Norton never seems to uninstall correctly, and our campus requires McAfee. The tool is amazing - almost as amazing as if they had just written the installer correctly to begin with at any point over the past ten years...
Maybe they finished watching Gundam 00 a few seasons back.
They're building the space solar array without the giant space elevator. No terrorism problems, no defense treaty violations from hiding too many mecha to guard it.
URL shorteners are amazing whenever you have to write down a URL by hand, or read a web address to someone over the phone, or copying it between two computers (maps-dot-google-dot-com-slash-fivethousandlinesoftypoinducinggibberish).
Those are good reasons, but I can think of a few reasons why it would be a bad idea:
Would rebranding Firefox really be seen as a "good thing"? Or would/.ers see it as stealing?
IE is in some respects a more technically sophisticated browser. I'm talking about each tab in it's own sandboxed process. Also, to my knowledge there is no Firefox ActiveX control or COM interface or.NET assembly - there is no drop-in way to use Firefox in a Windows application.
Now, if MS *really* wanted to do something positive, they could open source IE.
You're looking for the Enhanced Write Filter. It redirects all writes to RAM, meaning your changes are lost when you reboot. (Or you can have a shutdown script that commits changes to disk if you want.)
It's part of the XP Embedded SDK, so it's designed for things like letting you run XP from a ROM chip or from a CD-ROM. I use it on my netbook because having all writes trapped in memory makes it's cheap, slow SSD seem ridiculously fast.
This empirically demonstrates that evolution isn't very useful for evolution. Duh.
Re:Software Projects vs. Traditional Projects
on
Why New Systems Fail
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· Score: 1
My theory: If you build a bridge, and it falls over, you go to jail. Additionally, people die.
I guess the kinds of project managers described ("the know-it-all, the micromanager") that evidently exist in IT would all be felons in the bridge-building world. But dammit Jim, IANACE (I Am Not a Civil Engineer), nor a project manager, nor an IT manager.
I have a feeling you won't be writing a class in C.
Sure, ya can. Create a struct with function pointers. Ta da! Just very little language support for silly things like "inheritance"... Call it "explicit polymorphism!"
Well, there probably won't be any decent use of DX11 (there's going to be an 11?!) for a while. There's not any decent use of DX10 or 10.1 yet, even though even the cheapest hardware has DX10 support.
The Only DX10 games that jump to mind are Crysis, Hellgate: London, and Age of Conan. Except Age of Conan never actually shipped their DX10 client to my knowledge. Kind of sad - DX10 is really shiny.
TL;DR. You lost me at complaining about having to type out the few extra bytes in "0.0.0.0" versus just "0". You realize Windows has to read the whole 4KB (or whatever) disk cluster anyways, right? And probably "read ahead" many more clusters to fill its buffer?
And why would you use GetTickCount() to time anything? Besides being inaccurate, all it's measuring is how long it takes to return focus to your program from the context switch it makes to do a hosts lookup.
I second the logitech G5. They're cheap, I love the adjustable weights, and just enough buttons for my taste. Middle-click for opening and closing tabs, and two side buttons for forward and back.
But, mousing in an IDE? Even in Visual Studio, the only button that gets any use is the left mouse button, and maybe the middle-click scrollwheel button for opening and closing tabs. Everything has a keyboard shortcut.
I'd recommend a good keyboard instead - I have an IBM Model M I whip on for nostalgia, but I'm very happy with my Das Keyboard II. THAT will make more difference in programming! Unless you're using Lego Mindstorms:P
Vista and onward come with a two-way firewall. (Start -> run -> wf.msc) The XP firewall (that they added in a service pack!) is just fine unless you're hosting internet services on you box. In which case, wtf are you doing.
As long as you let users run arbitrary code, you are always going to have virus problems. Last semester I removed DNS hijackers from 3 Mac OS X laptops at my college's help desk, despite how awesome BSD is.
I'd be more worried about Microsoft "charging for programs to fix the insecurities" if they didn't already:
Provide patches for free.
Provide service packs for free.
Push virus removal scripts through Windows Update, also free.
