Posts by Morely Dotes 939 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007
I've worked in a software development department for the "world's largest chipmaker," and all of Dave's comments are spot-on. I remember when our team got a new manager who had just come from Microsoft - and his attitude was "I don't care if it works, we have a ship date, mark it gold and we'll fix it in patches." I fixed the "high-ranking idiot" problem by leaving; I didn't want to be associated with hardware drivers that didn't work.
From http://www.ft.com/cms/s/4239e29e-02f2-11da-84e5-00000e2511c8.html :'"We have inadvertently started carrying our own trackable ID card in the form of the mobile phone," said Sandra Bell, head of the homeland security department at the Royal United Services Institute.'
"If Boeing had a way of convincing Mexicans and other poor folk it was a good idea to stay at home rather than joining the American Dream - now that might be a trick worth $30bn."
Bollocks! "Illegal" aliens do jobs in the USA that most Americans won't do for the same money. It's unfair exploitation, but trying to keep them out - or worse, actually successfully keeping them out - can only harm American businesses. Spending any money on the effort is nothing more than pork barrel politics.
@ David Eddleman: I agree with what you've said, but in fairness, the Symantec malware database included at http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/security_response/index.jsp does contain a lot of useful information.
The two bits it's missing are "don't use Symantec products" and "don't use Windows," of course. >;-)
I am the entire Support Desk at my day job. I'm also the guy who has to call Dell, HP, Canon, or whatever when we have an issue with their product(s).
I have users who, when asked what program they need help with (because they have started teh call with "I need help." respond with "Microsoft." While I heartily agree, it's necessary to patiently guide them to find out which program it is (and it's not good telling them "Internet Explorer is not Windows Explorer, nor is it the Internet," because all they know is "I click this little picture, and this is supposed to happen.") I also have users who know that they would rather use Paint.NET than Adobe Photoshop (which is good, considering the price), and can I please help them find the layers control? So there's a bit of a range - in a 100-person world-wide company, I guess we have every possible skill level.
And when I call Support at one of our vendors because, for example, the HP Web site is so horribly disorganized that I can't find the drivers I want, I don't expect to be told "because that product is out of warranty, I must charge your credit card $25 before I can tell you the URL." Particularly when I explain that it's *their* search engine that fails to produce any useful answers. Furthermore, I don't expect the drone on the other end to repeatedly read his script to me when I try to explain why he's not addressing the problem. I do understand that, for HP support, English is a second language, but if all they're allowed to do is read me a script, why have they even bothered to study English?
I can still say, "well, given your policy, I'm glad we've become an all-Dell shop," before gently hanging up. Or "please hold while I transfer your call to the Director." He gets paid more than I do - and he can tell them to sod off, since he's Management.
Meanwhile, I'm getting paid to help - even if the caller is a silly bastard who couldn't tie his own shoes without a 3-week course. So I will help, if he'll let me. And if not, at least I know I tried.
So, the bottom line is, I never blame the poor sod on the other end of the call - no matter if he called me for help, or I called him. I don't abuse them, and I don't expect abuse from them (and certainly won't accept it). What I do expect is professional behavior. If you called me for help, I have all sorts of ways I can avoid helping you without being directly abusive (it's not for nothing that I have studied the works of Simon Travaglia), and I am sure that's true if I called you for help, as well, so it behooves both of us to be polite and pleasant.
Besides, I know how to change your password.
at http://www.softwarefor.org one can download the ISO file of a disk called "Software for Starving Students," which contains all of the legally-free applications a Windows or OSX user might need, including office software, archivers, graphics packages, file utilties, and much more.
Of course, installing Kubuntu would be better, but I recognize that most "students" will do anything rather than actually learn something useful.
@ Ashley: "Is this robot more cost-effective than a human being?"
Assuming your average construction worker earns about US$60,000, then the cost of the robot is roughly equal to a single year's pay (actual cost of employment is generally about twice the actual wages due to taxes, insurance, benefits, and the costs associated with ensuring adherence to safety regulations and such).
Ergo, it's at least as cheap to buy a dozen of these HeRPes-3 bots than it is to employ a dozen humans. Supervisors, of course, are always expensive (and rarely worth the costs), but will remain a requirement. After all, *someone* has to give the wrong orders!
@ Michael Miller: There's no way that changing bind-on-pick-up items for bind-on-equip is going to *reduce* cheating or farming.
