I've just started getting hit by the latest email worm/virus/trojan thing (some jerkoff with my real email address has just gotten themselves infected). And judging by the lack of response from my personal address' email server I'm not alone. This could be the resurgance predicted as people got back to work after the (long?) weekend. Either way, spam is probably down because email servers are overloaded more than peoples' inboxes are.
People will just develop more for open platforms. Look at the number of people writing stuff for the PalmOS compared to WinCE (or whatever the latest name is).
Ignoring the fact that Rez isn't original, saying that consumers don't want any original games because one original game didn't do well is, well, stupid. As is painting all gamers with the same brush. I don't like FPS or RTS games. I like action RPGs, many styles of "old-skool arcade" games and stylised racing games. On top of that I collect old video games.
I also have about 2,500 tracks worth of legitimate music (judging by what's on my iPod), but none of it is Country, Rap (except MC Hawking) or Opera -- most of it is Electronica. I have quite a collection of fiction books, but most of them are Sci-Fi and (Dark) Fantasy -- no Romance or Crime. Asking what "Gamers" want is as silly as asking what "Readers" want or what "Listeners" want. Time to narrow down your target audience...
While I admit there are some risk management issues associated with legislative backup requirements, mostly you just have to know that no (archive) media will last forever. If you want the data to last forever then you need an ongoing process of renewal -- not a dependance on the lifetime of a product as written in the sales brochure.
Apart from one critical time when I simply ran out of storage capacity and had my only copy of something on a Zip disk, I've never lost a peice of data that I didn't purposely delete. I never have my only copy of anything I care about on a single CD. I used to have CD backup copies and an archive hard disk. The hard disk got re-tasked, so I made a second copy of its contents. I am currently re-creating the old archive drive plus all the data I've accumulated since its time on a new hard drive, and some of the CDs aren't working properly after only four or five years. When I've finished organising the archive I'll probably burn it to DVD. In a number of years I'll look at migrating it to the next medium...
That's known as the Morning Show Interview Technique. If you want to come back you agree with the host. If you want security to escort you to your car, you disagree with the host.
...any moment now. Why bother downloading it myself when hundreds of students are already overloading our bandwidth quota in an attempt to download it for me?
Personally, I would have considered a disk formatting worm to be fully justified.
I'm starting to believe the same thing myself. Thing is, once the PC is rebuilt what are the chances that it will be patched properly?
Someone should scan the whole damn planet using HFNetChk with the credentials of Username: Administrator, Password: [NULL] and automatically push any missing patches.
And to buy us the time it takes to install infrastructure like that; Replace every lamp in every traffic light with an LED version. Seriously.
And doing both these things would buy us the time we need to get solar and wind power into a substantial slab of homes. If we act fast enough we may not have to build another power station for 50 years.
I can categorically state that I didn't need an SMS to know that Gigli, The Hulk and Charlies Angels 2 were crap. I didn't even need a review of Hulk, I could tell from the trailers.
If casinos can't eliminate card counters they will simply eliminate blackjack.
Which begs the question why they haven't simply done that yet.
(Though that ignores the question as to why anyone would go to a casino in the first place -- they're the only place I know that's simultaneously an assult on the eyes and seriously miserable.
Be they text on a screen or sound vibrating your eardrums, it's all just chemical and electrical signals in your brain. You may question whether or not the poster actually does what he typed, but they were describing a behaviour in The Real World.
"I did it and it didn't screw up my system" is actually fairly useful info, if the source can be trusted. No matter how many people post that it did or didn't work, each post is "+1 Informative". Certainly more informative than "I think it's stupid and you're stupid", which is what I believe you tend to see if you browse at 1.
I've got a Nerf gun I want to put in a glass-fronted case labelled "In case of stupid, break glass". The other thing I thought would be funny for an IT guy would be an abacus or slide rule in a similar box with the standard "in case of emergency" label.
What do you do about remote users that can only connect via VPN through a modem?
Fortunately we don't have anyone who only connects via VPN, so when I know they're in the office I can specifically scan their PC. (Currently we have two laptops away from the desk which will get a damn good patching on their return.)
Screw Windows Update, I, luckily, started testing Shavlik's HFNetChkLT for patch deployment about 12 hours before the worm started. Very nice. Has problems deploying Service Packs (particularly Office), but does patches perfectly. Either way, it will let an administrator of a corporate network check every member of the domain for patches from a single point and that point doesn't even have to be a server. My laptop has been deploying patches pretty solidly for the last day and a bit.
I am not American bashing in any way, but these issues are non-trivial.
As an Australian, my pet hate on this issue is having to use "color" in HTML tags. Typically though it means that I can safely use "colour" in php variable names.