Bundle Windows Defender with Vista, and provide it as a free download for XP.
I used Windows Live OneCare for a while, and it seemed to work OK. But, it didn't really provide much above and beyond what the free stuff provides, and it would freak out if you didn't have automatic updates turned on (I prefer to screen my updates).
Robocopy works really well, and comes with Vista and up (works on XP, too). More of a bulk file copy than a sync, though.
Subversion may be overkill, but some nice free servers and clients exist for Windows. TortoiseSVN is a nice client that integrates with the shell; set up a server on a cheap home box and get a free dyndns alias.
Newer versions of SyncToy seem to work pretty well, and they're stupid simple, but I haven't used them on anything more than a flash drive's worth of data. Ditto for the built-in "briefcases."
The hardcore could use ImageX from the free WAIK, or even set up Windows Deployment Services, and create images of your entire machine. They're stored incrementally - the base image may be 50 GB, but every additional image will be tiny deltas.
Short answer: no, other than Active Directory roaming profiles.
On a more practical level, what's the incentive for a county level internet provider to charge $100 for installation if they only need $50 to cover the cost? What's the incentive for a for-profit organization to do the same thing?
It may only cost the for-profit ISP $50, but it might cost the public ISP $100 for the same hook-up. At least if the cost is too high, it doesn't sound like anyone will have to move - if they actually make a profit and pay back their bonds.
You say they'll have "no incentive to screw people over for money" - of course they will; they have interest to pay down. Or they'll have to levy taxes, in which case they have no incentive to improve anything whatsoever.
But, sometimes anything's an improvement over TDS.
They could design a DRM system that is generous on all counts, such that the average person has no pragmatic or material objection to its restrictions.
Steam! About the only thing you can't do with Steam DRM is sell it to somebody else, which doesn't bother a horder like me.
I'd argue the steam DRM actually adds value. I can download my entire library of games onto any computer I please without having to dig out the media, enter CD keys, or activate anything. It saves me from doing tech support for my PopCap-addicted extended family when they lose their install CDs.
I hear the next version of the Steam client will even kiss you goodnight. Probably.
*if* a ssd really costs ten times the equivalent hdd, which is not the case, you could just create a 10 disk raid array attaining speed AND capacity that ssd would dream of.
That'd be interesting. As others have pointed out, you wouldn't want to do a raid 0 - you'd probably loose all of your data within a year.
Raid 5 or raid 10 would be ideal, but you'd still be going through drives fairly frequently.
Also, as somebody else mentioned, the drive controller for that would be ridiculous. Also, completely worthless for laptops.
What normal people do is install the operating system and programs on the SSD and dump their petabyte anime collections elsewhere.
The "Malicious Software Removal Tool" is pushed through Windows Update. It's not meant to be a full-blown virus scanner, just an install script that will neuter a few of this month's viruses. It's created for the computer illiterates with no virus scanner in the hopes that they left Automatic Updates on.
Windows Defender was supposed to be a very basic, lightweight application to provide some warning that you're infected It's part of Windows Vista, installable on Windows XP, and has some nifty functions that fall between msconfig and HijackThis. I can't speak to it's detection rate, but our help desk has gotten a few calls from people who didn't realize they were infected until Windows Defender told them so.
Windows Live OneCare was their attempt at competing with Symantec or Network Associates. They bought the basic engine from some other company, saw that the entire thing was written in VB 6, facepalmed, and rewrote it as OneCare. It also helps with remote backups and whatnot.
They really shouldn't be all one product, as they serve completely different purposes. Although if they made Windows Defender a bit more powerful, they'd have an uninstallable version of Live Care.
I work help desk at a McAfee campus and am also responsible for doing repairs on student and faculty computers.
You have to register your computer using a special utility that records your MAC address and whether or not you have McAfee installed. In the mean time, you'll get an IP address from the "unregistered" block and the firewall won't let any of your traffic leave the LAN.
(Yes, this can be spoofed by wireshark-ing a registered person's MAC address, or even uninstalling McAfee after registering. But, that's beyond five nine's of students on campus.)
