Posts by jwenting

masochist :twisted: I just want mine to work so I can do things with them.
Programming, running servers on them, stuff like that. If I need to spend more time getting them running than actually using them there's a good chance of them being thrown against a wall at high speed for one last gratifying shower of parts.

Yup. Ubuntu just works. Many Linux zealots don't like that, while saying they want the world to use their god in reality they don't want their small exclusive club of configfilehackers to be broken open by people who can just use the OS without spending hours pouring over obscure scripts and configurations to get the simplest thing done.

Google is getting way too intrusive, shortly people will be completely pwn'd by them and that's when they suddenly will realise they can no longer access their own data without paying Google a kingly ransom for it.
In the meantime Google will be analysing all that data and selling it to the highest bidder.

LOL.

Actual numbers are completely meaningless when comparing internet (or cellphone, or whatever) use between countries with different population and demographics.

The percentage of people using the technology is, and there China is lagging behind.
The large numbers quoted (especially for internet use) are also in large part people having access at work, rather than at home. Most US and European people will have both, yet are not counted twice (I'd not be surprised if the Chinese do count such people twice).

And of course do the Chinese need bigger pipes. If they have more users in an area they need more bandwidth in that area to serve them all than a US ISP would where there are more people connected but spread over a wider area and connecting to a larger number of backbones.

Java is plenty fast. It's people who have an anti-Java agenda that say otherwise, using data a decade old (when it was true) and exquisitely crafted "tests" to make their point.

In practice Java is quite fast. If it weren't we wouldn't need to build in a deliberate delay in our core Java applications in order to prevent the data from flowing faster than the hardware can handle...

The "complaints" that "Java is slow" have been inaccurate since the release of the 1.4 JVMs ages ago, but will never die because there are too many people who have vested interest in seeing the end of Java (not the least of which is a good portion of the open source zealots).
Strangely those same people do NOT have a mantra that "Ruby is slow" or "Python is slow" despite both being an order of magnitude slower than is Java (ironically it has been found that the latest version of JRuby is far faster than its C based counterpart).

It's quite possible to write extremely performant applications in Java, applications that in many cases outperform their counterparts written in C or especially C++.
But it's also quite possible to write tests that are rigged to show C++ as heavily outperforming Java.

I've seen some tests that were so clearly rigged it was silly that anyone fell for them at all.
Make it run for a very short period (so the JVM startup time makes up a significant portion of the runtime, a time cost native compiled applications don't have), use highly optimised math modules written in Assembler for the C++ program, but not the equivalent modules for the Java program, then deliberately select to "test" only those parts of the language where you know Java is relatively slow (goniometric functions mostly).
No wonder Java comes out low in such rigged "tests", but that's exactly …

"There shouldn't really be a 'choice' or 'variety' in how to protect a system. "

There should be. What you're saying is equivalent to saying that everyone should be required by law to wear a bulletproof vest 24/7 because someone might fire a gun and you might be hit, same for a fireretardent suit because there might be fire somewhere, complete crashprotection because you might get hit by a car or fall and break something, etc. etc. etc.
You should also have a government dictated diet, listing exactly what you should eat and drink and when to do so, all in the name of protecting your health.

People should take their own responsibility, not have the government dictate whatever they must do.
That's the communist way, the abandonment of all personal freedoms.

The problem isn't that there's a lot of negative things to say about Microsoft, but that there are a lot of things that are made out to sound negative and a lot of things that are just sucked out of someone's big thumb to make up a negative story about them.
It's 90% jealousy combined with 10% lack of understanding.

And don't the security firms have access to the same beta and prerelease versions you do (and early access versions of development tools for Vista)?
Seems someone's looking for something negative to say about Microsoft, as usual.

Nothing to prevent the same anti-piracy systems from being used on a downloadable version that are on the hardcopy version.
The key is in fact far more easy to personalise to the purchaser, making pirated keys that much easier to track down (as it is they can be traced at best to a single store which may have sold hundreds of copies, but more likely to a large chain which can sell tens of thousands nationwide).

Embed an encrypted string indicating the actual buyer into the key, and keep record of which key is issued to which individual, and you can find any pirated key being used for product activation easily and bring the person who originally spread it to justice.
Send the actual key back during product activation to do that, and you're good to go.

It also prevents key generators from working as the keys generated by them would not have been sold and therefore no record of their existence is available to the activation servers, which will just reject the activation attempt.

