroughly. Odds are, someone has had this problem before; and, the symptoms and solution are already posted somewhere. This takes care of the problem 49% of the time.
Ask for help from the community. This means saying, I've looked at the documentation, googled the error codes, and tried the suggested resolutions. Taking the time to carefully and accurately describe the problem and the steps I have taken before bugging someone else seems to prevent rude or careless responses.
Basically, if you ask your question as an intelligent, thoughtful person would, you tend to get responses in kind. Saying angry or careless things begs for angry, careless responses. Since, however, MS techs can get fired for replying as the care to, you mostly see this type of response from volunteers. And, volunteers are the heart of the FOSS community.
I haven't been in the position to place orders like that for a year and a half or so; but, when I did, I had the PUC's number in my contacts along with my SBC rep's. After the first sign of a runaround from SBC, a complaint to the PUC and service got great for a couple of months.
I did this not only to help my immediate situation; but, with the hope that if there were enough complaints lodged, it might actually wake someone up in Sacramento or in DC.
I'm hoping that Sun's decision to open source the T1(niagara) design will be a leading step in this direction. If the greedy suits are willing to partner with community experts in a truly open way, the suits with the capacity for mass production and the community can both benefit.
While it would be nice to download the latest development design of the K12 processor and cut a wafer in my garage, I'll be happy if the best current ideas find their way to me via major corporations.
can manage to mangle even the best of intentions. I fail to see how this can stop someone from sending scads of spam through an ISP based outside.au. I do, however, see how this places a burden on ISPs and on legitimate mailing list managers.
My feeling is that until some agency, like the WTO, can arbitrate spam investigation and fine enforcement on an international level, there will be no significant progress. If, however, my ISP can track a batch of spam back to an ISP in, say, Singapore and can file a complaint with the WTO and actually get enforcement within a year, then there will be progress.
In the current climate of lip service to international obligations, without any real committment from any nation, I do not feel hopeful. Instead, this patchwork of half-baked laws will just make international network management more expensive and less functional.
It is scaring me that press releases from NASA sounds just about like press releases from IBM. AJAX or JAXA? XML, eXtensible Markup Language, or LMX, Lunar Mission '10? I'm confused and minding it less and less.
Gotta agree. I have the flashblock extension installed in firefox; and, only when absolutly essential (like shopping for tires on lesschwab.com) do I use IE and flash. My boss uses the scriptblock extension; only using scripts when necessary and never allowing flash. And, on some of the networks we manage, we block flash from executing via Group Policy.
So, this is just an annoyance in my opinion. If there were a way to load fonts in a "sandbox" on the fly and have them used as normal OS installed fonts, great. Anything that rasterized text seems to defeat the core value of HTML. That is, it turns simple, universally readable text into graphics that are far from universally useable. I can read html pages just fine in LINKS; but, PDF, Flash, yeah right.
Exercise
Rosenthal suggests that going for a walk or jog, or doing some other form of exercise can also help beat the blues. Exercising is even more effective against SAD if done outside during bright daytime hours.
Hamster wheels are now being installed in mental hospitals throughout the country.
I agree that it is likely a very good thing that the US Defense establishment is committed to developing capabilities for packet-based conflict; but, why the Air Force. Are atmospheric and space combat not enough of a mission?
It seems that the NSA, or some similar agency is a more appropriate group for the digital warfare mission. They already have the infrastructure and expertise (I hope); why duplicate it in the Air Force?
Oh, that's right governments are all about rudundancy. Doh.
I work for a IT firm and, though we give the strong password speech regularly, some of our clients are so opposed to having to do something as difficult as remembering a password that we let them keep their insecurity rather than risk losing business.
I wish it were possible to be hard line and just force people to use strong passwords; but, when they can fire us for doing so; it seems a little quixotic. Until end users are willing to accept that they, personally, need to take some responsibility for their data security, all of this will continue to be a joke.
After all, Wells Fargo comes by their house and makes sure their doors are locked and the alarm is set everytime they leave home. Why shouldn't Symantec to the same for their PCs?
Re:Hard to admit, but that is quite clever
on
Sober Code Cracked
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· Score: 1
I question that. After years of classroom instruction in programming and working in the IT industry, though not as a developer, I haven't the faintest idea how to write "quality malware". I am consistently impressed by the quality of the programming that goes into trojans, spyware, etc. And, I often wish that the "real software", MAS90, Medial Manager, would put the same effort into their products.
Malware will run stably and reliably despite all efforts to kill it. Those gazillion dollar products that people really want to run and depend on will only be stable if installed whilst standing on one's head at 1:13PM february 29.
