While I agree with your post, I think it could be summed up in another way; the only way identity theft is going to go away is when it is no longer a lucrative venture.
Yeah, but you guys also get games that I wish I could get here in the US. European game developers tend to gives games much better plot lines than the US game developers. For instance, I love the X series, and I had to scour the local games shops to find a copy of X2 and X3. Games with plots just don't sell as well here as games with explosions. Give me a well thought out plot before explosions, I say. That means I'm usually relying on German and UK based companies to deliver the goods.
Troll? OK, give me the benefit of the doubt and defend them for installing rootkits on customers computers and give me one reason why I should take up the practice since it seems most people here really could care less. The fact that it happened a long time ago doesn't mean a thing. It was a predetermined malicious action... yet you defend them. Why? Give a single reason that it's ok and justifiable.
I just know there's a great rootkit joke somewhere in this.
Seriously, though, I'm a Software Development major; I don't care if it's free. I'll not be writing code that helps Sony. And that's coming from someone who jumped on student Visual Studio offerings from Microsoft... while running three Linux boxes, a BSD, and a Mac box in addition to XP. I'm not a platform snob or (much of) an elitist, but I simply can't ignore the fact that Sony has tainted my profession by actually having the sheer gall to ship CDs with rootkits. I know they're separate divisions of Sony and all, but it's hard to make that distinction from far away, watching them get away with murder at the expense of the computer illiterate or trusting ignorant. I don't know how you can feel good about supporting their platform if you're a software developer. Maybe I'm too emotional about it, and I'll get thicker skin over the years, but I certainly hope not.
I'll be 24 this week. I don't think you quite understand. We know how bad it is, but there's almost an unspoken understanding that the best way to fight back is just... not care. Really. Think about it. What can you hold over the head of someone who doesn't care? What use is power or position if no one bothers to listen to you? We saw the gen-xers get screwed, and we realized that well... there isn't going to be anything left anyways. It wouldn't sting so much had the boomers not told us what radical free thinkers they were (before the sold out).
I spoke to someone a few months ago who basically said, "Man, we've abused the economy and now it's going to come back and bite us." Who's us? One of us is going to be walking in to this economy right out of college, the other is musing about it in retrospect while only the value of his paid off house goes down (staying mostly relative to inflation). At least have the common decency to pretend to be ashamed that you're telling me your generation drank all the beer before ours even got to the party!
If you've ever seen SLC Punk, you'll understand the sentiment in the opening scene where the narrator does a voice over to the video of himself eating breakfast by putting Cheerios in a dirty bowl and pouring beer in it, "...We were educated college graduates... the only way that we could find to fight 'The Man' was to waste our educated brains." Seriously, we're reminded daily that things are becoming worse and worse. We have nothing and it's worth less every day, while we listen to the boomers spending all the money while complaining that taxes are so high. Give us a break. Seriously.
Don't pass the baton to the Xers as screwed up as it is and even try to give them advice. That's just condescending. And stop wondering why we show no sign of caring. There's not going to be anything left to care about. And for those of my generation that really don't care because they don't know, are you going to hold it against them that they bought in to your generations marketing speak, "have whatever you want, whenever you want it; you don't even have to have the cash for it!" Everyone can be a rockstar or a basketball player, and driving a Porche will make you cool. Isn't this the generation you've created? Isn't the entire focus on money and power while not having the common sense or good taste to handle either on their own, let alone both at the same time? If we take everything too seriously, we'll become the same sell outs. Why should we put down our 'texting'? We're talking to our friends. Friendship has value. Take it from me, my best friend died when we were 20 (he was two days younger than me). What should we be doing? Working over time for a company that will throw us out on a whim? No thanks. We'd rather be hanging out with our broke, lazy, underachieving friends any day of the week. Which makes sense when you consider that everything else in our lives has an increasing marginal value. I spend every dollar I get on tools that increase my training since that has long term value, while saving up my cash to be screwed by a bank and then double whammied by inflation and facing outsourcing seems like a losing proposition to me. Just for the record, I work hard and I play hard.
I also apologize for my statement being US centric (Actually, western centric might be more accurate... the declaration of independence did borrow quite a few ideas from European government, ie magna carta, etc., IIRC - I'm no history buff) in advance.
This would be a good question for the candidates (I apologize for my US-centric point of view, but the idea applies everywhere), and not just the presidential ones.
Can we gather a list like this and ask candidates to comment on it, like the groups interested in abortion or taxes or the environment do? Or is that outside the scope of/.?