@ executor485: Paranoid much? Blizzard is making roughly US$150,000,000 gross MONTHLY from player subscription fees. That's 1.8 BILLION dollars annually. How much more could they make "farming?" How many morons will spend $80 to get a little extra gold? Not enough for Blizzard to bother with it. A small-time bunch of crooks, sure - you only need 100 or so sales per month to make enough to live comfortably, if you are a one- or two-man outfit.
@ steve lampros: Clearly you know little or nothing about Wow. That the same for all the others who obviously don't know that WoW is *not* exclusively player-vs-player, like Counter-Strike and Utlima Online. One can choose a server which is PvP, Player-vs-Environment (with optional PvP, chosen by the player and which can be switched off at any time), and Role-Play.
"there are no laws that prohibit cheating in WoW and other games"
You mean other than the laws against tortious interference with a third-party economic relationship?
Cheaters in WoW and other MMORPGs degrade the "user experience" for the non-cheating players (I won't detail the hundreds of ways the experience is degraded, but the reader is welcome to research that for himself). As a consequence, if cheating becomes pervasive, the non-cheating players find the game is not worth the monthly fee and cancel their accounts, thus depriving the game operator of income. In the case of WoW, this can amount to billions of dollars - not small change.
And then of course there's the question of ethics. Judging solely by the article here at _El_Reg_ I would have to say the book's author has no ethics.
NIC.AT has never been cooperative at de-registering domains known to be operated for phishing nor spamming, in my experience. My solution was simple: Any domain ending in ".AT' is firewalled from our servers here at SpamBlocked.com
We have no intention of changing this policy in the foreseeable future.
Out of the Top Ten, I wouldn't quibble with any of the others, but to find that travesty above Wizard of Oz... [shudder]
And as for nicking Lawrence, well, it's not as if the Brits have done right by him, is it? His story stands on its own merits. Surely the film deserves to do the same.
The "survey" is published by a firm which makes money from end-users who buy anti-virus software. Independent testing shows that "for-cash" AV software is inferior to "for-free" AV software in overall effectiveness, security, and PCU-time usage. Frankly, if it weren't bundled with a lot OEM Windows installs, I don't think the stuff would make enough money to keep them afloat.
Sorry, the iPhone offers nothing that can't be had from the HTC Touch http://www.htctouch.com/ except a higher price tag, a lock-in to Apple's choice of wireless phone network, and a system that can't be expanded by the owner nor even have the battery changed without paying an outrageous bench charge.
I'd love to love the iPhone, but frankly, it looks to me like a design that should have come from Microsoft.
And the ability to watch YouTube videos is, if anything, another strike against it, not a "plus."
I'm charter member of NEDRA (National Electric Drag Racing Association, membership #100) and we measured the headlight draw as negligible. Cabin heater/defroster can reduce range by up to 20%, depending on climate, but there are electric heater cores especially designed for low air-flow restriction.
Incidentally, drag racing is ideal for electric cars - the biggest issue is getting enough traction off the line to maximize acceleration without burning off all your tire tread.
We have a few seats of 2003, and, let me see... 4 seats for 2007, all of which are in the IT Department, for testing and training purposes.
Now, as a consultant, I always recommend OpenOffice because of the cost and support factor (e.g., the product is free, and support is free. MS Office is anywhere up to US$800, and support is US$235 per incident).
Plug-in hybrids make sense, though. My own commute is 12 miles each way - and I rarely drive anywhere else, so a tank of gas is in more danger of evaporating than being burned, if I only had a plug-in hybrid.
When I have the cash, I'll be converting to an all-electric plug-in vehicle - no gas at all. My old Nissan Maxima will still have the off-the-line performance I love after conversion, but I won't be a slave to Halliburton any more.
"Shame on you Democratic party and Left Wing fanatics"
Excuse me? Was it the Democratic Party who sent burglars to break into the Watergate Hotel? Was it the Democrats who mismanaged the US economy so badly that they had to start not one but TWO foreign wars to distract the voters from the issues at home? Was it the Democrats who managed to "lose" eight ballot boxes in the swing State, Florida, during the crucial vote-counting, but later "found" them when their candidate was running neck-and-neck with the opposition? Was it the Democrats who had a Florida Secretary of State, legally required to determine if the election was valid, who was also the campaign manager for one of the candidates? Was it the Democrats who ignored the clear letter of the law and issued orders for warrantless wiretaps to be carried out against US citizens?
As it happens, I'm not a Democrat, either. But I can see who the obvious criminals are - and they aren't Democrats.
