With a debit card...if stolen and used...that money is gone then....and you don't get it back till YOU can prove it wasn't you. I don't like the idea of that latter situation, kinda like being guilty till proven innocent.
That isn't true. I had my debit card account compromised the other day. Wells Fargo gave me a credit for all of the contested charges as soon as I told them what was going on.
To be completely honest, there weren't very many good games on the Apple IIgs, other than the Sierra games (Kings Quest, Police Quest, etc.) All of the good games were on the PC. Each game required its own boot disk. Each boot disk required figuring out how to write autoexec.bat and config.sys files. After a while I actually enjoyed figuring out how much lower memory I could free up. I interviewed for a tech support job at Interplay when I was 15, and I answered all of their questions about how to properly configure systems to get the games running, but they didn't hire me because I was too young. I really only got the interview because a friend of mine worked there and we would stay after hours to play Command and Conquer and Quake on the LAN.
Anyway, I digress. I do argue that Linux is a better educational tool because of the command line. A GUI is really just an application that sits on top of the command line and hides what is going on beneath the surface. If kids are really going to understand the computer, they will do it through the command line. You could argue that such low level knowledge is obsolete, and you very well might be right. I think that everyone has different learning styles. I learned a lot about computers when it didn't work right. I learned a lot when I tweaked a file and all of a sudden the computer didn't boot. For me it was like a big puzzle, with a lot of intricate pieces. "Oh, you have to load EMM386 and THEN push things into high memory, but you need the HIMEM switch in config.sys to actually enable it." Things like that. The equivalent in Linux is building the kernel, and including only the parts that are necessary.
You very well may be right that modern OSes are too complex for the command line, 1980s approach to things. My own perceptions are probably blinded by my personal experiences. The command line was a real boon for my career. Comfort with the command line translated to comfort with *nix, comfort with Cisco IOS, comfort with COSMOS and comfort with System75. Most everything these days has a GUI, although I can't speak about 5ESS or whatever switches are being used these days, but they probably do too. These days tech support is a click away, and information is easily accessible. You're probably right. Kids shouldn't worry about playing around in the low levels of the system when the userland world is rich enough to keep them busy. Instead of learning a command line, they should probably be focused on APIs, object classes and the like.
The test environment doesn't have to exactly mimic the production environment. It just has to serve as a model. Lets say that in their test environment they move mailboxes around, and they find that it takes X minutes and Y amount of bandwidth to move Z amount of data. They can then take those calculations and extrapolate what will happen when the numbers change. We obviously don't have details involved, but the article mentions moving mailboxes and servers being overwhelmed by the amount of data moved.
I've seen Exchange infrastructures go down in similar scenarios. In theory, with Microsoft Exchange you can select thousands of mailboxes and move them all at once from one server to another, even if the two servers are only connected by a 128kbps link. The reality of the situation is that you want to move significantly smaller chunks of data.
I'm sure that there are a lot of smart people at Google who realized where they f'd up and have made the necessary changes to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Just for the sake of discussion, where do you see the evolution going? Somewhat related, what evolution have you seen in the last ten years that wasn't just an incremental advance on already established technology? Or maybe not ten years, but twenty years, going back to the late-1980s / early 1990s.
Consider a theoretical patent of, "Returning queried information from a database". Imagine how many applications have been developed that use that methodology. Every post displayed on Slashdot uses that. Every email shown in Gmail uses that. Just about any information presented on the Internet uses some iteration of that basic idea.
If Microsoft has just a small handful of core computing patents like that, they are set for as long as people are using computers to organize and share their data.
A lot of software leverages office. For example, a company I did some consulting work for rolled out a document imaging solution. The solution hooks into Office and other Windows apps (mostly the financial software). For example, they can pull up a scanned check and from that check, go straight into the corresponding vendor record, AP invoice, etc. There are annoying little hooks like that written into all sorts of Windows applications. The same functionality can be reproduced in OSS (after all, code is just code), but there is a significant cost involved in reinventing the wheel and customizing OSS. Look at it from the point of view of the document imaging software developer. What platform do they target? OpenOffice? StarOffice? Some other office suite? What happens when OpenOffice gets upgraded, but StarOffice doesn't? Does the developer now support two seperate releases of their software? Do they tell the StarOffice users, "Sorry, you're assed out of all the new features we develop using the new OpenOffice functionality."?