So, every computer on campus, student and faculty, has an updated version of McAfee 8.5i. Yet I spend an awful lot of time removing viruses from those computers throughout the year. Even AVG works better, for crying out loud!
We also use Faronics DeepFreeze on machines meant for student use; we're permitted to move McAfee from those machines because in theory virus infection is impossible. Those machines work about twice as fast as their unfrozen counterparts.
It's standard practice to not even try to boot up an infected machine because the more interesting infections do a good job of preventing most of your tools from running - it's easier to pop out the hard drive, hook it up to a USB->IDE/SATA adapter, and mount it on our help desk machine and do an offline scan.
We used to use McAfee for doing these offline scans - but then we realized it would take a few hours to scan the drive and would miss most of the infection. (If it's "spyware" or "adware" and not a bona-fide "virus" it won't detect it at all. Most of our infections are "XP Antivirus".)
It does NOTHING and makes the computer it's installed on unbearably slow. Plus, a site license seems to be rather costly. Our current routine is do a 30minute-ish offline scan using MalwareBytes, pop the hard drive back in, and run ComboFix or SpyBot SD to repair the registry. Most viruses are gone in about an hour - no thanks to McAfee.
Sorry for the rant! At least we aren't stuck with Symantec/Norton.
XP came out in 2001. DVDs were still fairly "new" and drives and burners were still expensive. I can forgive them for not bundling DVD playback.
You're forgetting, however, that Vista does include DVD playback software - works out of the box in WMP or Media Center. And that SP2 evidently added BluRay support - to my knowledge, not too many *nix include that by default.
(Yes, you can't really "license" it in a Free OS and cracking it looks like it's turning out to be difficultish.)
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I have a product to sell you for $infinity. I can guarantee that you won't find a better price.
Symantec provides a tool exactly for that purpose.
Norton never seems to uninstall correctly, and our campus requires McAfee. The tool is amazing - almost as amazing as if they had just written the installer correctly to begin with at any point over the past ten years...
Maybe they finished watching Gundam 00 a few seasons back.
They're building the space solar array without the giant space elevator. No terrorism problems, no defense treaty violations from hiding too many mecha to guard it.
URL shorteners are amazing whenever you have to write down a URL by hand, or read a web address to someone over the phone, or copying it between two computers (maps-dot-google-dot-com-slash-fivethousandlinesoftypoinducinggibberish).
Those are good reasons, but I can think of a few reasons why it would be a bad idea:
Would rebranding Firefox really be seen as a "good thing"? Or would /.ers see it as stealing?
IE is in some respects a more technically sophisticated browser. I'm talking about each tab in it's own sandboxed process. Also, to my knowledge there is no Firefox ActiveX control or COM interface or .NET assembly - there is no drop-in way to use Firefox in a Windows application.
Now, if MS *really* wanted to do something positive, they could open source IE.
uTorrent vs. Azureus.
Not even 7MB of memory usage with 10 torrents going.
Now, explain how the drag-and-drop .NET program even comes close to approaching the functionality of Firefox, or OpenOffice, or even uTorrent.
You're looking for the Enhanced Write Filter. It redirects all writes to RAM, meaning your changes are lost when you reboot. (Or you can have a shutdown script that commits changes to disk if you want.)
It's part of the XP Embedded SDK, so it's designed for things like letting you run XP from a ROM chip or from a CD-ROM. I use it on my netbook because having all writes trapped in memory makes it's cheap, slow SSD seem ridiculously fast.
Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be start with a complete dump of Wikipedia and add your own stuff to it. Their database dump page is here.
It is 2.8TB, however. They allude to a "Wikipedia API" for working on a "random subset" of Wikipedia; maybe that would be helpful too.
This empirically demonstrates that evolution isn't very useful for evolution. Duh.
My theory: If you build a bridge, and it falls over, you go to jail. Additionally, people die.
I guess the kinds of project managers described ("the know-it-all, the micromanager") that evidently exist in IT would all be felons in the bridge-building world. But dammit Jim, IANACE (I Am Not a Civil Engineer), nor a project manager, nor an IT manager.