A while ago I unburied an old dual Pentium Pro monster; and, for the hell of it I tried to install Windows 2000 Server on it. Got the RAID array rebuilt, the OS installed, and the system hanging out connectected to the 'net between the external bridge and the firewall's WAN port. Done because this beast was not allowed in the house and the easiest way to get ethernet to the garage was unprotected.
I proceeded to lose interest in it for a few weeks; and, though I could RDP into it from the outside at will, there was nothing unpleasant on it at all. This is with the OS only, no ISA server, no AV software, nothing but a basic Admin account password.
Of course, the system was not being browsed on, used as a mail client, anything; but, I do question the premise that just an IP connection is a sure road to malware hell.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article, it seems that he was creating something to satisfy his personal curiosity. He put together a good simple plan and actually made it work. That is interesting, fun, and admirable. I did not get the feeling that he set out to save the world from pseudo-randomness; as many have noted, it does not need saving. If he made some over-enthusiastic claims about the utility of his creation, who cares, he made it and it works; and, that is cool. Now, if next week, he starts hawking them at $250.00 each for the Ultimate Internet Privacy Shield, then give him hell. :)
I didn't take it too seriously; but, it is interesting to realize that my experience differes so dramatically from others'.
I am actually a consultant; working by myself. Most of the clients I work with are very small businesses. By that I mean that they are 1-10 person businesses, often without a dedicated receptionist/secretary, let alone an in-house IT shop. If they need something that cannot be affordably purchased off the shelf, or, is too small to interest a serious developer, I can and do provide the bits of custom code that they need. I have worked for a large consultancy; and, for their Fortune 100 clients; and, in that case, I did not do any coding; as there were programmers on the team for that purpose. In the very small town I live in now, though, there are no large corporate installations; and, no large consultancies. So, I do everything from evaluating problems and writing proposals to walking end users though the process of picking a different printer from their default in MS Word. Because of the diversity of requests and client businesses; and, because I am not motivated to be a hands-off consultant or a developer, this is the nature of my experience.
I am not a developer; that is, I do not do development full time professionally. I am an IT consultant, which means that I end up being a jack of all (PR related) trades. In addition to helping clients find the , I occassionally do web development. I am a functional programmer. I can write code that does the task at hand; and, I try to write clear maintainable code. I am not an expert in any particular development language; and, I do not have the time or interest to become fully conversant in the state of the art of web security. Although I have no data to back this up; I believe that there are a huge number of people like me writing code for sites. We need to get something up that looks good and works reliably, but, we do not have the knowledge or time to make sure that it is truly secure. It seems that the ideal place for security is not with individual site developers; but, rather with language standards bodies and browser makers. If the language and the runtime environment is secure, the site will be secure independent of the skill and resources of the developer.
IJARR
When I took Java at my local University a few years ago, the professor provided us with a programmers' text editor, like Crimson Editor. I ended up doing my work in NetBeans because I was a lot more productive than with a "dumb" editor; so, the prof's strategy did not play out, at least in my case.
Since, I use a variety of IDE's, Visual Studio, Eclipse, PHP Designer for significant projects; and, I always have Crimson Editor close at hand for things that can be solved quicker than Visual Studio takes to load.
My recommendation to you is to give your students the option, letting them know that you are not going to spend class time answering questions about how to configure their IDE of choice.
Holy shit!. I just laughed so hard I scared the dogs. Thanks. BTW, the garbage disposal seems like the next step.
-
Check out what is in front of me, i.e., read the readme, see what foo -help says, look carefully at the command/menu options, etc. Half the time, I made a wrong assumption about how the controls worked and this step is a remedy.
-
Record the error codes, check the log files, etc. and then google thoroughly. Odds are, someone has had this problem before; and, the symptoms and solution are already posted somewhere. This takes care of the problem 49% of the time.
-
Ask for help from the community. This means saying, I've looked at the documentation, googled the error codes, and tried the suggested resolutions. Taking the time to carefully and accurately describe the problem and the steps I have taken before bugging someone else seems to prevent rude or careless responses.
Basically, if you ask your question as an intelligent, thoughtful person would, you tend to get responses in kind. Saying angry or careless things begs for angry, careless responses. Since, however, MS techs can get fired for replying as the care to, you mostly see this type of response from volunteers. And, volunteers are the heart of the FOSS community.I haven't been in the position to place orders like that for a year and a half or so; but, when I did, I had the PUC's number in my contacts along with my SBC rep's. After the first sign of a runaround from SBC, a complaint to the PUC and service got great for a couple of months. I did this not only to help my immediate situation; but, with the hope that if there were enough complaints lodged, it might actually wake someone up in Sacramento or in DC.
