Here’s a funny new trend in announcing software to your users. “Microsoft Messenger 8 has not been released”. In fact, you may even want to say “If you see a file called BETA8WEBINSTALL.EXE (or an obvious variation/advertisement) then please ignore.”
Even the old saying “patch early/often” can and will be held against you by the clever worm and virus authors.
Because congress adopted a federal holiday on June 26, 1870. Simple.
Why, you ask?
Well, it had an inauspicious beginning in the country. It was so controversial (decadent) in the 1700s that it was actively banned by Puritains, including those who left England to settle the early American states. Perhaps more importantly it was shunned by the Founding Fathers since it was considerd an English tradition and irrelevant to the observance of religion. Alas, Digital History suggests by the early 1800s Christmas in America had become just another famously drunken, lewd and riotous event, rivaling the decadence of old King Charles’ England:
But despite the Puritans’ best efforts, Christmas in America became an excuse for dangerous hell raising. At Christmastime, men drank rum, fired muskets wildly, and costumed themselves in animal pelts or women’s clothes – crossing species and gender. In New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other cities, they formed Callithumpian parades, which involved beating on the kettles, blowing on penny trumpets and tin horns, and setting off firecrackers.
Sounds like a blast, no? Well, the fun obviously never lasts forever and so things eventually came to a head when, according to the History Channel, the effects of Christmas coupled with a rise in poverty and class conflict of the early 19th Century gave concern to those who were in power:
In 1828, the New York city council instituted the city’s first police force in response to a Christmas riot. This catalyzed certain members of the upper classes to begin to change the way Christmas was celebrated in America.
The new message was that people should stay home, sit by a fire, and drink and eat themselves senseless instead of partying outside with others. And so, out of the political discord of 150 years ago we can today say thank you to the federal government for inventing a national tradition and opening the door for America’s two great factions, corporations and religions, to fight over control of the “real” meaning of this holiday.
Thanks should also go to Thomas Nast, arguably the father of modern American political illustration, for creating the modern American image of Santa Claus during the Civil War…it might be worth noting that Santa was always pro-Union and anti-slavery.
Oh, and why December 25th? Apparently Pope Julius I wanted something to compete with the popularity of the festival “Saturnalia”, and probably found it most convenient to just rebrand the pagan holiday with a new name. Merry Saturnalia had a bad ring to it, I guess (especially since the word implied an “inversion of order” instead of something Christ-like).
Personally, I think the holiday should be celebrated on June 26th before someone starts another winter riot over the latest must-have expression of modern faith, like an XBox.
USA Today reports today that the ’04 and ’05 VW TDIs have appreciated in value, unlike most cars which have depreciated as much as 26%. And when you consider the diesel option actually made the car cost less up-front than the gas engine, bio-diesel powered Passats have turned out to be not only one of the most fun cars to drive but also a good financial and environmental investment.
NetworkWorld quoted the AT&T CISO, Ed Amoroso:
The past decade has been tough – the security industry has lost its way. At one point we had no security; now there’s too much. This has been the era of security getting worse and worse. Today there’s too much software from vendors that needs to be patched. There are viruses and worms and spam and firewalls…carriers need to be doing security for the endpoints.
The theory is that a central entity can do a better job filtering the data to detect anomalies, and that the end users can not all afford to specialize in security.
But how do we know that AT&T has a security baseline that is consistent with ours as end users? I agree with Ed that the most basic threats should be removed by the carriers (like the centrally-controlled conditioning that removes big spikes and sags from the power lines), but do not see how he can get around that fact that end users will always have vastly different risk models that need individual solutions. Some of us still buy small UPS, some big, and some go with multiple UPS plus generators. That doesn’t mean we don’t think that the power company shouldn’t be liable for outages, it just means we don’t all address the same risks let alone agree to a universal fix.