I know that it's always silly to try to predict the future, but here I go none the less. For the most part, all of the core computing applications have already been developed. Unless business processes change significantly, there are only so many systems that a company will ever need to deploy. There will be word processing applications, spreadsheets, databases, webpages, file servers, print servers and a slew of other devices. However the core of the network and the computing environment will remain rather static. Over the last decade, Microsoft developed a lot of core business applications in the form of Windows, Windows Server, Office and Exchange. As the room for innovation in the IT world shrinks, Microsoft will have to fall back to the patent portfolio. If their lawyers were smart, they patented every single technology that they could with the foreknowledge that sooner or later, someone else would want to develop software to do the same thing.
I think we are going to see Microsoft leveraging their patents more and more aggressively as time goes on. They have poured untold billions of dollars in R&D. It seems to me like they need to pursue patent litigation to generate some sort of ROI on all those R&D dollars.
The first thing that came to mind when reading the article is, "They were 'testing' code in a fscking production environment?!" Then I realized that Gmail is still a beta app. I think these things are to be expected from beta software. What I'm curious about is whether or not corporate users who are paying for Gmail were effected as well. If so, then Google better get their ducks in a row, and fast. It's one thing to play around with your servers when people aren't paying you for uptime. It's another thing entirely to test code on a production network.
The sales don't matter so much as the mind share. When I started using Linux, it was lagging behind what Windows could do. By that I mean that it lacked the application support. At this point they are almost equal. The major reason that Microsoft continues to exist is because of their application lock-in. For a lot of organizations, it is just too painful change to anything that isn't Windows. However as new companies come online, and new generations of people use computers, they will find that Linux provides the same kind of tools as Windows does, and those tools are often times a fraction of the price. A teacher doesn't care what program a student used to create a paper with. The teacher just cares that it is double spaced and turned in on time. A small business owner doesn't care if his computers run Outlook, he cares that he can email his employees.
Microsoft gained prominence because they provided businesses with the tools that they needed. They provided those tools in a relatively easy to use format. Because they were one of the very few providers of the tools, they prospered. I think what we are going to see is that they have squandered their lead. There really aren't very many more "killer apps" to be invented. This is completely opinion, but I think SharePoint is going to be Microsoft's last hurrah. It is their last chance to get organizations tied into a single, unified respository for all of their content. SharePoint is like a Wiki on steroids, but it doesn't necessarily need to be a proprietary Microsoft technology. They have the benefit of being able to easily integrate their Office Suite with SharePoint. As a proprietary vendor, they have the benefit of being able to issue edicts to their developers and align a lot of resources toward a common goal. Accomplishing the same thing in OSS land would take a lot of coordination and would probably require an outfit like IBM or the like to develop a competing project. Anyway, I digress...
Microsoft is smart to be worried about Linux, but not so much in the near term. "Developing markets" (read, anywhere outside of the US/EU) are all over Linux because it works with their budgets. Venture capitalists are all over Linux because it provides a foundation for them to build companies on. Linux application support is getting better every day. Just take a look at Zimbra. Now, I'm not about to scrap MY Exchange servers and migrate my users to Zimbra. But if I were a small business owner and I needed email for my company, I wouldn't even be looking at the cost of Exchange licenses.
When I was a kid, I had an Apple IIgs and a DOS box. The Apple was a nice machine, but the DOS box felt a lot more like a computer. At the time, I had a full instruction manual for DOS. That manual included descriptions of all the COM and EXE files on the system, their switches and examples of how to use them. Apple lacks that raw computing experience. It is there in the terminal window, but you don't need to go there to use the OS. Linux on the other hand still has that natural and exposed underbelly that geek kids can get into. Some kids are curious and those kids like figuring out how things work. Those kids don't need mommy and daddy to shell out $1000 for a computer that runs OSX because they can get Linux for free and run it on a 486. Those kids are a lot more likely to go a school that will move toward open source as a cost saving measure, as opposed to a school that will come up with a lot of money to pay the Apple tax.
