Posts by John O'Grady 19 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2008
I'd rather take "known" vulnerabilities over "We were going to tell you about how easy it was to root your laptop, but we needed that 8 months to let the exploits get well used before we fixed it and then told you."
Also, screw anyone that ever says to trust Microsoft. Take it from someone who has dealt with them since Windows 2.0, they can never be trusted. Can you say "Threshold"?:
I'll add a memory. Originally, Microsoft had an agreement with AOL to allow early versions of IE to be the only browser that worked through the AOL client. I remember finding some instructions on a BBS (I think I dialed in and used z-modem, but it's been a while) and hacking the AOL configuration somehow to let Netscape work.
As for what could of been, well. It's taken 20 years to get to the place that MS was deathly afraid of - applications that run on browsers instead of being tied to the Windows OS. If they had not spent so much time trying to kill all the other browsers that popped up, we could have probably been here a decade ago.
Don't get me wrong - Netscape had it's problems, both technical and managerial. If the roles had been reversed, however, I think that Netscape would have continued development after defeating IE. Instead, Netscape died, MS declared victory and killed the IE development team, leaving only one dev working on IE patches for almost five years, thereby killing all web development for a time.
Fail icon for MS literally failing humanity by slowing down development of one of the most important human inventions of all time.
Wow. Of all the places I frequent on the 'net, this is the last place I would have thought to find a republican troll. Seriously, this is a site for intelligent people, so your tripe is really not going to swing anyone's opinion here.
For those that don't know ALEC, here's a quick rundown. They create legislative templates of bills that are favourable to ALEC members, and which are then handed out to conservative politicians to try and pass in their home districts. Subjects of the bills range from "kill the gays" to "make sure convicted violent felons can still purchase guns" to "mercury in your drinking water is good for you" to "let Wall Street do whatever it wants" to "kill the abortion providers" to "climate change is Obama's mind-control program"... you get my drift. If there is any thinking involved or compassion emoted, it has nothing to do with ALEC.
Good luck in life Big John. Unlike you, I don't hate the other side. I just feel sorry for their confusion.
As a former CNE (Certified Netware Engineer), what I remember the most was Microsoft claiming that its Active Directory Services were superior to NDS - a full YEAR before Active Directory was even released! I had worked for a small company at the time and I certainly do not remember NDS being any kind of problem because that company was small. I had a tree set up in about an hour or two, with rights assigned to just about everyone. Yes, not having anything more than a command line on the server was bad, but was eventually fixed. When that company gave into the MS crap and switched to NT 3.51, they went from one Novel server to five NT servers, which they had to reboot almost every day because, you know, Microsoft. And they still had to keep the Novel server around for years because Active Directory sucked forever before it matured slightly and was actually useful for anything beyond a few users.
All those supposed updates, and Corel Draw and Photo-Paint is still much easier to use and does 99.9% of what 99.9% of users want. I tried blending an image into a background last week and spent three hours trying to do it in Photoshop/Illustrator/fireworks and utterly failed, with instructions on the web and in their own help being incomplete or arcane or outdated or all three. Got out Photo-Paint and blended the image in about 10 minutes from not knowing how to do it at all.
Illustrator is bloated, overly-complex, and not worth adobe reaching into your pocket every month. I'm sure if you spent extra money for classes on how to use CS, you might do okay, but then classes are hundreds to thousands of dollars anyway. I just don't see most of the CS suite being much of any use to anyone but the most wizened and trained graphic artists anymore. Everything you could possibly need is in Corel and maybe AlienSkin if you want nice filters.
Murderers and rapists and BP executives and hedge-fund managers belong in prison. A kid who links to other places on the net belongs back in college, never to be bothered again. If you think someone who creates a link in his website to something else on the internet, no matter what that is (except kiddie porn) belongs in prison, your priorities and head need to be re-examined.
Speaking as an American, my official position is: We're doing what now??? {hangs head} We are such idiots. Patents and copyright need to be completely revamped.
I have very fond memories of Partition Magic - written by a bunch of geniuses and which could do things with disk partitions that no one else can do even today. Then Symantec bought out PowerQuest and killed it in 2003 - never even wrapping its functionality into any of their other products. And the reason they bought PowerQuest, if memory serves, was to take the other product - Drive Image, out of the stores because it was cutting into Symantec's Norton Ghost bottom line. 10 years later and Ghost still doesn't work as easily as Drive Image!
Yeah - that's all coming back to me after reading your post as well. Fighting TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) programs for lower memory and managing the early graphics card allocations... XMS, A20, interrupts.... Good times! That was when everyone on AOL actually had a brain, because you had to have one to figure out how to get onto BBS's.
As I remember it, another reason Windows 3.1 came out on top was the kernel code that prevented it from running on PC-DOS. As it so happens, that smidgen of kernel code was the only code in all of the Windows code base that was obfuscated, a fact that came out in the later anti-trust lawsuit in '98. So you could say that anti-trust behaviour was programmed in from the beginning. If only Microsoft had been stopped then, we would all probably be using a descendant of OS2 Warp or BeOS, both of which were massively more stable and forward looking than Gates could ever be.
Sarah Jane Smith was my first companion to my first Doctor (Tom Baker) when I caught an episode of Dr Who by complete chance when I was somewhere around 12 years old. I became a fan instantly. She was the first companion to not scream and hide behind the Doctor every time things got a little scary. As I watched for the first time (Ark in Space), I saw the Doctor ridicule Sarah Jane while she was stuck in an air duct. When she clawed her way out of the duct spitting fire, I simultaneously had my first crush and first favorite science fiction series.
Over here in America, we Who fans are grieving the loss as well.
Like anyone is going to believe now that Mythbusters wasn't pressured to kill the RFID segment? If Beyond Productions and Discovery aren't going to pony up the reason that RFID is off-limits, then there cannot be a good reason for it.
Speaking as a mild hacker, the shear amount of documentation out there on how to rip data from an RFID chip at a hundred paces - no matter the manufacture's claim that the chip needs a reader in close proximity to power it up, is astounding. This kind of corporate white-washing is akin to that done on the touchscreen voting machines - and look what happeded with them!
I picked fire, because assuredly the pants of some of the production company's execs are quite crispy by now...
For dedicated services, you could try Lunerpages.com. I've been using them for a while, and I haven't had any troubles. Better yet, when I put a service ticket in for stuff like setting up DNS or a mail server, these guys have always gotten it on the first try.
I've been through the ringer on a few hosting companies in my time - cwihosting being the worst (Owner thinks he can yell at customers). Funny, but I almost signed up with 1&1 until a network admin friend of mine mentioned that their email servers were bullocks. I guess I doged a bullet.
Go icon for "go to someone else".
This isn't quite so bad as the ISP changing standard internet behaviour. If you don't like this "feature", turn it off. With what Verizon did, and Charter is currently doing, you have no choice, cannot opt out, and it breaks standard internet behaviour that email and web servers rely on.
I'll qualify this opinion with "So long as they make it intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that the toolbar is doing this and that you have a choice to turn it off". If not, the we're back to Google's modified motto of "Do not so much evil".
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