@ Silas: Once the drone has identified targets, a decision can be taken. Can the drone destroy the target? Drones have a more-limited capacity for expendables, so if the F-22 is deployed in relay position, and the drone can't manage the target, the F-22 may be ordered forward to engage. Or, if the drone is attacked by enemy fighters, the F-22(s) may be sent in (the drones still can't effectively fight back in air-to-air combat). In both cases, the F-22 would arrive much faster than if it had to be manned and launched from a rear-area airstrip after the target is identified, and speed to the target can make a huge difference in how effective the attack is.
In my opinion, although HP was once "king of the printers," their products are now crap; certainly their Customer Support is the worst I have ever experienced. No other manufacturer has ever told me I would have to pay US$25 to get the location of the drivers for a printer on their unnavigable Web site!
Now they're trying to put third-party ink dealers out of business. Well, with an 8000% markup on toner and ink, I can understand (but not condone) why they'd be trying to kill the competition - but the *right* way to do it is with excellence of your products, not the expensiveness of your lawyers.
Best wishes to Pelikan, and my advice to HP owners is, when the printer needs replacement, get a different brand.
It's generally accepted that if you pass by the bank after hours and you see the door wide open and money scattered all over the floor, that it's all right for you to telephone the "emergency contact number" posted on the door and let them know about it, without risking any legal liabilities. If the bank operates like that, the bank's officers will be facing legal charges themselves.
Yet a Web site operator who carelessly exposes customer data, including credit card numbers, social security numbers, names, address, and dates of birth, risks absolutely no criminal charges under existing law. And a security researcher who sees that they have dones so *is highly likely* to be brought up on charges if he tells the site operator without remaining anonymous.
I believe we need laws that specifically exempt security researchers from liabilities, provided they register with their local police departments, and disclose any vulnerabilities found to both the police and the site operator. At the same time, there should be criminal penalties for site operators who are notified (which is now documented by the researchers' notification to the police) and who do not take action to secure the data within 24 hours (weekends and holidays *not* excepted). Fines of US$10,000 per user exposed would not be unreasonable.
You can than the Luddites at CoE for this one...
It's the late 21st Century, and Mankind has finally realized that half of the world's problems stem from religion. The solution: A bounty on churchmen. You are a bounty hunter, and you get rewarded for hunting down and killing religious organizers - the higher in the church hierarchy, the greater the rewards. A Curate might net you 5 bob, and the Archbishop of Canterbury - well, that would be an easy 5 grand! Commensurate rewards for other religions, of course.
"I'm still finding it hard to believe a COMMONWEALTH country is allowed to kick its people around, demolish their houses, starve them, round them up, torture and murder them, bury them under increasingly lumpy golf courses, beat the opposition leader to a pulp, imprison journalists without trial and so on, and has been for some considerable time. It's sickening and it's time it stopped."
Oh, the UK. That's sorted, then.
You ask why is "Microsoft Hotmail" so bad at [insert pretty much anything to do with the Internet here].
The answer is "Microsoft." The arrogant fuckwits at Microsoft have *always* thought they could ignore existing standards, invent their own, and impose those inventions on everyone else by sheer force. this is a prime example of why no Microsoft product should ever be allowed to directly contact the Internet (e.g., there should always be a standards-compliant server between any MS crapware and the Internet).
Incidentally, MS Hotmail is not allowed to deliver email to *my* mail server, either. I got tired of all the spam they cheerfully forwarded to my customers, without, in over five years, ever *once* forwarding a legitimate non-spam email.
Hotmail can go stew in their own sewage. Google Mail is doing a good job, for a freemail provider. Hell, even Yahoo does a better job than Hotmail.
I've used PayPal for some years. Never had a problem with it - until after eBay bought them out. Now I'm hesitant to use PayPal, because they *debited* my bank account for a credit that was due to me from PayPal, causing an overdraft situation. I was only able to get it resolved after threatening to walk the 6 blocks to the Federal Reserve offices and filing a complaint there.
Go on, Google - find some other way to bring pressure. eBay needs to have some sense beaten into them.
"Ever feel the need to search Google and Yahoo! at the same time?"
About as often as I feel the need to pour camel urine in my tea, actually.
Google's ads (aka "sponsored links") are easy to identify and easy to ignore. Yahoo's ads are pervasive, and disguised - and their search engine is prone to delivery of more irrelevant results than relevant.