If I were Microsoft and I was focused on the next generation of geeks, I'd be scared shitless of Linux.
I've found that the Apple upgrades suck in a different way. Most of the time the OS itself upgrades just fine. The problems come about when the applications themselves then fail to work. I think that sooner or later, everyone who has worked with computers for long enough learns that, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Just because a new version comes out doesn't mean that you need to get rid of the old one. Of course that mindset is the antithesis of Microsoft's business model, and that's where a lot the friction comes from.
It doesn't matter what the OS is, be it Windows, OSX or *nix. Sooner or later an update will be applied, and there will be a version incompatibility with some app on the system and blammo... time to restore from backups because the stupid thing won't boot anymore. Or it boots but some random "business critical application" won't load. Or the stupid app loads, but every time you try to commit a transaction, it borks... or... or... or... You get the idea.
The article spells it out. People who haven't applied the security patch that Microsoft released months ago are vulnerable. The rest of the world are just fine. So like usual, it comes down to the poor home users who get screwed while the corporate networks who actually have admins doing their job maintaining them are doing just fine. Luckily things are better and only the subset of home users who don't have automatic updates turned on are screwed.
But I'd expect there are literally millions of coders still kicking around from the 80s/90s who did assembly programming under MS-DOS who would be able to write that kind of code - and because it isn't really really skilled work the chances are high that a significant proportion of those developers are unemployed.
That's right. I cut my teeth on x86 ASM cracking warez and writing virii. Programming never really grabbed my attention though. All things considered it was much too dry and structured. I didn't want to spend my life writing functions and low level code. Push to stack, pop from stack, xor, nop, znj, blah blah blah. Once Microsoft came out with Win95 and started to cut off direct calls to the CPU, my rudimentary ASM skills become more or less obsolete.
I'm still predicting that sooner or later, Apple via OSX is going to see a huge outbreak of malware. An x86 CPU is an x86 CPU. It will run the same low level code, whether that code is executed through Windows or OSX. It just seems like Apple has done a slightly better job of controlling access to the hardware than Microsoft has. The payloads are all ready to go. Someone just needs to find a chink in the armor. Once Apple gets enough market share to make it worth while, those chinks will be found. Until then, everyone will keep going after the low-hanging fruit that are the Windows boxen.
This is just a wild ass guess on my part, but I'm willing to bet that the problem is that they are trying to UPGRADE them. Anyone who has dealt with Microsoft OS's knows that the upgrades suck. To do a proper upgrade in the Microsoft world, you need to do what everyone else calls a "pave and rebuild". I don't know anyone in their right mind who tries to do an in place upgrade on Windows. That is just asking for headaches. They'd be better off doing a fresh install, creating a disk image from that and then pushing out the image. If Microsoft really cared about their userbase, they would just do away with "upgrades" all together and just admit that they don't work right. The same thing goes for their server software, Exchange, SQL, the whole nine yards.
What's the stigma with Crystal Reports? I have been using the program for years and it is a great, dynamic reporting tool that can pull data from just about any data source out there. I've run into numerous situations where knowing Crystal Reports was an asset.
How else do you guys get data out of your databases and format it for consumption by upper management?
It really sucks to get paid $75 an hour to use an easy to use program. The person with the sucky life is the person who posts anonymously on the internet in attempts to put other people down.
Re:It propably won't..
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Linked In Or Out?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I just joined LinkedIn because of a job prospect that came up. Our phone system vendor wants me to design some Crystal Reports for them. She has a profile on there and has over 200 contacts. She is big on networking, online or otherwise. It's only a matter of time before I'm "Crystal Reports guy" in her social network. Like the OP, I generally try to stay away from Myspace, Facebook and the like. I made the exception in this case because someone who is offering me work told me that I could find even more work if I create a profile on there. My perspective on it at this point is that it can't hurt and it might help.
How does the government actually monitor the compliance with the law? Do they have the right to subpoena financial records from any company doing business in any other state or country? Or does the tax just apply to online businesses that operate from ISPs physically located in Wisconsin? Does it fall on the merchant to recognize that an order is being shipped to WI, and then they withhold the appropriate tax and voluntarily send it to the state? If that's the case... hahahahahaha... good luck with that one, especially if there isn't an effective enforcement mechanism in place.