And as there's no more sneaking into stores and copying the keys from the backs of boxes (which used to be done quite a lot until manufacters and some stores wizened up and put them inside the box and the box in shrinkwrap that can't be opened and closed without leaving traces) that avenue of stealing keys is also blocked.

Distribution will get cheaper (cutting out the middle man, …

You might have ended your writeup on a less political/religiou tone than you did.
As it is (and I know you were quoting) you leave the unwary reader with a specific conclusion.
Whether deliberate (in which case very common but for that no better) or by accident, the conclusion you draw between the lines is agreement with the OSS zealots that Linux is inherently more secure than is Windows.

And as usual things are misrepresented.
Microsoft just says they believe the accusations made against them are wrong, and the OSS world starts attacking Microsoft as usual.

You just have to end with an anti-Microsoft tone as usual don't you?

For the average user Linux is certainly not more secure than is Windows.
They lack the knowledge to do much more than install their system out of the box, and out of the box Windows beats Linux when it comes to security and ease of configuration.
The potential maximum security situation is for 99% of users completely irrelevant, as they're unable to achieve it.
Built-in operating system security is also irrelevant because the majority of cybercrime instances against home users consist of fraud (chain letters, spam promising goods which aren't delivered, eBay auctions that are too good to be true, things like that) or ID theft through email scams.

Operating systems don't protect you against your own stupidity (though IE7 tries with its phishing filter and things like that).

tough luck, thank the pirates for that.
I've some 600+ audio CDs and buy one or two per month on average, never had problems ripping them into iTunes.
Even CDs you can't play with other players (like the 2nd to last Enigma album) play and rip fine in iTunes.

Your complaints about music purchased through iTunes working only in Apple players is somewhat bogus too. Many players support only one or a very few players, sometimes only a single online store as well.
And you know what you're getting when you buy it. That's your conscious decision to shop Apple instead of somewhere else. Don't blame Apple for making that business decision, blame yourself for buying into a system you don't like.

Buy a player that works with Microsoft Windows Media player for example. You can use several online stores that way, but of course it works only with Windows which in your logic is also Evil.

" it seems to be a dirty trick that Apple's doing right now by forcing you to buy an iPod/iPhone if you want to play your songs on a device, and forcing you to buy from the iTunes store if you want to play songs on your iPod/iPhone"

Uh, have you read that?
It makes no sense at all. You have to buy an iPhone if you want to play music with an iPhone?
WOW, that's really shocking!

You can import any MP3 or WAV (and probably many other formats) into iTunes and convert them to AAC, I don't see a problem here.

the only reason PP gets the biggest share of phishing victims is because they target the big fat underbelly of the internet, the gullible computer illiterate masses who are the preferred victims of phishing attacks (as anyone with more common sense doesn't fall for them).

posession of stolen goods is a crime in most countries, once you have downloaded pirated software/movies/music you are in posession of stolen goods.
The "fake" stuff isn't in itself enough to convict you, but can be used as an indicator to get a search warrant to find out if you have stolen goods.

It's certainly not spyware. All they do is log the IP addresses of people accessing their machines. Every website does the same.

which is why any sensible judge will rule that Apple has to withdraw the device from the market, maybe even hand it over to Cisco.

Let the robber baron Jobbs bleed for a change, might teach him a lesson.

Apple is confident that they can buy a judge and jury with their massive legal budget, maybe even countersue Cisco for using iWhatever for any product at all.

Not well received due to its closed nature.
Battery can't be removed (and thus exchanged), just like the iPod (but phone batteries wear out more quickly).
Lack of software options (no Java for example from what I hear).
Overpriced.

the only thing it has going for it is the "cool" Apple brand.

1TB may sound like a lot now, but I still remember buying my first PC in 1992 and people declaring me crazy for opting to get one with a 40MB drive.
"You'll never need that much space" was the most common criticism.

10GB these days is nothing. When I spent a day photographing an airshow last summer I ended up with 7GB of photos in just a few hours.
And that's the raw data, once processed that became roughly 70GB.

If the Chinese get what they want the internet will be blood red due to the Great Firewall of China regulating everything :mrgreen:

It's true that xp worked great the way it was released, but you have to understand that Microsoft is always trying to find ways of doing things, whether they're succesful or not.

As any company wanting to stay in business should. It's called innovation.