I'm hoping that Sun's decision to open source the T1(niagara) design will be a leading step in this direction. If the greedy suits are willing to partner with community experts in a truly open way, the suits with the capacity for mass production and the community can both benefit. While it would be nice to download the latest development design of the K12 processor and cut a wafer in my garage, I'll be happy if the best current ideas find their way to me via major corporations.
can manage to mangle even the best of intentions. I fail to see how this can stop someone from sending scads of spam through an ISP based outside .au. I do, however, see how this places a burden on ISPs and on legitimate mailing list managers.
My feeling is that until some agency, like the WTO, can arbitrate spam investigation and fine enforcement on an international level, there will be no significant progress. If, however, my ISP can track a batch of spam back to an ISP in, say, Singapore and can file a complaint with the WTO and actually get enforcement within a year, then there will be progress.
In the current climate of lip service to international obligations, without any real committment from any nation, I do not feel hopeful. Instead, this patchwork of half-baked laws will just make international network management more expensive and less functional.
My kitten Luna loads my boots with shredded paper and cat toys every night. She is the best boot loader ever!
Don't know, but, it's keeping Kleenex flying off the shelves.
It is scaring me that press releases from NASA sounds just about like press releases from IBM. AJAX or JAXA? XML, eXtensible Markup Language, or LMX, Lunar Mission '10? I'm confused and minding it less and less.
Yeah, I was wondering what was going with that message. Also explaing the phone guys in the white van across the street.
Gotta agree. I have the flashblock extension installed in firefox; and, only when absolutly essential (like shopping for tires on lesschwab.com) do I use IE and flash. My boss uses the scriptblock extension; only using scripts when necessary and never allowing flash. And, on some of the networks we manage, we block flash from executing via Group Policy. So, this is just an annoyance in my opinion. If there were a way to load fonts in a "sandbox" on the fly and have them used as normal OS installed fonts, great. Anything that rasterized text seems to defeat the core value of HTML. That is, it turns simple, universally readable text into graphics that are far from universally useable. I can read html pages just fine in LINKS; but, PDF, Flash, yeah right.
because anyone who would buy an iBall doesn't.
Tips For Beating Seasonal Depression
Exercise Rosenthal suggests that going for a walk or jog, or doing some other form of exercise can also help beat the blues. Exercising is even more effective against SAD if done outside during bright daytime hours.
Hamster wheels are now being installed in mental hospitals throughout the country.
I agree that it is likely a very good thing that the US Defense establishment is committed to developing capabilities for packet-based conflict; but, why the Air Force. Are atmospheric and space combat not enough of a mission? It seems that the NSA, or some similar agency is a more appropriate group for the digital warfare mission. They already have the infrastructure and expertise (I hope); why duplicate it in the Air Force? Oh, that's right governments are all about rudundancy. Doh.
I work for a IT firm and, though we give the strong password speech regularly, some of our clients are so opposed to having to do something as difficult as remembering a password that we let them keep their insecurity rather than risk losing business. I wish it were possible to be hard line and just force people to use strong passwords; but, when they can fire us for doing so; it seems a little quixotic. Until end users are willing to accept that they, personally, need to take some responsibility for their data security, all of this will continue to be a joke. After all, Wells Fargo comes by their house and makes sure their doors are locked and the alarm is set everytime they leave home. Why shouldn't Symantec to the same for their PCs?
I question that. After years of classroom instruction in programming and working in the IT industry, though not as a developer, I haven't the faintest idea how to write "quality malware". I am consistently impressed by the quality of the programming that goes into trojans, spyware, etc. And, I often wish that the "real software", MAS90, Medial Manager, would put the same effort into their products. Malware will run stably and reliably despite all efforts to kill it. Those gazillion dollar products that people really want to run and depend on will only be stable if installed whilst standing on one's head at 1:13PM february 29.
A while ago I unburied an old dual Pentium Pro monster; and, for the hell of it I tried to install Windows 2000 Server on it. Got the RAID array rebuilt, the OS installed, and the system hanging out connectected to the 'net between the external bridge and the firewall's WAN port. Done because this beast was not allowed in the house and the easiest way to get ethernet to the garage was unprotected. I proceeded to lose interest in it for a few weeks; and, though I could RDP into it from the outside at will, there was nothing unpleasant on it at all. This is with the OS only, no ISA server, no AV software, nothing but a basic Admin account password. Of course, the system was not being browsed on, used as a mail client, anything; but, I do question the premise that just an IP connection is a sure road to malware hell.
What happened to IPv5? And, will we got straight to IPv8 since noone actually has any motivation to migtate to IPv6?