lol I blocked Doubleclick at home and on everyone of my client sites ever since they came out...
The only thing that concerns me is as someone else has said, they start rotating the hosts or even outright dropping "doubleclick" anywhere in the domain name so those filters no longer work.
If the ads suddenly start coming from Microsoft.com servers suddenly trying to block them would cause issues getting updates and patches.
I can see it now, the new Eula and Verification tool, in order to access MS Updates you must all access to our advertising service.
Opps we see your system blocks Microsoft Advertisement, sending a message with your information to our legal department, contact your administrator to unblock our messages in order to receive your free critical updates.
And then I'm sure that MS will try to sue people for blocking their advertisements just like they try to sue you for getting a computer without their software...
What I am saying is you will have to be even more careful to protect the screen especially when its on both sides. As for having seen a color screen crack, yes I have. An incident at work cracked the screen on my Treo 700 and my girlfriend somehow busted the screen on her Razor when it flipped open inside her purse somehow. A co-worker of mine busted the color screen on his nokia just sitting in his car and forgetting to pull it off his belt, the seatbelt was enough to crack it. And my sisters husband, granted he works construction, has broken the screen on his last three phones.
Sure someone is going to come out with some sort of fancy carrier for it, but still you are going to hear about people cracking one or both screens because they sat on their phone and something smacked one side. Many of the belt carriers for phones, for people that are really active, leave indents on your phone. Every phone I have had in the last 8 years has had marks left on the back caused by the belt clips. So again, one of the two screens are going to get severely marred up by belt clip carriers and open to possibly worse damage as well.
So for those that question my thinking, obviously you havent thought it through yourselves.
"People know at the company, people know that if you were to do something like that you'd basically get fired. "
But NOONE got fired!!!
He states yeah, our employee did a bad thing, then says if someone does it they get fired, but the guy still has his job. He was not fired. Further proof they whitewashed the whole issue and arent going to do anything about it. And if they arent going to do anything about it this time, how can anyone beleive they are stopping it from happening again...
A point that has come up in the past but lately glossed over is that by using third party mail services such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc... their Terms of Use and Service state that you give them rights and ownership of your data to do with as they wish. In a corporate environment that means any trade secrets or concepts you mail to or from someone via one of the third party mail systems gives the systems owner license to use your data as they wish. If they want to develope it into a product and market it themselves, they in effect could without paying any royalties as your use of their service granted them consent.
As a rule at all my client offices its stated that all business related correspondance must happen via company owned services. IT doctrine at each site states the computer resources are property of the company and use provided to aid the users in corporate business only. Any personal use can result in disciplinary action, to include firing.
Many of these rules came about when users started clicking on random pop's or installing their favorite screen savers, weatherbug, mail programs, and chat programs. Many of these were found to contain malware that cost the companys lots of money to have cleaned up and slowed down productivity. While users company mail is scanned for virus's, third party mail products and chat programs showed more problematic and became the primary source for infection of the corporate networks.
We've also caught employees suspected of corporate espionage using third party mail services to transmit company information in an effort to side step IT monitoring their mail. That alone was enough for the Board of Directors to decree no employee may ever access such services from their offices.
We've enacted proxys at some sites, others content filtering, and others simply requiring the employees to sign a usage agreement that if caught in an audit means they can be terminated without severence.
I have several clients on SBC global and they have on occasion been shut off or fined Overage Charges for "Excessive Use". The contract "implies" unlimited use, but are actually limited in the ammount of traffic you can actually sustain each month.
In fact SBC is notorious for applying filters on high use users and begin to meter and slow down your pipe speed long before you exceed your max.
In the last three years I have seen 5 seperate sites have their contracts with SBC DSL terminated for "Excessive Use". The notice you get, or sometimes have read to you by a second tier support guru when you call to complain of the outage, goes on to state that your excessive use impacts other users and they are dropping you because of that.
In fact all service providers I have worked with and heard of have traffic limits ontop of your bandwidth limitations. Many also employ daily limits as well as monthly limits on traffic. Your monthly traffic limit might be 50gb, but you may still get shutdown for exceeding 4gb in one day... Dont be fooled by the marketing spin in to believing you have truely unlimited service...
Non-competes are standard and are typically used to curb employees jumping ship to quickly and to keep them from taking company property (ie information) to a competitor.