Bug-free programs of more than a few lines don't exist.
But from the entire tone of your rant it seems you don't care about the truth, only about kicking Microsoft in the shins...

new email addresses can receive spam within minutes of being created, even if they've never yet been used.
I've confimed that through experiments, creating semi-random email addresses on my server which usually started gathering spam in 5-10 minutes.

And for many changing their address is no (realistic) option.
The old address is too widely spread among people you need to stay in contact with, not all of whom are capable of handling something as simple as a change of address notification (think forum accounts, accounts at download stores, etc.).

You FEEL safer using Linux than Windows, but you're not and that's the problem.

The incidence (as percentage of installed base) of successful intrusion attempts against Linux boxes is far higher than that of successful intrusion attempts against Windows boxes.
That's because most Linux boxes are installed wide open by default, and are running a lot of unneeded and potentially dangerous applications like SendMail and Apache without their owners even knowing it.
They think there's nothing to fear because they're not using Windows (they're believing the hype/hoax/lies), and often don't keep up with security and other updates (which is why Windows now comes with automatic updates turned on by default).
As Sendmail especially (but Apache in many versions as well, and X too) is as leaky as a sieve, these systems are easy prey for crackers.
The reasons you don't hear a lot of outcry is because many of the low overall volume, and because a lot of those machines are run by companies who don't want the negative publicity.

Not really. Any OS has holes which can be exploited if you know how and care to.
Singling out Windows is not only unfair, it's dangerous as people start to think that the very act of installing something else will suddenly give them a completely secure system.

Any security though starts at the front door. If you install a decent firewall you keep most of the crap out the door (attacks trying to find open ports for example) and prevent most of the rest from dialing out if it does get in.

Instead of your analogy of a deadlocked foor on a cardboard box a better analogy would be that NOT having your system secured by firewalls and AV software is like having a jewelry store and leaving the doors and windows wide open when you leave at night and refusing to invest in alarm systems and guards because you believe in the general goodness of people and don't think anyone will ever steal from you.

hmm, could be overkill. Easier to encase the thing in a block of steel reinforced concrete with a meter's worth of concrete on all sides, lock that in a watertight steel chamber with walls 20cm thick, and sink the thing into an ocean trench.

nope. Turn off your computer, unplug all cables, and weld the case shut.

they may have had the reputation but that reputation was never backed up by facts.

As to Opera, as with Mozilla in the past you hear little about it because so few people use it.
As a result few exploits are ever attempted against it and thus it doesn't make headlines.
They don't AFAIK publish any data on holes they discover themselves, so that can't be used as a criterion either.

in fact, that question is worded quite deliberately to have a "yes" stop you from entering the potentially insecure site.
Most people will click "yes" or "ok" on any question without reading it and this way those people are prevented from entering places that could compromise their systems.
If you don't read, tough luck. Better than people claiming that IE7 is bad because it doesn't stop them from visiting sites that deliver malware onto their machines...

The only thing about that functionality that annoys me is that even if you explicitly declare you want to trust a certificate that's for example expired or handed out by a non-trusted authority (like our self-issued certificate we use at work for the intranet/extranet which for some obscure reason uses SSL) it won't remember that and present you with the same "untrusted site, continue or not?" warning the next time you visit that site.
That might be a bug in IE7, or it might be part of the functionality that will only work fully in Vista, but it annoys me.
Apart from that, I think it's a great idea that there's an extra step involved in visiting sites that don't have a valid SSL certificate yet are using SSL. It will stop a lot of phishing attempts, which often work like that.
And as the kinks are worked out there will no doubt be ways for smaller businesses to also get that seal of approval.

Websense predicts that some embedded anti-phishing toolbars will become targets of exploit code designed to disable or avoid their prevention mechanisms.

Even more duh: it's easy to trick people into installing spyware, that's well known.
Hiding that spyware as spyware prevention or removal software is also well established.
Lots of people like browser toolbars (don't ask me why, I won't touch them for anything).

Combine the three, and the logical next step is malware authors creating a phishing tool in the form of a browser toolbar that is presented as an anti-spyware/anti-phishing product.

So you're opposed to Linux because one distro is gaining the upper hand (at least among new users), and at the same time you're opposed to Linux because there are too many distros out there.

Which is it?

I do agree with your statements about GPL and OS in general, that neither is a guarantee of quality and that the GPL is too restrictive to develop software under it.

Sigh, another pointless study from another pointless magazine.