Why not, man? "We the people" are supposedly running this gig. So long as you aren't breaking the law (or understood social contracts... it's the spirit of the law, not the letter that really counts), you can start any group you want. And the beauty of it is that I can, too if I disagree. Not that I disagree with what you've proposed, but, for arguments sake, I could. I mean, we only have the internet at our finger tips and all the power that entails. If the hippies (ugh, can't stand hippies, I'm not sure I want to make this comparison) could get somewhat mobilized using bullhorns and actually putting stuff on paper, we'd have to screw it up fairly well to do worse than them. I don't see eye-to-eye with them, and their welcome to their stances, but I do recognize the 'hackmanship' that they had to pull off to make the technology at hand work.
Or it could be an Epic Failure. Does anyone remember Diakatana? I think it had to sell 100,000 copies to break even or something. The reviews that I read for it were much less than favorable.
Sometimes you just have to accept that "it didn't come together", suck it up and either release it or scrap it. Especially when it comes to games; bit rot happens too quickly with todays technology. I mean, the production of DNF has covered what, three or four generations of both software and hardware?
That being said, I'll probably buy a copy either way. I don't really play FPS much any more (I've got a never played copy of FEAR sitting on the shelf from two years ago... hacking code and messing with Linux has become my hobby), but this game has nostalgic value to me since I played DN3D when I was a kid.
You mean, when you installed it? I haven't tried it with AVG at the same time... sounds like too many cooks in the kitchen. I'm running AVG at home, I'll give this a shot tonight and verify it.
I take it your company doesn't have many software developers or accountants (using obscure/internal accounting packages). Seriously, I gave a half hearted attempt at not running as an admin, but it makes my life impossible when I'm constantly writing code and testing things.
This morning I got to work and had to update VMWare (I work at a small shop as an intern, if I'm not using VMWare server to test stuff, then I'm playing Russian Roulette with my desktop being a testing grounds). Before I could install the new version, I had to uninstall the old version(requires escalation). After installing the update (requires escalation), it screwed up all my network settings and I had to manually set my network adapters (requires escalation). Moving on to testing my Latest And Greatest idea, I had to uninstall an app or two (requires escalation) to have enough room to create one more VM (requires escalation) to model a three computer network. I fell back to working and controlling all three VM from the VMWare web GUI (requires escalation) and tabbed terminals inside of one of the VMs. To test what effect my idea would have on files from the backup archives (requires escalation, but that is by design). Finally, I had to create a subversion repo (requires escalation, but that is by design) to commit to.
Unfortunately, I have to do things that normal users just don't do that often. And, "run as..." isn't much of an option for several reasons. As a side note, it is fun to watch automated "run as" jobs clobber each other's roaming profile on the hour as ntuser.dat gets locked and you end up with AdminUser.network.1 - AdminUser.network.12 on each desktop during contention. Furthermore, my choices are to leave a weakly hashed NTLM2 (what are they, unsalted MD5?) admin password on my harddrive or type in a mixed case, alphanumerical, finger contorting password once or twice an hour. I'll pass.
I run Firefox, keep my patches up to date, run spybotSD every morning, spyware blaster about every other week, moonsecure (clamav with real time protection for windows) and I try to be very careful when browing and opening emails. For what its worth, I'd rather waste an eight hour block of time reimaging a hosed machine than have Windows and Clippy breaking my flow and concentration every few minutes. I'd almost suspect that the aggregate time I would waste would be about equal. But, as it stands my XP install is over three years old now (although, it has 'character' after how much its been messed with). My boss is on his fourth or fifth install in that same time period, however, and he also runs as an admin...
Under no circumstances will I ever use hosted apps and data for any business purposes. Our data stays on our systems in our facility - period. Your backups, too?
Forgive me my ignorance (I'm a developer which necessarily equates to a crappy admin), but when you say that it takes a long time to get everything back up and running, you mean that you have to stagger the cold boots, right? I just lost a power supply on my SATA RAID box last week. OK, so I admin by proxy when I need a box for my source code... I had bought what I thought was a reasonably sized power supply, with what I knew about power supplies from a few years ago when I did LAN party thing in high school, and went about 20% above what I thought the box would need.
It only lasted a year, give or take a month. The RAIDbox has four SATA drives and two IDEs. I found out that, apparently, spinning up a bunch of disks from a cold boot requires a huge surge of current.
I can only imagine what a 48U rack of servers packing two 15,000 RPM SCSI (or one of those Sun RAID boxes... ok, I also have a thing for esoteric hardware and expensive toys) must do to a power distribution system when an entire rack goes online at the same time. And then the AC kicks it in to high gear (I'd assume... I've got two desktops, my RAID box and two servers in my apartment... my heat was broken this winter and I didn't notice.) about ten minutes later.