As another example, I use Firefox to browse to Slashdot because the site renders like shit in IE7. Otherwise, I use IE7 as my default browser because it gets the job done and works just fine. Having to change browsers to access a specific site isn't the end of the world. If the content is compelling, I will do what I need to do to access that content.
Here's an anecdote for your anecdote. At the company I work at, we have a corporate account through Wells Fargo. A good portion of the staff needs to access a specific site on Wells Fargo to monitor their company credit card transactions and other things. (I'm just in IT, I don't know the exact functionality.) Wells Fargo designed the site so that it doesn't work in IE6. We updated everyone to IE7. It's that simple. As long as there is a business need to update, the update will take place. Our update took place almost two years at this point and as a benefit, the users are using a more secure web browser. FWIW, the majority of our users are on Firefox as their default browser.
The point I'm trying to make is that action needs to come from the web community. It needs to come from the people designing the sites. If Wells Fargo can give the finger to their corporate clients and require a specific browser, so can everyone else. It's not like we were going to move all our financial accounts away from Wells Fargo because they made our users use a more secure browser.
It goes back to the original point. How much do you really expect for a one time fee of $3? Who said anything about enduring? Ten years ago, the band would have just released a four track CD with their previously unreleased music on it for $3. Today you get access to their unreleased tracks, you get access to the rest of their tracks, and you get some sort of portal with information about tour dates and other band specific stuff (I haven't read the article, I'm just going on the comments that other people have posted). WTF do you honestly expect? Where are you coming up with this "to endure it has to..." crap from? Who said anything about enduring? It's $3.
Things that I spent about $3 in the last 24 hours...
Slice of pizza. That endured about 5 minutes. Bottle of water. The endured a couple of hours. Gallon of gas. That endured about 25 miles. Starbucks coffee. That lasted about 20 minutes.
How long is $3 spent on a stupid iTunes app going to last in relation to other things that cost a similar amount of money in our culture? How much longer than those other things does it have to last until it becomes a good deal?
From what you've posted, it sounds like you want something that you would have to pay a subscription for. If I were to suggest that, you'd say, "Why would I subscribe to music when I can just download it and have it forever?" Fine. If you're not willing to a monthly fee, don't expect it to be around forever. If you want it to be around forever, realize the cost of "forever" is more than $3.
What if the app is just the first, beta release of a product that for all we know, three years from now could be bought by a major independent label, and used as a portal to hundreds of bands? You're one of those glass half empty types aren't you?
If a band that I liked wanted to charge me $3 to listen to any of the music that they've put out, I'd do it. That is a whole lot cheaper than buying a bunch of CDs or individual tracks.
These apps and similar things aren't meant to be everything for everyone. This one obviously isn't even aimed at you. You want more than they are willing to provide for $3. Okay. And?
On the other hand it seems perfectly targetted at the "What do I want to spend my allowance on?" demographic. It's like Ringtone 2.0. The band of the month gets to make $3 from a bunch of junior high school kids with rich parents who can afford to buy them iPhones.
What do you expect for $3 measely dollars? Maybe the band should come to your house with signed copies of all the music you have access to and load it onto your computer, your kid's computers, and maybe even take your wife out for coffee? I mean damn... You did give them three whole dollars!
If you want to listen to the music on the computer, pay for it from the iTunes store. If you want it in portable format, pay for the CD. Or hell, don't pay for anything and just steal it like everyone else does.
I think I need to take a step away from/. because if I see one more person write a post about, "I expect the world for less than a Chinese sweatshop worker gets paid in a day.", I'm going to freak the fuck out.
Althought a lot people like to complain about IE6 sucking, it takes an organization standing up and taking action to actually change things. Microsoft, like the record companies, and all the other "evil" organizations out there will only continue to shovel shit if people continue to consume it. IE7 has been out for a while at this point and there isn't any reason for anyone to be running IE6. It takes action from the community to change things. The community needs to say, "We aren't going to support IE6 because it sucks. Here, run this other browser that works great."
