It's a fine line between something that is designed to encourage discussion and flamebait. Honestly, I don't know which side of the line my post was. Thing is, I don't care. I'm paid to care about just over 20 staff computers and just over 160 student computers. Fortunately all the friends and family close enough to ask me for help with computers are more than computer literate enough to avoid getting their PC infected, regardless of the OS it runs.
I've got two projects I'm putting together that I'm starting to describe as "off Internet". One is an old-school dial-up BBS, the other involves a community wireless network. Neither will connect to The Internet. Let Joe Average run insecure-out-of-the-box Windows Whatever. When it grinds to a halt under the weight of all the viruses, for the third or fourth time, they may decide to find a solution on their own, or they may just give up on computers. Either one is good.
The college where I work specifically organises a secondhand book sale each semester. On top of that, we haven't just blindly updated Office (on either the student of staff PCs) so old textbooks are not a problem (actually, buying new textbooks for old versions of Office is becoming the problem).
The games of yesteryear that were considered to have outstanding graphics really pushed the hardware, I mean that they required real talent in programming and required every CPU cycle you could devote to them. None of today's games really push the envelope, just your wallet. Wake me when someone writes a game in assembler and it still requires a 2GHz machine and the latest DX9 video card.
Re: You can't even buy a simple cell phone any mor
on
KISS
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· Score: 1
Correction: You can't even buy a new simple cell phone any more. There are plenty of places to buy simple hardworking solid old reliable boring secondhand mobiles, if that's your thing. (In Australia, any Cash Converters.) Meanwhile, you could do a lot worse than a Series 60 phone -- the basics are easy and the expansion options are infinite.
To the best of my understanding a "window" travels along the length of the concatinated file set as a solid archive is created. This window is the modern version of a dictionary, so therefore I believe it would be considered shared across multiple files.
Compression can be improved for large amounts of data simply by increasing the size of this window. Some of the latest versions of 7zip allow for this window to be 32MB in size ("Ultra" compression). While this only causes 32MB of RAM to be consumed when decompressing, it causes nearly 300MB of ram to be required when compressing. My laptop with 384MB of RAM grinds to a halt trying to compress more than 32MB of files using the "Ultra" mode (though my home PC with 512MB of RAM makes short work of it).
I'm not advocating that a PC with a virus be allowed to continue on the network. Quite the opposite -- the user of a PC with a possible virus should be told. In fact, you may have made my point for me.
My comment about not just walking in and unplugging a PC from a network was more about letting someone save an open file before you break their connection. You and I may save at five minute intervals, but I've seen people lose a whole afternoon's work because their PC crashed.
I just worry about all these computer savvy people that see themselves as God compaired to less technically literate people. It's as if they think the maximum importance of the work you can be doing on a PC is proportional to your level of computer literacy. This simply isn't the case. Some things I would do to my equipment in a heartbeat, I wouldn't even think of suggesting to upper management for fear of compromising my career.
Have you ever tried to extract a single file from a gzip'ed tar archive? It's not possible without unpacking everything and throwing away the bits that you don't want.
Sorry, but that's true of almost every compressor that gets a better ratio than zip. I used to use RAR, now I use 7z. They both create "solid" archives by sorting the files into an order most likely to place similar sections together then compress the whole thing as a single stream of data. Makes a huge difference to compression.
You are talking about DOS/Windows virii of yore which spread(slowly compared to worms) thru files via floppy disks, emails. But all the mass mailing virii/worms are mailed by a malicious program running in the background. They don't infect the attachments that you send with your real emails or any other emails you send manually.
I know this, but it's like trying to explain the different between NULL and zero to any non-technical person.
By defaulat, the old version of MailScanner had a specific list of viruses for which it didn't send a reply. The new version doesn't send a reply for all viruses. Whatever. But don't go reporting people for spamming because of an anti-virus response, that's a lie and likely to get you in serious trouble.
I'm the postmaster of my company. With auto-replies turned on here I get:
Viruses. (or rather notification that someone tried to send me a virus that was filtered)
Notification that a virus was sent to one of my users.
Bounces from invalid addresses that a virus has sent a message to using the administration or my personal address in the From: line.
Bounces from mail servers that detect a virus and send an auto-reply to the faked From: address. (This is what everyone seems to hate at the moment, yet it's maybe 2% of my virus-related traffic)
Bounces from invalid (or full) addresses we've sent an auto-reply to.
If I pass through a message to the recipient that the servier filtered the message, I also get:
Phone calls from confused users
Now, just purely to get some peace and quiet I have I have turned off all notification except #2, I did this yesterday morning. However, I had to weigh up the confusion being suffered by my users against the requirement for notification of a failure to deliver an important message.
Now, I'm sorry if you think that these auto-replies are ruining your life, but blame the virus writers not the rest of us. We're only trying to get on with our lives too.