I have even seen Non-competes for Contract work stating I couldnt consult in a particular field for one year.
Typically they are specific to a roll or project and do not block you entirely from working in your general field.
Also, if one is overly restrictive and you are unable to find work because of it, it is non-enforceable. Meaning they can not force you out of work in your profession for any ammount of time. But they can still hold you and your new employer liable if they determine any of their processes or technology has made it into their competitors product. There have been several cases where companies have tried to enforce overly restrictive non-competes only to find them thrown out by the courts and in a few cases when enforced those companies were forced to pay benefits and salary to the person for that year they could not "work".
Example, if you are a hardware engineer at Intel working on the core architecture and jump ship to AMD, they can forbid you from working on the AMD core architecture for one year via non-compete clause. But they can not stop you from working at AMD as a hardware engineer in another department, as long as its not directly tied to the Core.
Heck, even Intel, whom Microsoft laudes as a partner in embracing Vista has publicly stated that they, as a corporation, will not even install Vista on their computers until after SP1 is released...
So now you have a technology partner publicly stating they wont be so quick to upgrade either...
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/03/07/intel_wati ng_to_go_vista/
Aww, look, Microsoft Marketting people do read Slashdot...
When Dual core Xeon 5130 machines with 3gb of ram cant get a higher than a 3.1 Vista rating, (at MS's own launch day event), I dont a Pentium M with 1gb is running any better.
And yes, I was at the Launch event for Vista and tested it out on 10 different machines provided and everyone one of them dragged.
Not according to Microsoft... According to their speakers at the MS Vista launch event, even the Home and Ultimate versions need to call Microsoft every 180 days to verify their key.
The buisness users can purchase an "Activation server" they maintain in house and can configure their workstations to call it to verify they have legit keys. The Activation server in house still has to call Microsoft every 180 days to verify all the license information it has.
The in house Activation server came about because of Government and Private organizations that want to have unconnected secured networks. Though the "Activation Server" needing to call MS every few months can result in a "potential breach" or extra wasted IT staff hours as you call the phone number to manually activate again...
Another option you have, though Microsoft claims that they did not enable it in Vista, as Volume License keys will be used in house only and no longer shipped out to customers, are the MAK license options in their Volume license 2.0 program. But as I said, MS claimed at their launch day event they will not be shipping any such versions of Vista...
Anyone else remember the incident where the US Navy tried to automate a warship with Windows NT and it crashed shortly after leaving port... Divide by Zero error left it dead in the water...
Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water
The US Navy's so-call "Smart Ship technology" left the Aegis missile cruiser USS Yorktown dead in the water off the coast of Cape Charles, Va. for several hours. The shutdown of the ship's propulsion was credited to a database overflow in a Windows NT system. The crash was caused by the inability of the OS to properly handle division by zero. Said Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center, "Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor." The Navy is still expected to spend $138 million expanding the "Smart Ship" program to the entire Aegis class, and to other ships in the fleet. (Government Computer News, 13 July 1998)
Will they ever give the game community a satisfactory resolution to the incident where their staff have cheated in the game? Any other game company would have fired those employees... Theirs kept their jobs and simply created new accounts, that with their developer access, can just quickly ramp back up... The way they treated the whistle blower was much harsher than those actually guilty of deceiving and betraying their player base. I know I will never purchase any additional services or titles from CCP as a result of this gaff.
I attended the New Day Launch conference at Moscone Center in San Francisco, Ca today. I was more impressed with Exchange 2007 than I was Vista or Office 2007. In fact I have no plans to install either for the next two years at any client site.
They had demo workstations set up for you to play with Vista and I can honestly say I am less than impressed. The workstations, HP Desktops, were slow to respond. Hitting the windows logo key, you could count to two before the start menu would start to open. I tested this out on 5 different demo PC's to ensure it wasnt just the one or two machines. Always the same results.
The Demo machines had a Vista Experiance rating of a lowly 3.1. So I looked at the system panel to see what the configurations were. The Demo PC's with only a 3.1 Vista Rating were Dual Core Intel Xeon 5130 2ghz with 3gb of Ram.
If such a machine gets such a low rating, its likely to be 2 years before the PC hardware catches up with Vista. Further promising I'll be in no rush to considering moving to it.