I have a feeling you won't be writing a class in C.
Sure, ya can. Create a struct with function pointers. Ta da! Just very little language support for silly things like "inheritance" ... Call it "explicit polymorphism!"
Well, there probably won't be any decent use of DX11 (there's going to be an 11?!) for a while. There's not any decent use of DX10 or 10.1 yet, even though even the cheapest hardware has DX10 support.
The Only DX10 games that jump to mind are Crysis, Hellgate: London, and Age of Conan. Except Age of Conan never actually shipped their DX10 client to my knowledge. Kind of sad - DX10 is really shiny.
TL;DR. You lost me at complaining about having to type out the few extra bytes in "0.0.0.0" versus just "0". You realize Windows has to read the whole 4KB (or whatever) disk cluster anyways, right? And probably "read ahead" many more clusters to fill its buffer?
And why would you use GetTickCount() to time anything? Besides being inaccurate, all it's measuring is how long it takes to return focus to your program from the context switch it makes to do a hosts lookup.
I second the logitech G5. They're cheap, I love the adjustable weights, and just enough buttons for my taste. Middle-click for opening and closing tabs, and two side buttons for forward and back.
But, mousing in an IDE? Even in Visual Studio, the only button that gets any use is the left mouse button, and maybe the middle-click scrollwheel button for opening and closing tabs. Everything has a keyboard shortcut.
I'd recommend a good keyboard instead - I have an IBM Model M I whip on for nostalgia, but I'm very happy with my Das Keyboard II. THAT will make more difference in programming! Unless you're using Lego Mindstorms :P
Vista and onward come with a two-way firewall. (Start -> run -> wf.msc) The XP firewall (that they added in a service pack!) is just fine unless you're hosting internet services on you box. In which case, wtf are you doing.
As long as you let users run arbitrary code, you are always going to have virus problems. Last semester I removed DNS hijackers from 3 Mac OS X laptops at my college's help desk, despite how awesome BSD is.
I'd be more worried about Microsoft "charging for programs to fix the insecurities" if they didn't already:
I used Windows Live OneCare for a while, and it seemed to work OK. But, it didn't really provide much above and beyond what the free stuff provides, and it would freak out if you didn't have automatic updates turned on (I prefer to screen my updates).
That's why the Direct3D bit is a big deal. Direct3D is the 3D part of DirectX.
Also the 2D part as well; they nixed DirectDraw many moons ago. That is to say, it's the graphics part of DirectX. Big deal indeed!
Looks like you got modded "-1, Canadian." :P
Robocopy works really well, and comes with Vista and up (works on XP, too). More of a bulk file copy than a sync, though.
Subversion may be overkill, but some nice free servers and clients exist for Windows. TortoiseSVN is a nice client that integrates with the shell; set up a server on a cheap home box and get a free dyndns alias.
Newer versions of SyncToy seem to work pretty well, and they're stupid simple, but I haven't used them on anything more than a flash drive's worth of data. Ditto for the built-in "briefcases."
The hardcore could use ImageX from the free WAIK, or even set up Windows Deployment Services, and create images of your entire machine. They're stored incrementally - the base image may be 50 GB, but every additional image will be tiny deltas.
Short answer: no, other than Active Directory roaming profiles.
I thought "evade death" meant "make just enough money to afford today's ramen brick."
I guess the legacy thing makes more sense.
On a more practical level, what's the incentive for a county level internet provider to charge $100 for installation if they only need $50 to cover the cost? What's the incentive for a for-profit organization to do the same thing?
It may only cost the for-profit ISP $50, but it might cost the public ISP $100 for the same hook-up. At least if the cost is too high, it doesn't sound like anyone will have to move - if they actually make a profit and pay back their bonds.
You say they'll have "no incentive to screw people over for money" - of course they will; they have interest to pay down. Or they'll have to levy taxes, in which case they have no incentive to improve anything whatsoever.
But, sometimes anything's an improvement over TDS.
They could design a DRM system that is generous on all counts, such that the average person has no pragmatic or material objection to its restrictions.