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That isn't true. I had my debit card account compromised the other day. Wells Fargo gave me a credit for all of the contested charges as soon as I told them what was going on.
To be completely honest, there weren't very many good games on the Apple IIgs, other than the Sierra games (Kings Quest, Police Quest, etc.) All of the good games were on the PC. Each game required its own boot disk. Each boot disk required figuring out how to write autoexec.bat and config.sys files. After a while I actually enjoyed figuring out how much lower memory I could free up. I interviewed for a tech support job at Interplay when I was 15, and I answered all of their questions about how to properly configure systems to get the games running, but they didn't hire me because I was too young. I really only got the interview because a friend of mine worked there and we would stay after hours to play Command and Conquer and Quake on the LAN.
Anyway, I digress. I do argue that Linux is a better educational tool because of the command line. A GUI is really just an application that sits on top of the command line and hides what is going on beneath the surface. If kids are really going to understand the computer, they will do it through the command line. You could argue that such low level knowledge is obsolete, and you very well might be right. I think that everyone has different learning styles. I learned a lot about computers when it didn't work right. I learned a lot when I tweaked a file and all of a sudden the computer didn't boot. For me it was like a big puzzle, with a lot of intricate pieces. "Oh, you have to load EMM386 and THEN push things into high memory, but you need the HIMEM switch in config.sys to actually enable it." Things like that. The equivalent in Linux is building the kernel, and including only the parts that are necessary.
You very well may be right that modern OSes are too complex for the command line, 1980s approach to things. My own perceptions are probably blinded by my personal experiences. The command line was a real boon for my career. Comfort with the command line translated to comfort with *nix, comfort with Cisco IOS, comfort with COSMOS and comfort with System75. Most everything these days has a GUI, although I can't speak about 5ESS or whatever switches are being used these days, but they probably do too. These days tech support is a click away, and information is easily accessible. You're probably right. Kids shouldn't worry about playing around in the low levels of the system when the userland world is rich enough to keep them busy. Instead of learning a command line, they should probably be focused on APIs, object classes and the like.
The test environment doesn't have to exactly mimic the production environment. It just has to serve as a model. Lets say that in their test environment they move mailboxes around, and they find that it takes X minutes and Y amount of bandwidth to move Z amount of data. They can then take those calculations and extrapolate what will happen when the numbers change. We obviously don't have details involved, but the article mentions moving mailboxes and servers being overwhelmed by the amount of data moved.
I've seen Exchange infrastructures go down in similar scenarios. In theory, with Microsoft Exchange you can select thousands of mailboxes and move them all at once from one server to another, even if the two servers are only connected by a 128kbps link. The reality of the situation is that you want to move significantly smaller chunks of data.
I'm sure that there are a lot of smart people at Google who realized where they f'd up and have made the necessary changes to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Just for the sake of discussion, where do you see the evolution going? Somewhat related, what evolution have you seen in the last ten years that wasn't just an incremental advance on already established technology? Or maybe not ten years, but twenty years, going back to the late-1980s / early 1990s.
Consider a theoretical patent of, "Returning queried information from a database". Imagine how many applications have been developed that use that methodology. Every post displayed on Slashdot uses that. Every email shown in Gmail uses that. Just about any information presented on the Internet uses some iteration of that basic idea.
If Microsoft has just a small handful of core computing patents like that, they are set for as long as people are using computers to organize and share their data.
A lot of software leverages office. For example, a company I did some consulting work for rolled out a document imaging solution. The solution hooks into Office and other Windows apps (mostly the financial software). For example, they can pull up a scanned check and from that check, go straight into the corresponding vendor record, AP invoice, etc. There are annoying little hooks like that written into all sorts of Windows applications. The same functionality can be reproduced in OSS (after all, code is just code), but there is a significant cost involved in reinventing the wheel and customizing OSS. Look at it from the point of view of the document imaging software developer. What platform do they target? OpenOffice? StarOffice? Some other office suite? What happens when OpenOffice gets upgraded, but StarOffice doesn't? Does the developer now support two seperate releases of their software? Do they tell the StarOffice users, "Sorry, you're assed out of all the new features we develop using the new OpenOffice functionality."?