YOU explain it to him. I've had users that set their email program to check mail every minute, yet still not even check to see what arrived for 30 minutes after it's arrived. I can't work it out -- people who have no idea how any of this works, who hate computers, will still blindly trust an email system for seriously important stuff. So, as an IT Officer I have to do things I might not necessarily agree with just so that I cover my arse.
(Not that it's anywhere near as bad where I am now -- most of the experiences aluded to in this thread are from my previous job.)
In the case of anti-spam companies that ignore this information, they ARE spamming and contributing to the problem. There is no excuse.
That's a nice black and white world there.
Here's food for thought. I believe that those disclaimers at the bottom of an email; "If you received this in error you must notify the sender and destroy this email" are a complete waste of bandwidth, totally unforcable -- yet even as IT Officer I'm forced to use them because the lawyers said so and the Directors trust them more than me.
Or here's another one. Yahoo, Hotmail, et al place actual ads at the bottom of outgoing messages. Are you going to report your friends for spam every time that they send you a message from one of these services. You're paying for the bandwidth consumed by those extra characters.
This is not a black and white issue. And in a week or so it won't matter again for a while.
Sending an auto-response to a virus email is not against the TOS of our ISP. If you LIE about spam and get our company's Internet connection turned off, you will be sued for lost business and possibly slander.
And by the way, if your boss has a virus that propagates via email - he ought to have his cat5 cable severed and shouldn't be contacting any other computers - much less emailing anyone.
You're kidding right? How long are you going to last if you handle problems like this? No wonder IT departments are thought of so poorly in many companies. What an attitude.
There is a huge installed base of working VGA monitors with the 15-pin sub-D connection. My Multiscan 500PS is a big old expensive beautiful monitor and it's not going anywhere. As it happens my new-ish video card has VGA, DVI and S-Video and can output on any two at a time. I have my Sony monitor and a Philips TV hooked up at the moment. It also comes with a DVI-to-VGA adapter, which was used to try and debug what turned out to be a documentation error.
At work I'm getting dual-head cards in all the new PCs. As PCs die their old monitors are connected as a second screen to new PCs While the low profile cards only have a DVI connection, it is immediately split into two analog ports for two cheap analog monitors. We only have one PC with a DVI monitor -- an odd machine that was bought while we were testing a new supplier. Sure the screen looks nice, but it's still cheaper and easier to go with the old connector at the moment. Give it a couple of years.
Do any of you actually have a job in a place that uses email for important communication? Do you all have the memory of a bar of soap? Sure, the latest wave of email worm/virus/trojan things fake the From: address, but viruses attach themselves to legitimate files too. You can't just blackhole every sus email. I've just said this in another thread. The auto-response from AV software isn't spam, its the server trying to warn you that an attachment you might have cared about didn't make it to the destination.
You try explaining why an urgent email the Managing Director sent from his home PC didn't reach an important client and didn't send back an error message. It might not be your fault he got a virus, but it's sure as hell not his fault the company didn't get that billion-dollar contract.
A couple of hundred dollars in extra traffic costs
About a hundred dollars of my time plus about 20 minutes downtime for the financial controller as I learnt how to clean it off a PC -- the other two infections I removed with no downtime (the users weren't even at their PCs when I fixed it and didn't know they were infected until after it was fixed).
Total cost at this business probably didn't exceed A$400. We're "medium". 19 core staff, 80-odd contractors.
It would have been less of my time if it didn't highlight that the anti-virus software on the mail server wasn't behaving properly and had expired (so you might want to add a licence renewal into the cost if you're into padding numbers).
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It's a fine line between something that is designed to encourage discussion and flamebait. Honestly, I don't know which side of the line my post was. Thing is, I don't care. I'm paid to care about just over 20 staff computers and just over 160 student computers. Fortunately all the friends and family close enough to ask me for help with computers are more than computer literate enough to avoid getting their PC infected, regardless of the OS it runs.
I've got two projects I'm putting together that I'm starting to describe as "off Internet". One is an old-school dial-up BBS, the other involves a community wireless network. Neither will connect to The Internet. Let Joe Average run insecure-out-of-the-box Windows Whatever. When it grinds to a halt under the weight of all the viruses, for the third or fourth time, they may decide to find a solution on their own, or they may just give up on computers. Either one is good.
Creeping Copper Coins are a "$".
The IT jobs market in Australia isn't much better than the US. Go compete with someone else ;)
The college where I work specifically organises a secondhand book sale each semester. On top of that, we haven't just blindly updated Office (on either the student of staff PCs) so old textbooks are not a problem (actually, buying new textbooks for old versions of Office is becoming the problem).
"For sale: Textbooks. Never used, grades to prove it."