Steam! About the only thing you can't do with Steam DRM is sell it to somebody else, which doesn't bother a horder like me.
I'd argue the steam DRM actually adds value. I can download my entire library of games onto any computer I please without having to dig out the media, enter CD keys, or activate anything. It saves me from doing tech support for my PopCap-addicted extended family when they lose their install CDs.
I hear the next version of the Steam client will even kiss you goodnight. Probably.
*if* a ssd really costs ten times the equivalent hdd, which is not the case, you could just create a 10 disk raid array attaining speed AND capacity that ssd would dream of.
That'd be interesting. As others have pointed out, you wouldn't want to do a raid 0 - you'd probably loose all of your data within a year.
Raid 5 or raid 10 would be ideal, but you'd still be going through drives fairly frequently.
Also, as somebody else mentioned, the drive controller for that would be ridiculous. Also, completely worthless for laptops.
What normal people do is install the operating system and programs on the SSD and dump their petabyte anime collections elsewhere.
The "Malicious Software Removal Tool" is pushed through Windows Update. It's not meant to be a full-blown virus scanner, just an install script that will neuter a few of this month's viruses. It's created for the computer illiterates with no virus scanner in the hopes that they left Automatic Updates on.
Windows Defender was supposed to be a very basic, lightweight application to provide some warning that you're infected It's part of Windows Vista, installable on Windows XP, and has some nifty functions that fall between msconfig and HijackThis. I can't speak to it's detection rate, but our help desk has gotten a few calls from people who didn't realize they were infected until Windows Defender told them so.
Windows Live OneCare was their attempt at competing with Symantec or Network Associates. They bought the basic engine from some other company, saw that the entire thing was written in VB 6, facepalmed, and rewrote it as OneCare. It also helps with remote backups and whatnot.
They really shouldn't be all one product, as they serve completely different purposes. Although if they made Windows Defender a bit more powerful, they'd have an uninstallable version of Live Care.
I second everything that you say about McAfee.
I work help desk at a McAfee campus and am also responsible for doing repairs on student and faculty computers.
You have to register your computer using a special utility that records your MAC address and whether or not you have McAfee installed. In the mean time, you'll get an IP address from the "unregistered" block and the firewall won't let any of your traffic leave the LAN.
(Yes, this can be spoofed by wireshark-ing a registered person's MAC address, or even uninstalling McAfee after registering. But, that's beyond five nine's of students on campus.)
So, every computer on campus, student and faculty, has an updated version of McAfee 8.5i. Yet I spend an awful lot of time removing viruses from those computers throughout the year. Even AVG works better, for crying out loud!
We also use Faronics DeepFreeze on machines meant for student use; we're permitted to move McAfee from those machines because in theory virus infection is impossible. Those machines work about twice as fast as their unfrozen counterparts.
It's standard practice to not even try to boot up an infected machine because the more interesting infections do a good job of preventing most of your tools from running - it's easier to pop out the hard drive, hook it up to a USB->IDE/SATA adapter, and mount it on our help desk machine and do an offline scan.
We used to use McAfee for doing these offline scans - but then we realized it would take a few hours to scan the drive and would miss most of the infection. (If it's "spyware" or "adware" and not a bona-fide "virus" it won't detect it at all. Most of our infections are "XP Antivirus".)
It does NOTHING and makes the computer it's installed on unbearably slow. Plus, a site license seems to be rather costly. Our current routine is do a 30minute-ish offline scan using MalwareBytes, pop the hard drive back in, and run ComboFix or SpyBot SD to repair the registry. Most viruses are gone in about an hour - no thanks to McAfee.
Sorry for the rant! At least we aren't stuck with Symantec/Norton.
XP came out in 2001. DVDs were still fairly "new" and drives and burners were still expensive. I can forgive them for not bundling DVD playback.
You're forgetting, however, that Vista does include DVD playback software - works out of the box in WMP or Media Center. And that SP2 evidently added BluRay support - to my knowledge, not too many *nix include that by default.
(Yes, you can't really "license" it in a Free OS and cracking it looks like it's turning out to be difficultish.)