I know that it's always silly to try to predict the future, but here I go none the less. For the most part, all of the core computing applications have already been developed. Unless business processes change significantly, there are only so many systems that a company will ever need to deploy. There will be word processing applications, spreadsheets, databases, webpages, file servers, print servers and a slew of other devices. However the core of the network and the computing environment will remain rather static. Over the last decade, Microsoft developed a lot of core business applications in the form of Windows, Windows Server, Office and Exchange. As the room for innovation in the IT world shrinks, Microsoft will have to fall back to the patent portfolio. If their lawyers were smart, they patented every single technology that they could with the foreknowledge that sooner or later, someone else would want to develop software to do the same thing.
I think we are going to see Microsoft leveraging their patents more and more aggressively as time goes on. They have poured untold billions of dollars in R&D. It seems to me like they need to pursue patent litigation to generate some sort of ROI on all those R&D dollars.
The first thing that came to mind when reading the article is, "They were 'testing' code in a fscking production environment?!" Then I realized that Gmail is still a beta app. I think these things are to be expected from beta software. What I'm curious about is whether or not corporate users who are paying for Gmail were effected as well. If so, then Google better get their ducks in a row, and fast. It's one thing to play around with your servers when people aren't paying you for uptime. It's another thing entirely to test code on a production network.
The sales don't matter so much as the mind share. When I started using Linux, it was lagging behind what Windows could do. By that I mean that it lacked the application support. At this point they are almost equal. The major reason that Microsoft continues to exist is because of their application lock-in. For a lot of organizations, it is just too painful change to anything that isn't Windows. However as new companies come online, and new generations of people use computers, they will find that Linux provides the same kind of tools as Windows does, and those tools are often times a fraction of the price. A teacher doesn't care what program a student used to create a paper with. The teacher just cares that it is double spaced and turned in on time. A small business owner doesn't care if his computers run Outlook, he cares that he can email his employees.
Microsoft gained prominence because they provided businesses with the tools that they needed. They provided those tools in a relatively easy to use format. Because they were one of the very few providers of the tools, they prospered. I think what we are going to see is that they have squandered their lead. There really aren't very many more "killer apps" to be invented. This is completely opinion, but I think SharePoint is going to be Microsoft's last hurrah. It is their last chance to get organizations tied into a single, unified respository for all of their content. SharePoint is like a Wiki on steroids, but it doesn't necessarily need to be a proprietary Microsoft technology. They have the benefit of being able to easily integrate their Office Suite with SharePoint. As a proprietary vendor, they have the benefit of being able to issue edicts to their developers and align a lot of resources toward a common goal. Accomplishing the same thing in OSS land would take a lot of coordination and would probably require an outfit like IBM or the like to develop a competing project. Anyway, I digress...
Microsoft is smart to be worried about Linux, but not so much in the near term. "Developing markets" (read, anywhere outside of the US/EU) are all over Linux because it works with their budgets. Venture capitalists are all over Linux because it provides a foundation for them to build companies on. Linux application support is getting better every day. Just take a look at Zimbra. Now, I'm not about to scrap MY Exchange servers and migrate my users to Zimbra. But if I were a small business owner and I needed email for my company, I wouldn't even be looking at the cost of Exchange licenses.
When I was a kid, I had an Apple IIgs and a DOS box. The Apple was a nice machine, but the DOS box felt a lot more like a computer. At the time, I had a full instruction manual for DOS. That manual included descriptions of all the COM and EXE files on the system, their switches and examples of how to use them. Apple lacks that raw computing experience. It is there in the terminal window, but you don't need to go there to use the OS. Linux on the other hand still has that natural and exposed underbelly that geek kids can get into. Some kids are curious and those kids like figuring out how things work. Those kids don't need mommy and daddy to shell out $1000 for a computer that runs OSX because they can get Linux for free and run it on a 486. Those kids are a lot more likely to go a school that will move toward open source as a cost saving measure, as opposed to a school that will come up with a lot of money to pay the Apple tax.
If I were Microsoft and I was focused on the next generation of geeks, I'd be scared shitless of Linux.
