MIS

"Now many years into the real world I realize it is not how good your code that determines your rank in an IT org but how can you outlast everyone else by eating crap and being a yes man."

Isn't the "yes man" and "eating crap" classes part of the MIS degree anyway? I'll take a field-working CS-type for an IT Manager than an MIS person any day, since they actually have a concept of how things can work, rather than reading marketing hype to make their decisions for them.

@Gareth

Perhaps they are simply avoiding the inevitable sludge-fest of a Win-Mac-Lin bash?

Anyway, I'm wondering WTF The Reg didn't just post the top 10 and the bottom 5 (for the rest of us to mock of course), but instead direct us to a registration-required website?

The FAIL is for the lack of actual usable information in the report.

In Addition

I also know of another alternate: Kolab

http://www.kolab.org/

I have not actually implemented a test environment to see exactly how compatible the latest incarnation is though.

Ah ha!

"clusters to tap into vast amounts of latent processing capacity in Windows 7 PCs"

Ah! So that's why my Win7 is slower than WinXP! M$ must be tapping into my latent cycles to crunch search requests for Bing!

/mines the one with the tin-foil hat in the pocket.

BOFH

A personal favorite BOFH episode of mine is when the BOFH has to attend a training and when asked to log in using his username and password, punches in "root." He receives a reprimand of "No, log on with YOUR username" to which he promptly responds: "But root IS my username!"

Ah, it is all too true, especially in a Windows environment. I can't even have a shared USB printer on a Windows box without having to grant the user(s) on said workstation Power User status. Some software, as stated before, refuses to work properly/install without Admin privileges, however, if you "run as administrator" the crappy software throws the keys/links/etc into the administrator's profile rather than yours and now is broken. Only way to install? Give yourself Administrator privileges, install, then revoke them, and then hope it doesn't need admin rights to simply run the program. Shoddy software is probably a key cause of requiring we admins to sit in an Admin account for our daily work. I can't tell you how many times I wished I could "right-click -> run as administrator" items in the control panel.

Yes, I'm presenting this from a Windows point of view because, last I checked, coporate environments like to use Windows. In Windows, as an Admin, you need Admin privileges.

Capitalism

"Intel and Micron announced a 25nm process earlier this year and are using the lower cost per chip to increase their profits rather than lower prices."

Ah, capitalism at its finest. And of course, the inevitable next report (some months down the road): "Now, with multiple manufacturers releasing flash chips in the sub-30nm range, prices have finally started to fall [slightly] on the large-profit-margin Intel and Micron-based SSDs."

Greedy coporate pirates. :)

Title

"HP also kicked out a new small form factor workstation called the Z2000 SFF.... What makes this is workstation instead of a desktop PC in a tower case is not clear. Prices start at $739 for a base configuration"

I believe you had already answered this question above: "...executives think they need one because their egos demand it."

What better way to satisfy their egos than to hand them a "workstation" that is even the fancy SFF, and have it be just about as cheap as a regular old SFF business model?

But

I guess everyone is forgetting about the mole used in The Matrix III to penetrate "Zion." Of course, such a bunker-buster will probably be just as obvious and take just as long to bust through. Even using conventional drilling, it takes several hours to reach any reasonable depth. Post a requirement for human conveyance and they might as well hope for the mole machine from Core.

Wow

First post an M$ bash, second and third a McrappyFee bashing. Gone are the days (that never existed) of quality comments.

My vote would be immediate "responsible" disclosure and if a patch isn't released in 2 weeks, go public. Proof-of-concept exploit code is close to rediculous, considering it allows some script kiddie to just dump the exploit into their virii framework with no effort of their own. The problem with propriety systems is there's no incentive to secure their stuff in any reasonable timeframe because where else are you going to go? Don't like the M$ failship? Unlikely your corp is going to jump ship to *nix and still get vendor support for your Win32 software running under Wine. Apple is right-out due to no sensible [note use of word] companies developing business apps for that platform.