Or am I completely off base and that's not why it takes so long to reboot a data center?
First let me say, that was a very well thought out and informative post. I only would like to bring up a counter point for the sake of discussion.
The language you choose may affect your ability to scale when you take its concurrency model (or lack thereof in some cases) in to account. For instance, I can have a O(1) algorithm, using a hashmap, but that doesn't mean that I'll be able to have the runtime performance of constant time. For a solid example, let's use Java (Java 6, with java.util.concurrent, as this is the concurrency framework I'm most familiar with).
I can have a ConcurrentHashMap (a regular HashMap with a concurrency wrapper) with constant time access (get and put). However, every time that I modify the internal structure of the HashMap, every other thread that is accessing the HashMap at that time is kicked out. That means I've got my optimal algorithm, but due to competition for resources, it'll have the runtime performance of an algorithm chugging along at exponential time if everyone wants to write to that data structure.
Granted, there are ways around this, but you can't just throw hardware at the problem and pretend it doesn't exist. In reality, more hardware raises the communication overhead to the process. Your language of choice may or may not scale at the same pace as others when you take in to account your concurrency needs and perhaps the backend you are given to interface. All that being said, I'm not sure how varied the runtime characteristics of various languages (say, an interpreted JIT versus native machine code) scale WRT each other. I would suspect that a JIT would have much more overhead when you layer it on top of an OSes concurrency model (handling locks within your own code, the JIT handling resources, and the OS doing the same, all at the same time... probably with a database and filesystem doing so at varying degrees). Of course, I could be wrong.
I'm sure in retrospect, it's kind of like a funny Three Stooges moment. I'd bet at the time you didn't see the humor in it, though.
Another really nice thing about the AGMs is that you can leave them at any angle (upside down, on their side, etc) and they don't build up internal 'sludge' on the plates and die like the lead acid could. Disclaimer: Or so I've heard, I've not seen it nor have I used a Lead Acid battery.
Slashdot Mirror
It'd be a shame if someone were to share a small trojan horse or worm as $currentTop40PopSong.exe.mp3 ;)
"It's like they know what we're going to do before we do it!"
Haha! This is great! We just found the exception that proves the rule! Party on!
While I agree with your post, I think it could be summed up in another way; the only way identity theft is going to go away is when it is no longer a lucrative venture.
Yeah, but you guys also get games that I wish I could get here in the US. European game developers tend to gives games much better plot lines than the US game developers. For instance, I love the X series, and I had to scour the local games shops to find a copy of X2 and X3. Games with plots just don't sell as well here as games with explosions. Give me a well thought out plot before explosions, I say. That means I'm usually relying on German and UK based companies to deliver the goods.
...am looking forward to quantum computing. This way, my system files on Windows will both have a rootkit and not have a rootkit at the same time!
Yeah, but you won't know which until you check...Troll? OK, give me the benefit of the doubt and defend them for installing rootkits on customers computers and give me one reason why I should take up the practice since it seems most people here really could care less. The fact that it happened a long time ago doesn't mean a thing. It was a predetermined malicious action... yet you defend them. Why? Give a single reason that it's ok and justifiable.
I just know there's a great rootkit joke somewhere in this.
Seriously, though, I'm a Software Development major; I don't care if it's free. I'll not be writing code that helps Sony. And that's coming from someone who jumped on student Visual Studio offerings from Microsoft... while running three Linux boxes, a BSD, and a Mac box in addition to XP. I'm not a platform snob or (much of) an elitist, but I simply can't ignore the fact that Sony has tainted my profession by actually having the sheer gall to ship CDs with rootkits. I know they're separate divisions of Sony and all, but it's hard to make that distinction from far away, watching them get away with murder at the expense of the computer illiterate or trusting ignorant. I don't know how you can feel good about supporting their platform if you're a software developer. Maybe I'm too emotional about it, and I'll get thicker skin over the years, but I certainly hope not.
I'll be 24 this week. I don't think you quite understand. We know how bad it is, but there's almost an unspoken understanding that the best way to fight back is just... not care. Really. Think about it. What can you hold over the head of someone who doesn't care? What use is power or position if no one bothers to listen to you? We saw the gen-xers get screwed, and we realized that well... there isn't going to be anything left anyways. It wouldn't sting so much had the boomers not told us what radical free thinkers they were (before the sold out).