I've found that the Apple upgrades suck in a different way. Most of the time the OS itself upgrades just fine. The problems come about when the applications themselves then fail to work. I think that sooner or later, everyone who has worked with computers for long enough learns that, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Just because a new version comes out doesn't mean that you need to get rid of the old one. Of course that mindset is the antithesis of Microsoft's business model, and that's where a lot the friction comes from.
It doesn't matter what the OS is, be it Windows, OSX or *nix. Sooner or later an update will be applied, and there will be a version incompatibility with some app on the system and blammo... time to restore from backups because the stupid thing won't boot anymore. Or it boots but some random "business critical application" won't load. Or the stupid app loads, but every time you try to commit a transaction, it borks... or... or... or... You get the idea.
The article spells it out. People who haven't applied the security patch that Microsoft released months ago are vulnerable. The rest of the world are just fine. So like usual, it comes down to the poor home users who get screwed while the corporate networks who actually have admins doing their job maintaining them are doing just fine. Luckily things are better and only the subset of home users who don't have automatic updates turned on are screwed.
But I'd expect there are literally millions of coders still kicking around from the 80s/90s who did assembly programming under MS-DOS who would be able to write that kind of code - and because it isn't really really skilled work the chances are high that a significant proportion of those developers are unemployed.
That's right. I cut my teeth on x86 ASM cracking warez and writing virii. Programming never really grabbed my attention though. All things considered it was much too dry and structured. I didn't want to spend my life writing functions and low level code. Push to stack, pop from stack, xor, nop, znj, blah blah blah. Once Microsoft came out with Win95 and started to cut off direct calls to the CPU, my rudimentary ASM skills become more or less obsolete.
I'm still predicting that sooner or later, Apple via OSX is going to see a huge outbreak of malware. An x86 CPU is an x86 CPU. It will run the same low level code, whether that code is executed through Windows or OSX. It just seems like Apple has done a slightly better job of controlling access to the hardware than Microsoft has. The payloads are all ready to go. Someone just needs to find a chink in the armor. Once Apple gets enough market share to make it worth while, those chinks will be found. Until then, everyone will keep going after the low-hanging fruit that are the Windows boxen.
This is just a wild ass guess on my part, but I'm willing to bet that the problem is that they are trying to UPGRADE them. Anyone who has dealt with Microsoft OS's knows that the upgrades suck. To do a proper upgrade in the Microsoft world, you need to do what everyone else calls a "pave and rebuild". I don't know anyone in their right mind who tries to do an in place upgrade on Windows. That is just asking for headaches. They'd be better off doing a fresh install, creating a disk image from that and then pushing out the image. If Microsoft really cared about their userbase, they would just do away with "upgrades" all together and just admit that they don't work right. The same thing goes for their server software, Exchange, SQL, the whole nine yards.
Like IE, Firefox and Chrome are also free for the end user. What is the cost to the OEM beyond developing the disk image with the alternative browser?
What's the stigma with Crystal Reports? I have been using the program for years and it is a great, dynamic reporting tool that can pull data from just about any data source out there. I've run into numerous situations where knowing Crystal Reports was an asset.
How else do you guys get data out of your databases and format it for consumption by upper management?
It really sucks to get paid $75 an hour to use an easy to use program. The person with the sucky life is the person who posts anonymously on the internet in attempts to put other people down.
I just joined LinkedIn because of a job prospect that came up. Our phone system vendor wants me to design some Crystal Reports for them. She has a profile on there and has over 200 contacts. She is big on networking, online or otherwise. It's only a matter of time before I'm "Crystal Reports guy" in her social network. Like the OP, I generally try to stay away from Myspace, Facebook and the like. I made the exception in this case because someone who is offering me work told me that I could find even more work if I create a profile on there. My perspective on it at this point is that it can't hurt and it might help.
How does the government actually monitor the compliance with the law? Do they have the right to subpoena financial records from any company doing business in any other state or country? Or does the tax just apply to online businesses that operate from ISPs physically located in Wisconsin? Does it fall on the merchant to recognize that an order is being shipped to WI, and then they withhold the appropriate tax and voluntarily send it to the state? If that's the case... hahahahahaha... good luck with that one, especially if there isn't an effective enforcement mechanism in place.