M$ clearly has the application advantage, even if their OS is riddled with holes worse than a discarded water heater in the backwoods of Alabama... It is no different than the iPhone and App Store. People still buy the outdated hardware to get at the software, even though the likes of the Nexus One are on the market. No apps? No use.

Figure my allegence with that one. /coat

Title

I agree the patent system needs reform/abolishment. However, since there would be next-to-no incentive to be the first to innovate if we did away with patents, perhaps make a requirement for "unique and novel." Yes, yes, it supposedly already requires that. But I'm talking, if someone invents a Warp Drive, grant them a patent. If someone invents coating the wires connecting to a warp drive with "identifying colors based on purpose" toss it out! Or perhaps "graphically displaying warp drive power graphically based on percent-of-maximum" crap. You get the idea.

Title

Perhaps we should simply force all mutli-core programmers to actually read a book about threading rather than develop frameworks that deal with threads "behind the scenes" and hope it works.

<insert "teach a man to fish"-type comment here and mutter something about understanding a concept>

Title

Perhaps the CRS-X naming convention is similar to open-source projects, where odd numbers represent "unstable" builds, and even numbers are "production" releases. They just don't want to admint their CRS-1 and CRS-3 systems would have versionings of "0.1" and "0.3" in the open source world....

Symantics aside, world-changing technology isn't what I'd label the CRS-3. 3x the bandwidth/performance is quite radical by any means, but the only "world-changing" impact they could muster from this would be if they gave it away for free (with an optional support contract of course. How else would they make money?).

Well

Last I checked, showing a degree was only proof that one had enough thought-power to do a list of tasks EXACTLY how one was asked, consistantly, over a long period of time. This is something that "self-taught" people with no Uni degree have no proof (and sometimes ability) to be able to do.

Now, as one of those that fall into the "self-taught" category, I've gone through the motions of getting a paper to back up my skills. When asked why, I merely reply "so I have a piece of paper backing up that I know what I know." Yes, it was an utter waste of my time. I gleaned perhaps one concept in each class that I did not know already. With years of field experience, it was no surprise. Now, the quality of work put forth by other students was quite another matter. You could easily see the "self-taught" students vs. the "normal" students. Their work (programming code, etc) spoke for itself. Self-taught students' code was varying degrees of atrocious, however it worked, and it worked well. The "normal" students had "standard" formatting, but couldn't even figure out how to loop through an array, let alone complete the assignment. And this is in a second or third year class! I always dreaded the "group projects" and specifically associated with the self-taught crowd for the fact that I could rely on their horribly constructed code to actually work its magic and all I had to do was decypher their class interfaces, rather than write the whole project myself just to make it work.

The education system, even in the US, fails miserably. Perhaps these dim-witted politicians want their progeny to have the "advantage" of the college education they failed to receive, at the cost of the quality of that education. It reminds me of a certain situation in border states in the US that had to "dumb down" secondary school exit exams just so more students could pass them.

Title

This is why Apple (supposedly) trolls your app code. I wonder if they build your code themselves and post it on the app store, or if they just take your binary file as granted....

Title

Simply put, online dating (and no, not restricted to "dating" sites) avoids the evolutionary problem of finding a suitable mate within proximity, by chance.

Pontificate at your own expense.

I for one...

@Rob Foster:

AGW proponents say humans are to blame for "Climate Change." Others claim we are not to blame for Climate Change. The idiots are the ones who say "the climate is not changing." Sorted.

@the CO2 Anon. Coward of: "reducing our CO2 emissions will definitely prevent this":

NASA reported that CO2 was not sufficient enough, on its own, to change the climate, but that ASH (or other types of particulates of such nature), were the most likely culprit of any climate change. So I'd be more worried about volcanic eruptions, forest fires, and other dirty-burning/releasing of ash-like particulates. Perhaps put a filter on your campfire next time?

Cheers

"Finding out that we are alone in the universe? Or, finding out that we are first and have to teach all the other intelligent races that come after us?"