So you have a few hundred respondents worldwide, all of whom are either HR people from companies addicted to certifications or possibly individuals addicted to them.
Not representative of the IT industry as a whole.

If it were you'd have MCSD, MSCE, SCJA, and SCJP right on the top, and probably some Linux and Unix certs as well.

The main target for this release will be new installations rather than upgrades.
Microsoft may have underestimated how content most users are with XP in that, especially given the massive volume of Microsoft hatred flooding the internet (they've probably a team analysing it all and predicting how much of it is real and how much merely kids wanting to be "kewl", that team may well be overly pessimistic in their analysis).

And the major market for new installations will always be the home user, especially with media center and desktop replacement laptops which are becoming ever more common.

Corporations may well reuse their existing XP licenses for a while at least, as they did with NT4 before (which is why Win2K also never really took off in companies).

We see this with every other release, conservative companies aren't likely to upgrade to something else unless their current system is about to be declared end of life OR there's a major business reason (like a major customer wanting all the documents they get sent to be in a format your current software can't produce).
For anyone who's been in the industry for more than a few years there'll be little surprise if the uptake of Vista by businesses is slow unless and until 64 bit computing really takes off.
At that time they may well decide to standardise on Vista rather than go for a mix of 32 bit XP and 64 bit Vista installations. …

Another major reason is that the PS3 is late to the game.
Most hardcore console buyers have in recent months bought an XBox and Nintendo and are now out of money for a bit before buying a PS3 (at which point prices may have come down).
I expect PS3 sales to soar when Christmas shopping commences in earnest, as the others have probably reached most of their market saturation by now and people are holding off on purchases for themselves for a few weeks, instead making Christmas lists...

There are only so few people buying every console on the market after all, the rest don't really care one way or the other and will buy one catching their fancy and use it until they're tired of the games they can get for it.
Those people will generally be using either an XBox or Nintendo by now (and possibly an older model of them) or a PS2 or PS and not be thinking about buying yet another one.

Being the most expensive of the bunch does indeed give PS3 another disadvantage, especially since the games for it (being BluRay discs) will almost certainly be more expensive as well than those for the competition.

For me, I'll stick to Diablo II on my trusty old PC.

"It may seem like the Zune is a total flop, after all, "it's from MS". But no, I don't think that is the problem."

I think it is the problem, or at least a major one, with many of the target audience (youngsters).
That audience is extremely image conscious, and many are part of the "hating Microsoft is kewl" generation bred by slashdot.
They'll use Windows at home because they need it to play games, but then they can claim it wasn't their choice as the game manufacturer forced it upon them (nasty conspiracy). With an MP3 player, they MUST have an iPod because every "kewl" kid in their school also has one (and those kewl kids have them because their idols have one, etc. etc.) and moreover buying a Zune would show that they of their own free will buy Microsoft which is clearly bad for their image with the other kids in the herd (for herd mentality it is).

Richard, that already exists. It's called OpenOffice and doesn't make much of a dent...

"However, explain to me if you will, or indeed if you can, why it appears that UK users will have to pay a staggering 72 percent more than US users for Office 2007 Professional Edition? "

So? That's the case with pretty much ALL software in the UK (and Europe in general).
Software costing $100 in the US will cost 100 pounds at least in the UK, and €100 or more on the continent.

That's been the case for years, maybe decades, and hardly new or limited to Microsoft.

Blame our governments for taxing businesses to death while plundering consumers with extortionate VAT rates.

I always translate that term as "I felt free to tell something that's just not true" :mrgreen:

This isn't about software patents, but patents on hardware, mainly production techniques for high density microcircuitry.
If Via's chips or their factories use patented technology without a license they should feel the heat.
Asian firms have been able to flount international patent law for far too long, effectively making it uneconomical for US and European companies to do large investment in R&D because their inventions would turn up in cheaper Asian products within months of them hitting the market (and sometimes sooner).

those guys also always forget to take into account the environmental impact of generating and transporting that electricity...

Reminds me of something my father was involved in in the 1980s or early '90s.
Milk is almost exclusively sold in cartons these days and at the time there was a huge row by the greenies that that is bad for the environment and cartons should be banned.
My father (who at the time was a fiscal consultant for several dairies across the country) got his hands on the results of a study ordered by those dairies (through a middleman so the origin of the funding would not be known, thus the results untainted) on the complete environmental impact of cartons versus bottles.
Turns out that if you take into account not just the cost of producing cartons versus producing bottles (which favours bottles because they're reused) but the cost of disposing of them, transporting them, and cleaning those bottles in between uses, cartons were actually better for the environment than were bottles (in both cases some assumptions had to be made of course, like the percentages of bottles that would be returned and could be reused, and the percentages of cartons going into landfills, incinerators, and paper recycling).