As another example, I use Firefox to browse to Slashdot because the site renders like shit in IE7. Otherwise, I use IE7 as my default browser because it gets the job done and works just fine. Having to change browsers to access a specific site isn't the end of the world. If the content is compelling, I will do what I need to do to access that content.
Here's an anecdote for your anecdote. At the company I work at, we have a corporate account through Wells Fargo. A good portion of the staff needs to access a specific site on Wells Fargo to monitor their company credit card transactions and other things. (I'm just in IT, I don't know the exact functionality.) Wells Fargo designed the site so that it doesn't work in IE6. We updated everyone to IE7. It's that simple. As long as there is a business need to update, the update will take place. Our update took place almost two years at this point and as a benefit, the users are using a more secure web browser. FWIW, the majority of our users are on Firefox as their default browser.
The point I'm trying to make is that action needs to come from the web community. It needs to come from the people designing the sites. If Wells Fargo can give the finger to their corporate clients and require a specific browser, so can everyone else. It's not like we were going to move all our financial accounts away from Wells Fargo because they made our users use a more secure browser.
It goes back to the original point. How much do you really expect for a one time fee of $3? Who said anything about enduring? Ten years ago, the band would have just released a four track CD with their previously unreleased music on it for $3. Today you get access to their unreleased tracks, you get access to the rest of their tracks, and you get some sort of portal with information about tour dates and other band specific stuff (I haven't read the article, I'm just going on the comments that other people have posted). WTF do you honestly expect? Where are you coming up with this "to endure it has to..." crap from? Who said anything about enduring? It's $3.
Things that I spent about $3 in the last 24 hours...
Slice of pizza. That endured about 5 minutes.
Bottle of water. The endured a couple of hours.
Gallon of gas. That endured about 25 miles.
Starbucks coffee. That lasted about 20 minutes.
How long is $3 spent on a stupid iTunes app going to last in relation to other things that cost a similar amount of money in our culture? How much longer than those other things does it have to last until it becomes a good deal?
From what you've posted, it sounds like you want something that you would have to pay a subscription for. If I were to suggest that, you'd say, "Why would I subscribe to music when I can just download it and have it forever?" Fine. If you're not willing to a monthly fee, don't expect it to be around forever. If you want it to be around forever, realize the cost of "forever" is more than $3.
What if the app is just the first, beta release of a product that for all we know, three years from now could be bought by a major independent label, and used as a portal to hundreds of bands? You're one of those glass half empty types aren't you?
If a band that I liked wanted to charge me $3 to listen to any of the music that they've put out, I'd do it. That is a whole lot cheaper than buying a bunch of CDs or individual tracks.
These apps and similar things aren't meant to be everything for everyone. This one obviously isn't even aimed at you. You want more than they are willing to provide for $3. Okay. And?
On the other hand it seems perfectly targetted at the "What do I want to spend my allowance on?" demographic. It's like Ringtone 2.0. The band of the month gets to make $3 from a bunch of junior high school kids with rich parents who can afford to buy them iPhones.
What do you expect for $3 measely dollars? Maybe the band should come to your house with signed copies of all the music you have access to and load it onto your computer, your kid's computers, and maybe even take your wife out for coffee? I mean damn... You did give them three whole dollars!
If you want to listen to the music on the computer, pay for it from the iTunes store. If you want it in portable format, pay for the CD. Or hell, don't pay for anything and just steal it like everyone else does.
I think I need to take a step away from /. because if I see one more person write a post about, "I expect the world for less than a Chinese sweatshop worker gets paid in a day.", I'm going to freak the fuck out.
Althought a lot people like to complain about IE6 sucking, it takes an organization standing up and taking action to actually change things. Microsoft, like the record companies, and all the other "evil" organizations out there will only continue to shovel shit if people continue to consume it. IE7 has been out for a while at this point and there isn't any reason for anyone to be running IE6. It takes action from the community to change things. The community needs to say, "We aren't going to support IE6 because it sucks. Here, run this other browser that works great."