Just because the universe is X Billion/Trillion years old, doesn't necessitate that life has evolved prior to now. We, ourselves, could be that "ancient" alien race that went about seeding and colonizing the planets in our galaxy and beyond.

Anyone got a few Stargates in their pocket to sprinkle around? Methinks I misplaced my coat...

Hey!!!

I just patented the "five fingered" glove. Many companies have patented a glove in which to insert a hand, and variations on it, but my patent explicitly states the need for five "tubes" in which to insert the fingers for the purpose of digit dexterity. Now I can sue everyone that makes gloves!

Talk about patenting multi-touch and gestures....bleh.

Problem

Since many servers (should) nowadays be running inside a VM, simply dumping out due to being an a virtual environment isn't enough of a check. Servers are the lucrative hosts for zombies due to their always-on, high-bandwidth, high-horsepower nature. To dump them simply for being a virtual server will cut out a portion of this zombie base. As noted in the paper, other methods would be much more meaningful. However, one mentioned (of including a self-address in the list for verification), wouldn't be on my list. Even if it was a web-based email, it would still require utilizing one (or some) of the bots to auto-check the "personal" email address for verification, which would throw a control password into the mix, and provide a means of compromise. Not good. Other alternative would be to check it with some control center, which could be traced back to, another fail.

Perhaps the easiest way would be to register a few (if not all) directly-accessible bots (not behind a firewall or the like) as targets. For every batch of spam sent, from every server, one email would be addressed to <randomgarbage>@<infectedcomputerip> (so to speak) and have a C&C message verify across the bot-whispernet that such an email was received, and have that determine if the machine is being filtered/blocked/redirected. It isn't flawless, but will give the herder an idea of which machines are pointlessly infected.

As for the "act as a honeypot" to disable a zombie suggestion above, I would assume you have the technical know-how to remove such a bot if you know how to "act as a honeypot" in the first place. Or am I just giving too much credit?

Either way, if the bot is unable to send spam for whatever reason, I'd probably just flip it into "keylog and send me juicy info" status anyways.

OR

Or you could show us the tasty little 9" tablet.

XP vs Win7

Windows 7 is a smooth operating system, if you're a punter end-uzer. I have to run Windows XP for quite a few reasons, least of all for gaming. Civilization 4 WILL NOT WORK in Windows 7. Period. Granted, last patch for it was Sep07, but WTF? Yes, it technically is not Windows' fault, but the software companies (who had PLENTY of advance notice), however, older software/games that were developed and reached end-of-life long before Vista was born have no chance. And of course, VMs don't (yet) have native gfx support, so Civ4 in a VM is out of the window(s) :P

Another thought, what will happen to Windows XP Mode in Win7 when XP hits EoL? Technically, it's a feature of Win7, which should still be supported..... But then, Win8 will probably be out by 2014 (hopefully) and all our problems will go away (again)...

Seriously

Seriously, people shouldn't bash Apple for this. When you buy a product, it is because you deem its benefits acceptable compared to is lack of features. You buy a DVD player without a USB or Network plug? Don't cry to the maker because "it's essentially a computer, so why did you not include this feature?!?!" You bought it. If it was the only DVD player on the market, well, your desire to watch DVDs may far outweigh your want for a USB or Network plug and you'll buy it regardless. When people buy an Apple product, they feel it is worth the niche market cost and lock-in. Not to mention accepting the Big Brother we-know-whats-good-for-you-take-it-or-leave-it marketing and development. If you don't own an Apple product yet, go ahead and flame your reasons for not buying their "crap." But when you become a paying customer, you waive that right.

Misleading...

"US television news magazine 60 Minutes reported that Google has been running four "Bloom Boxes" in a data center for the past 18 months, but this is a tad misleading."

Since when has 60 Minutes ever NOT been misleading with their hypegasm reports? Remember the whole SUV "exploding gas tanks" debacle where they planted explosive charges to get it to blow up on impact?

So

So 2X goes hysterical because its shoddy programmers screwed up an API call and crashed a server?

Mines the one with a Windows API reference guide in the pocket