The study was never published anywhere, every scientific and mass media publication refused to print something that went counter to the mantra of the "green" movement.

I've myself been a part of a group of people who …

the real clever bit is that they can make a ton of money selling the special paper that people will need to use their special printer in combination with their special paper.

"Carbon footprint" is complete bollocks, an invention by treehugging politicians with no understanding of the first thing they're talking about and picked up happily by marketeers who see a quick buck when they smell it.

The actual polution from this machine could well be a lot higher than that of regular printers.
Most paper is already recycled, but this special stuff will be a lot harder to due to the chemicals used to make it thermal.
It will also be useless for archival work as thermal paper always degrades over time. Fine for the office meeting notes, but if you want your print to be readable in a few months you'd better not use it.
If the stuff does end up in a landfill or incinerator, it will release potentially toxic chemicals into the environment.

And that's without taking the production into account.

If you want to save on paper, move more towards a paperless office. Don't let yourself be fooled into things like this.

Technically Google's services are indeed pretty viral as they seem to infect everything they touch unless you take precautions :)

And as I have my doubts as to the good intentions of Google, the usually hostile nature of virusses is also present.

And yes, it will lead to large amounts of forking and mutually incompatible versions all released as "Java".
Those already existed to a small degree, aimed at destroying confidence in the platform, and will now be a lot easier to create.

The userbase won't get fragmented though, as those forks will (for the most part) not be aimed at "fixing" things but destroying them and released by people who have no interest themselves in using Java but only want to confuse end users and cause them headaches when using Java software.
As it is there are tons of questions from Linux users about their Java based applications not working which are almost exclusively tracked down to them having gcj set up as their default Java runtime.

This idiotic decision by Sun will compound that problem a thousandfold in short order and drive it onto the core platform for Java as well, which is Windows.
Software manufacturers will no longer be able to rely on their users having a JVM that can run their software and will abandon Java for (for example) C#.

Time to start looking for another line of work then.
Companies will pretty rapidly start moving away from Java as they want nothing at all to do (and rightly so) with anything that even remotely reeks of GPL.

Random searches act as a deterrent to at least the casual terrorist (the guy who suddenly goes nuts and decides to hijack an aircraft, it happens).
They've been used in Europe for the last 30 years, and hardly any hijacking has originated here.
That could of course be luck but you can never rule that out, as luck is also random :mrgreen:

It also makes it harder for the pros to plan ahead, as even the best disguise will no longer be a guarantee for not being searched, increasing the risk to them.
If there's a 10% chance that even the perfect false nose and passport will not help to get you through, that's too great a risk for the pros.

so? All depends on your definition of "unreasonable".
If you're so hot about it, start proceedings to have this challenged at the USSC.

If a government agency orders you to hand over your data to them you are indemnified AFAIK from any wrongdoing, same as when the data was stolen.
Those are circumstances outside your control.

This is just a lot of anti-government whiners. While there may be more random searches of laptop bags for hidden items, more people told to show their machines indeed work (so as to prove there are no bombs in the battery pack, no hidden weapons hiding out as cirsuit boards) there won't be much more going on.
And sadly so, as this would be a great opportunity to go after piracy. If peoples' computers are combed for illicit material, pirated software, music, and movies would also turn up.

Sounds like just another load of scaremongering by some anti-US, anti-government people who think they're done injustice because they no longer can wave their first class tickets at someone and be let through security without a second glance.

Noone is going to confiscate anything without due reason. Airport security has had that authority for decades and it's not led to a very lucrative side trade in expensive items taken from passengers for them, so there's no reason why it should start now.

And noone is going to download the entire content of your laptop to steal your corporate secrets and sell them to the highest bidder (at least not a customs official, I'd be more worried about the passenger in the seat next to you, the one who just cracked your unsecured WiFi card).
BTW, I've yet to see a laptop that would take weeks or months to copy the content of the harddisk to another machine :)

The open content of wikipedia is the data, therefore if you take that data and republish it under a different name you're forking it.