In the past I used Dogpile, but I've found in recent years that Google gives me what I need with a minimum of fuss and very little "hey, buy this" crap, so I've switched to a direct Google search. It was Google results I always used from Dogpile anyway. I've simply cut out the middleman.
By taking a muscle relaxant and a tranquilizer an hour or so prior to going through a border checkpoint, all of the usual somatic symptoms of stress will be suppressed. There's nothing to be done directly about the (highly inaccurate) databases, but "social engineering" always pays off - it won't be long before the dangerous types get themselves removed from the databases, leaving only the innocent, harassed, and soon highly-irritated ordinary citizens, along with the only-slightly-dangerous-if-annoyed types.
Ah, well. I suppose the programme is keeping the snoops employed, at least.
I'm an American citizen, a proud retired US Army veteran - and deeplay ashamed that the United States of America has allowed a cretinous thief like Dubya to sit in the Oval Office.
And Webster Phreaky seems to be exactly the sort of chauvinist Southern Baptist git who'd vote for Bush and Cheney - after all, it's good to send our younr men and women off to die in a foreing civil war, as long as Dick Cheney's Halliburton stock keeps the price up due to those wars, isn;t it?
Oi, you Brits - next time you want bailing out, call me. We've plenty in common - includign the concept of "common law" - and at least you aren't French! ;-)
I prefer to think that they aren't deliberate falsehoods:
@Neil: "The only reason Mac's are more secure is because no one can be bothered to make viruses for them when it is not a dominant product."
False. There was a time when the Mac OS was *the* dominant OS in schools and universities, and the fact is that Macs have always been less prone to malicious software because the OS design was always more secure than anything Microsoft had. Sure, there were a lot of viruses aimed at "old-school_ Mac OS - but the primary method of distribtuion was via floppy disk. That's infinitely slower than the Internet. Furthermore, OSX is based on Linux, and Linux is secure-by-design (as opposed to "sort-of secure by third-party, crash-prone, and buffer-overflow-ridden add-on products" which described Windows to a "T").
@Wade Burchette: "Macs use security through obscurity."
False. Mac OSX uses security-by-design, as all versions of Linux should do (Lindows is a glaring exception, having been configured to run as "root," which is precisely what you should *never* do - and is precisely what all versions of Windows have doone, up until Vista).
@axx: "So bearing in mind that the major banks, retailers and credit card companies that spend millions on security still get hacked all the time, why is it that a large proportion of Apple Mac users incorrectly remain under the impression that the OSX operating system is hack proof?"
Are you under the impression that banks are running Macs? Or that they aren't suffering from the usual weakest link - the "social engineering" attack? I can attest that the majority of the problems are cause by bank employees (who, by the way, *are* using Windows) stupidly giving out access information that should have been kept confidential, and the rest by Web hacks (usually on Windows IIS servers, by the way - when the server is not running Windows, then the hack is *always* an older and well-known vulnerability, which should have been patched, for which patches were available, and which the bank's IT Department failed to patch).
Re: Hardware Differences: "If Microsoft could release their own PC with all their own hardware and their own drivers it would be a completely different matter."
MS did just that. It's called the "Xbox." And what does it do? Why, it plays games. It excels at playing games, in fact. But the operating system is burned into a ROM chip - guess how hard it is to infect a ROM chip. Go on, I'll give you three guesses! So, even Microsoft knows that a "secure" Windows PC needs two things: (1) major limitations on what software it can use; and (2) Windows must be permanently installed in such a way that it can't be modified without hacking the hardware.
And for the record - I don't own a Mac, don't especially want a Mac, and I make my living maintaining Windows PCs (and I make a nice side bit of dosh cleaning up infected Windows PCs). I do have several Linux PCs, and five Windows PCs (one Win2K, four WinXP, and one of those will dual-boot Vista as soon as I ahve time to install the beast). My job involves a lot of security work and security awareness - and my job would be orders of magnitude less work if my employer used Mac OSX on the desktop - but the same is true if he used Linux, and that's essentially free (installation still costs some time, and time is money so...). I rather like Windows XP, within certain limitations; it's excellent for playing games, after all. But it's *not* secure, and neither it nor Vista will ever *be* secure as long as Microsoft continues to support things such as Browser Helper Objects, Web browsers that are integrated into the OS, silent privilege elevation, and pushing for "bells and whistles" in the GUI at the expense of security in the kernel.
'Live Mail - generates fatal error on login ("Safari has experienced a fatal error and has to close. We apologise for the inconvenience")'
Live Mail is a Microsoft property. It won't work properly at all, and it only works as designed (as opposed to "properly") with Internet Explorer.