However, date format is a much more serious issue, one I was never able to properly resolve with the previous database package I developed for: DB-Text. It has some American date formatting hardcoded in a couple of places, resulting in serious pain for anyone using dates outside of US. An an example of how bad it was at some points, if you used 13/1/1990 it came out as the 13th of January 1990, but if you used 12/1/1990 in the same place it came out as the 1st of December 1990, without changing any settings -- and there was nothing you could do about it. We ended up having to use "12-Jan-1990" style formatting.
Slashdot Mirror
I've just started getting hit by the latest email worm/virus/trojan thing (some jerkoff with my real email address has just gotten themselves infected). And judging by the lack of response from my personal address' email server I'm not alone. This could be the resurgance predicted as people got back to work after the (long?) weekend. Either way, spam is probably down because email servers are overloaded more than peoples' inboxes are.
People will just develop more for open platforms. Look at the number of people writing stuff for the PalmOS compared to WinCE (or whatever the latest name is).
I also have about 2,500 tracks worth of legitimate music (judging by what's on my iPod), but none of it is Country, Rap (except MC Hawking) or Opera -- most of it is Electronica. I have quite a collection of fiction books, but most of them are Sci-Fi and (Dark) Fantasy -- no Romance or Crime. Asking what "Gamers" want is as silly as asking what "Readers" want or what "Listeners" want. Time to narrow down your target audience...
Apart from one critical time when I simply ran out of storage capacity and had my only copy of something on a Zip disk, I've never lost a peice of data that I didn't purposely delete. I never have my only copy of anything I care about on a single CD. I used to have CD backup copies and an archive hard disk. The hard disk got re-tasked, so I made a second copy of its contents. I am currently re-creating the old archive drive plus all the data I've accumulated since its time on a new hard drive, and some of the CDs aren't working properly after only four or five years. When I've finished organising the archive I'll probably burn it to DVD. In a number of years I'll look at migrating it to the next medium...
That's known as the Morning Show Interview Technique. If you want to come back you agree with the host. If you want security to escort you to your car, you disagree with the host.
http://web.archive.org/web/2000030322484 4/http://www.clickto.com/coinop/GamePage/Polybius. html
I assume the URL has been broken by /. string filters...
...any moment now. Why bother downloading it myself when hundreds of students are already overloading our bandwidth quota in an attempt to download it for me?
Someone should scan the whole damn planet using HFNetChk with the credentials of Username: Administrator, Password: [NULL] and automatically push any missing patches.
Oh, and I suppose Pitch-O-Mat 5000 was just a modified Howitzer?
And to buy us the time it takes to install infrastructure like that; Replace every lamp in every traffic light with an LED version. Seriously.
And doing both these things would buy us the time we need to get solar and wind power into a substantial slab of homes. If we act fast enough we may not have to build another power station for 50 years.
I can categorically state that I didn't need an SMS to know that Gigli, The Hulk and Charlies Angels 2 were crap. I didn't even need a review of Hulk, I could tell from the trailers.
(Though that ignores the question as to why anyone would go to a casino in the first place -- they're the only place I know that's simultaneously an assult on the eyes and seriously miserable.
"I did it and it didn't screw up my system" is actually fairly useful info, if the source can be trusted. No matter how many people post that it did or didn't work, each post is "+1 Informative". Certainly more informative than "I think it's stupid and you're stupid", which is what I believe you tend to see if you browse at 1.
I've got a Nerf gun I want to put in a glass-fronted case labelled "In case of stupid, break glass". The other thing I thought would be funny for an IT guy would be an abacus or slide rule in a similar box with the standard "in case of emergency" label.
Screw Windows Update, I, luckily, started testing Shavlik's HFNetChkLT for patch deployment about 12 hours before the worm started. Very nice. Has problems deploying Service Packs (particularly Office), but does patches perfectly. Either way, it will let an administrator of a corporate network check every member of the domain for patches from a single point and that point doesn't even have to be a server. My laptop has been deploying patches pretty solidly for the last day and a bit.
This utitilty should buy you enough time to download those patches you need.
After reading through everything, I don't think SP3 is a fix, since the patch "is okay to install on SP3 and SP4" and "will be included in SP5".
That's really helpful. Do you want to explain it to a company of real-estate agents or should I?
However, date format is a much more serious issue, one I was never able to properly resolve with the previous database package I developed for: DB-Text. It has some American date formatting hardcoded in a couple of places, resulting in serious pain for anyone using dates outside of US. An an example of how bad it was at some points, if you used 13/1/1990 it came out as the 13th of January 1990, but if you used 12/1/1990 in the same place it came out as the 1st of December 1990, without changing any settings -- and there was nothing you could do about it. We ended up having to use "12-Jan-1990" style formatting.