I spoke to someone a few months ago who basically said, "Man, we've abused the economy and now it's going to come back and bite us." Who's us? One of us is going to be walking in to this economy right out of college, the other is musing about it in retrospect while only the value of his paid off house goes down (staying mostly relative to inflation). At least have the common decency to pretend to be ashamed that you're telling me your generation drank all the beer before ours even got to the party!
If you've ever seen SLC Punk, you'll understand the sentiment in the opening scene where the narrator does a voice over to the video of himself eating breakfast by putting Cheerios in a dirty bowl and pouring beer in it, "...We were educated college graduates... the only way that we could find to fight 'The Man' was to waste our educated brains." Seriously, we're reminded daily that things are becoming worse and worse. We have nothing and it's worth less every day, while we listen to the boomers spending all the money while complaining that taxes are so high. Give us a break. Seriously.
Don't pass the baton to the Xers as screwed up as it is and even try to give them advice. That's just condescending. And stop wondering why we show no sign of caring. There's not going to be anything left to care about. And for those of my generation that really don't care because they don't know, are you going to hold it against them that they bought in to your generations marketing speak, "have whatever you want, whenever you want it; you don't even have to have the cash for it!" Everyone can be a rockstar or a basketball player, and driving a Porche will make you cool. Isn't this the generation you've created? Isn't the entire focus on money and power while not having the common sense or good taste to handle either on their own, let alone both at the same time? If we take everything too seriously, we'll become the same sell outs. Why should we put down our 'texting'? We're talking to our friends. Friendship has value. Take it from me, my best friend died when we were 20 (he was two days younger than me). What should we be doing? Working over time for a company that will throw us out on a whim? No thanks. We'd rather be hanging out with our broke, lazy, underachieving friends any day of the week. Which makes sense when you consider that everything else in our lives has an increasing marginal value. I spend every dollar I get on tools that increase my training since that has long term value, while saving up my cash to be screwed by a bank and then double whammied by inflation and facing outsourcing seems like a losing proposition to me. Just for the record, I work hard and I play hard.
Can we gather a list like this and ask candidates to comment on it, like the groups interested in abortion or taxes or the environment do? Or is that outside the scope of /.?
Why not, man? "We the people" are supposedly running this gig. So long as you aren't breaking the law (or understood social contracts... it's the spirit of the law, not the letter that really counts), you can start any group you want. And the beauty of it is that I can, too if I disagree. Not that I disagree with what you've proposed, but, for arguments sake, I could. I mean, we only have the internet at our finger tips and all the power that entails. If the hippies (ugh, can't stand hippies, I'm not sure I want to make this comparison) could get somewhat mobilized using bullhorns and actually putting stuff on paper, we'd have to screw it up fairly well to do worse than them. I don't see eye-to-eye with them, and their welcome to their stances, but I do recognize the 'hackmanship' that they had to pull off to make the technology at hand work.Class of '03 here, I had heard this story (it was about a 10 minute blurb, IIRC, but I was not completely unaware of it)
DN3D fan here (as were all my friends), I'll be 24 next week.
Or it could be an Epic Failure. Does anyone remember Diakatana? I think it had to sell 100,000 copies to break even or something. The reviews that I read for it were much less than favorable.
Sometimes you just have to accept that "it didn't come together", suck it up and either release it or scrap it. Especially when it comes to games; bit rot happens too quickly with todays technology. I mean, the production of DNF has covered what, three or four generations of both software and hardware?
That being said, I'll probably buy a copy either way. I don't really play FPS much any more (I've got a never played copy of FEAR sitting on the shelf from two years ago... hacking code and messing with Linux has become my hobby), but this game has nostalgic value to me since I played DN3D when I was a kid.
I could not reproduce this. Did you get Moon Secure from sourceforge?
You mean, when you installed it? I haven't tried it with AVG at the same time... sounds like too many cooks in the kitchen. I'm running AVG at home, I'll give this a shot tonight and verify it.
I take it your company doesn't have many software developers or accountants (using obscure/internal accounting packages). Seriously, I gave a half hearted attempt at not running as an admin, but it makes my life impossible when I'm constantly writing code and testing things.
This morning I got to work and had to update VMWare (I work at a small shop as an intern, if I'm not using VMWare server to test stuff, then I'm playing Russian Roulette with my desktop being a testing grounds). Before I could install the new version, I had to uninstall the old version(requires escalation). After installing the update (requires escalation), it screwed up all my network settings and I had to manually set my network adapters (requires escalation). Moving on to testing my Latest And Greatest idea, I had to uninstall an app or two (requires escalation) to have enough room to create one more VM (requires escalation) to model a three computer network. I fell back to working and controlling all three VM from the VMWare web GUI (requires escalation) and tabbed terminals inside of one of the VMs. To test what effect my idea would have on files from the backup archives (requires escalation, but that is by design). Finally, I had to create a subversion repo (requires escalation, but that is by design) to commit to.