Testing Apple beta products with Microsoft proprietary Web sites is about as sensible as expecting a Dachshund to sire pups on a black rhino. Sure, it may be amusing to watch the attempt, but it can only end in tears.
Personally, I won't be trying it until the official wide-release beta, though. I do have a life.
'"It's only a matter of time before someone uses the information Google Earth provides to do this country harm," Gianaris was quoted as saying in an article in the New York Post. He objects to the satellite images carried on Google Earth and Google Maps that gives detailed views of skyscrapers, airports and other potential terror targets.'
Well, let's see... Terrorists are allegedly funded by Iran. Iran is a nation, and has sufficient resources to build ballistic missiles and (allegedly) nuclear warheads.
You don't suppose that Iran could purchase a satellite downlink receiver, and gain direct access to the maps and photos that Gianaris wants to keep ordinary law-abiding citizens from seeing, do you?
This is why we send them to the seat of government - we don't want cretins like that in our own neighborhoods.
I think they made it badly, but the point is:
On the privacy front, Google is *far* less dangerous than Microsoft, who covertly collect as much information as possible on every Windows user; Yahoo, who knowingly hands over information to the Chinese government which is then used to stifle freedom of thought and freedom of expression; and many, many others.
Mind you, I won't use Google Dekstop Search (nor Microsoft's, either), nor do I permit Google to collect information via the Google toolbar. But I wouldn't allow anyone else to have thet information, either.
"Today's advisory is the first to implement a change Microsoft is making in the way it communicates plans for high-priority updates."
Why do I feel as if I am watching Holly from _Red_Dwarf_ banging her head against the screen (from inside, for you Philistines who haven't seen the series) to count the updates?
"He didn't publish that information, Microsoft reverse engineered/hacked his product to find that out."
Which incidentally is an express *criminal* violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Ah, well. It's a mutli-billion-dollar company doing it, so I guess it's OK. Not like a kid in his home making his Linux PC play DVDs, no; *that's* a heinous crime, obviously.
I'm a happy NetFlix customer. I have no desire whatsoever to become an Amazon customer, for many reasons, including their nasty habit of spamming, an their unethical attempts to patent obvious and widespread business processes.
And Blockbuster is not the answer; I have heard from a very reliable podcast on CNET that Blockbuster still sends its annoying phone robot to nag you if you keep a movie over 24 hours, even though there are no late fees. "Late nags" are not really better.
...as demonstrated by Amazon's latest nonsensical attempt to patent all business done on the Internet.
That is, abuse won't stop until there are stiff fines and civil punishments for filing a frivolous patent claim. Something along the lines of "$500,000 fine and no patent applications will be accepted from the offender for 17 years."
There is no shortage of high-tech workers in the USA. What is in short supply is high-tech workers who will accept starvation wages for a 60-hour work-week.
If Google can't pay Amercian wages, let them bloody move their entire business to Mumbai, or Tegucigalpa - including the greedy, self-centered bastards that founded the business.
And the same applies to Microsoft.
Instead of buying a newer version of Microsoft's trojan factory, er, Office, convert your enterprise to an open-source product such as OpenOffice. Patches for newly-discovered vulnerabilities *always* come faster for open-source products (probably because the developers are alos the users, and therefor they have a personal stake in ensuring security).
The cost savings alone is justification; an "upgrade" version of Office 2007 Standard costs US$197.99 plus shipping from Amazon. A typical small business will therefor spend in the neighborhood of US$20,000 to move to Office 2007 (and that doesn't include the costs of retraining the staff to use the new software, which, of course, works differently to Office 97, 200, and 2003). Converting to OpenOffice costs nothing (again, ignoring retraining - but since OpenOffice is a "work-alike" for MS Office 2000, those costs will be significantly less than the move to Office 2007).
"In the past, P2P was all about file-sharing and key word search," Johan Pouwelse, an assistant professor at Delft University. "We're working towards true content sharing, a system that gives you the sort of visual browsing you have on YouTube and the community feeling you have on FaceBook or MySpace."
So, we can expect to see extremely-poor-quality video, with horrendous graphical design that look like something out of Paul Klee on a bad acid trip, and page navigation that makes circumnavigating Cape Horn in a single-masted sailboat, during a hurricane at midnight, look like a picnic in Hyde park. Oh, and with gratuitous insulting commentary from spotty, malodourous total strangers .
Glad to have that sorted, then.
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