The games of yesteryear that were considered to have outstanding graphics really pushed the hardware, I mean that they required real talent in programming and required every CPU cycle you could devote to them. None of today's games really push the envelope, just your wallet. Wake me when someone writes a game in assembler and it still requires a 2GHz machine and the latest DX9 video card.
Correction: You can't even buy a new simple cell phone any more. There are plenty of places to buy simple hardworking solid old reliable boring secondhand mobiles, if that's your thing. (In Australia, any Cash Converters.) Meanwhile, you could do a lot worse than a Series 60 phone -- the basics are easy and the expansion options are infinite.
Compression can be improved for large amounts of data simply by increasing the size of this window. Some of the latest versions of 7zip allow for this window to be 32MB in size ("Ultra" compression). While this only causes 32MB of RAM to be consumed when decompressing, it causes nearly 300MB of ram to be required when compressing. My laptop with 384MB of RAM grinds to a halt trying to compress more than 32MB of files using the "Ultra" mode (though my home PC with 512MB of RAM makes short work of it).
My comment about not just walking in and unplugging a PC from a network was more about letting someone save an open file before you break their connection. You and I may save at five minute intervals, but I've seen people lose a whole afternoon's work because their PC crashed.
I just worry about all these computer savvy people that see themselves as God compaired to less technically literate people. It's as if they think the maximum importance of the work you can be doing on a PC is proportional to your level of computer literacy. This simply isn't the case. Some things I would do to my equipment in a heartbeat, I wouldn't even think of suggesting to upper management for fear of compromising my career.
By defaulat, the old version of MailScanner had a specific list of viruses for which it didn't send a reply. The new version doesn't send a reply for all viruses. Whatever. But don't go reporting people for spamming because of an anti-virus response, that's a lie and likely to get you in serious trouble.
- Viruses. (or rather notification that someone tried to send me a virus that was filtered)
- Notification that a virus was sent to one of my users.
- Bounces from invalid addresses that a virus has sent a message to using the administration or my personal address in the From: line.
- Bounces from mail servers that detect a virus and send an auto-reply to the faked From: address. (This is what everyone seems to hate at the moment, yet it's maybe 2% of my virus-related traffic)
- Bounces from invalid (or full) addresses we've sent an auto-reply to.
If I pass through a message to the recipient that the servier filtered the message, I also get:- Phone calls from confused users
Now, just purely to get some peace and quiet I have I have turned off all notification except #2, I did this yesterday morning. However, I had to weigh up the confusion being suffered by my users against the requirement for notification of a failure to deliver an important message.Now, I'm sorry if you think that these auto-replies are ruining your life, but blame the virus writers not the rest of us. We're only trying to get on with our lives too.
And I'm sure all the people who subsequently don't get important messages because of your childishness would just love to beat some sense into you.
(Not that it's anywhere near as bad where I am now -- most of the experiences aluded to in this thread are from my previous job.)
Here's food for thought. I believe that those disclaimers at the bottom of an email; "If you received this in error you must notify the sender and destroy this email" are a complete waste of bandwidth, totally unforcable -- yet even as IT Officer I'm forced to use them because the lawyers said so and the Directors trust them more than me.
Or here's another one. Yahoo, Hotmail, et al place actual ads at the bottom of outgoing messages. Are you going to report your friends for spam every time that they send you a message from one of these services. You're paying for the bandwidth consumed by those extra characters.
This is not a black and white issue. And in a week or so it won't matter again for a while.
Sending an auto-response to a virus email is not against the TOS of our ISP. If you LIE about spam and get our company's Internet connection turned off, you will be sued for lost business and possibly slander.
At work I'm getting dual-head cards in all the new PCs. As PCs die their old monitors are connected as a second screen to new PCs While the low profile cards only have a DVI connection, it is immediately split into two analog ports for two cheap analog monitors. We only have one PC with a DVI monitor -- an odd machine that was bought while we were testing a new supplier. Sure the screen looks nice, but it's still cheaper and easier to go with the old connector at the moment. Give it a couple of years.
If you report my company for spamming based on an anti-virus email auto-response we will see you in court.
You try explaining why an urgent email the Managing Director sent from his home PC didn't reach an important client and didn't send back an error message. It might not be your fault he got a virus, but it's sure as hell not his fault the company didn't get that billion-dollar contract.
- A couple of hundred dollars in extra traffic costs
- About a hundred dollars of my time plus about 20 minutes downtime for the financial controller as I learnt how to clean it off a PC -- the other two infections I removed with no downtime (the users weren't even at their PCs when I fixed it and didn't know they were infected until after it was fixed).
Total cost at this business probably didn't exceed A$400. We're "medium". 19 core staff, 80-odd contractors.It would have been less of my time if it didn't highlight that the anti-virus software on the mail server wasn't behaving properly and had expired (so you might want to add a licence renewal into the cost if you're into padding numbers).