Unfortunately, I have to do things that normal users just don't do that often. And, "run as..." isn't much of an option for several reasons. As a side note, it is fun to watch automated "run as" jobs clobber each other's roaming profile on the hour as ntuser.dat gets locked and you end up with AdminUser.network.1 - AdminUser.network.12 on each desktop during contention. Furthermore, my choices are to leave a weakly hashed NTLM2 (what are they, unsalted MD5?) admin password on my harddrive or type in a mixed case, alphanumerical, finger contorting password once or twice an hour. I'll pass.
I run Firefox, keep my patches up to date, run spybotSD every morning, spyware blaster about every other week, moonsecure (clamav with real time protection for windows) and I try to be very careful when browing and opening emails. For what its worth, I'd rather waste an eight hour block of time reimaging a hosed machine than have Windows and Clippy breaking my flow and concentration every few minutes. I'd almost suspect that the aggregate time I would waste would be about equal. But, as it stands my XP install is over three years old now (although, it has 'character' after how much its been messed with). My boss is on his fourth or fifth install in that same time period, however, and he also runs as an admin...
Netcrafts confirms it... Year Of the Linux Desktop.
*ducks*... BTW, frist!
Forgive me my ignorance (I'm a developer which necessarily equates to a crappy admin), but when you say that it takes a long time to get everything back up and running, you mean that you have to stagger the cold boots, right? I just lost a power supply on my SATA RAID box last week. OK, so I admin by proxy when I need a box for my source code... I had bought what I thought was a reasonably sized power supply, with what I knew about power supplies from a few years ago when I did LAN party thing in high school, and went about 20% above what I thought the box would need.
It only lasted a year, give or take a month. The RAIDbox has four SATA drives and two IDEs. I found out that, apparently, spinning up a bunch of disks from a cold boot requires a huge surge of current.
I can only imagine what a 48U rack of servers packing two 15,000 RPM SCSI (or one of those Sun RAID boxes... ok, I also have a thing for esoteric hardware and expensive toys) must do to a power distribution system when an entire rack goes online at the same time. And then the AC kicks it in to high gear (I'd assume... I've got two desktops, my RAID box and two servers in my apartment... my heat was broken this winter and I didn't notice.) about ten minutes later.
Or am I completely off base and that's not why it takes so long to reboot a data center?
First let me say, that was a very well thought out and informative post. I only would like to bring up a counter point for the sake of discussion.
The language you choose may affect your ability to scale when you take its concurrency model (or lack thereof in some cases) in to account. For instance, I can have a O(1) algorithm, using a hashmap, but that doesn't mean that I'll be able to have the runtime performance of constant time. For a solid example, let's use Java (Java 6, with java.util.concurrent, as this is the concurrency framework I'm most familiar with).
I can have a ConcurrentHashMap (a regular HashMap with a concurrency wrapper) with constant time access (get and put). However, every time that I modify the internal structure of the HashMap, every other thread that is accessing the HashMap at that time is kicked out. That means I've got my optimal algorithm, but due to competition for resources, it'll have the runtime performance of an algorithm chugging along at exponential time if everyone wants to write to that data structure.
Granted, there are ways around this, but you can't just throw hardware at the problem and pretend it doesn't exist. In reality, more hardware raises the communication overhead to the process. Your language of choice may or may not scale at the same pace as others when you take in to account your concurrency needs and perhaps the backend you are given to interface. All that being said, I'm not sure how varied the runtime characteristics of various languages (say, an interpreted JIT versus native machine code) scale WRT each other. I would suspect that a JIT would have much more overhead when you layer it on top of an OSes concurrency model (handling locks within your own code, the JIT handling resources, and the OS doing the same, all at the same time... probably with a database and filesystem doing so at varying degrees). Of course, I could be wrong.
*sigh*
Worst. Day. Ever!
Worse. Day. Ever!
I'm sure in retrospect, it's kind of like a funny Three Stooges moment. I'd bet at the time you didn't see the humor in it, though.
Another really nice thing about the AGMs is that you can leave them at any angle (upside down, on their side, etc) and they don't build up internal 'sludge' on the plates and die like the lead acid could. Disclaimer: Or so I've heard, I've not seen it nor have I used a Lead Acid battery.
That's what I thought, too, but I'm not sure of the details at all.
This is completely accurate, in every respect. I agree completely.