The 10mb limit has been a "standard" since before I started doing IT work in 1995. Some companys in the late 90's even started implementing tighter limits around 2mb per attachment or email because of heavy traffic bogging everything down. In more recent years there has been a loosening again on the size of attachments and e-mails, but occasionally you will still run into servers rejecting over 10mb. (One of my engineer clients loves to try sending 17 to 20 mb autocad files and complains when they dont get through...)
As for odd, back when I was in the military my unit was the first unit to bounce 256k data internet signals over GMF (Ground Mobil Force) Satellite links. The Cisco routers were piped through Crypto equipment, then out to a CSU/DSU modem and then out a circuit in the van. Even though we had redundant circuits, routers, and cryptographic equipment, we were also forced to carry an old 75 baud modem that weight 150 pounds, was 3 feet long by 2 feet wide as a redundancy... Never had to actually use it, so dont know if it actually worked...
In North Carolina, a place known for frequent lightining storms, one organization ran 10baseT outside between two buildings but decided to run it up high so it wouldnt get hit by vehicles. The resulting twin metal towers became a magnet for lightning strikes and blew out the motherboards of more than a half dozen computers before they realized they needed a better solution. (The PC's were early model 1990 pc's at oer $10k a piece.)
Slashdot Mirror
lol I blocked Doubleclick at home and on everyone of my client sites ever since they came out...
The only thing that concerns me is as someone else has said, they start rotating the hosts or even outright dropping "doubleclick" anywhere in the domain name so those filters no longer work.
If the ads suddenly start coming from Microsoft.com servers suddenly trying to block them would cause issues getting updates and patches.
I can see it now, the new Eula and Verification tool, in order to access MS Updates you must all access to our advertising service.
Opps we see your system blocks Microsoft Advertisement, sending a message with your information to our legal department, contact your administrator to unblock our messages in order to receive your free critical updates.
And then I'm sure that MS will try to sue people for blocking their advertisements just like they try to sue you for getting a computer without their software...
What I am saying is you will have to be even more careful to protect the screen especially when its on both sides. As for having seen a color screen crack, yes I have. An incident at work cracked the screen on my Treo 700 and my girlfriend somehow busted the screen on her Razor when it flipped open inside her purse somehow. A co-worker of mine busted the color screen on his nokia just sitting in his car and forgetting to pull it off his belt, the seatbelt was enough to crack it. And my sisters husband, granted he works construction, has broken the screen on his last three phones.
Sure someone is going to come out with some sort of fancy carrier for it, but still you are going to hear about people cracking one or both screens because they sat on their phone and something smacked one side. Many of the belt carriers for phones, for people that are really active, leave indents on your phone. Every phone I have had in the last 8 years has had marks left on the back caused by the belt clips. So again, one of the two screens are going to get severely marred up by belt clip carriers and open to possibly worse damage as well.
So for those that question my thinking, obviously you havent thought it through yourselves.
You just know we are going to read about these in a couple of months failing because the screens are getting cracked and busted left and right.
"People know at the company, people know that if you were to do something like that you'd basically get fired. "
But NOONE got fired!!!
He states yeah, our employee did a bad thing, then says if someone does it they get fired, but the guy still has his job. He was not fired. Further proof they whitewashed the whole issue and arent going to do anything about it. And if they arent going to do anything about it this time, how can anyone beleive they are stopping it from happening again...
A point that has come up in the past but lately glossed over is that by using third party mail services such as Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc... their Terms of Use and Service state that you give them rights and ownership of your data to do with as they wish. In a corporate environment that means any trade secrets or concepts you mail to or from someone via one of the third party mail systems gives the systems owner license to use your data as they wish. If they want to develope it into a product and market it themselves, they in effect could without paying any royalties as your use of their service granted them consent.
As a rule at all my client offices its stated that all business related correspondance must happen via company owned services. IT doctrine at each site states the computer resources are property of the company and use provided to aid the users in corporate business only. Any personal use can result in disciplinary action, to include firing.
Many of these rules came about when users started clicking on random pop's or installing their favorite screen savers, weatherbug, mail programs, and chat programs. Many of these were found to contain malware that cost the companys lots of money to have cleaned up and slowed down productivity. While users company mail is scanned for virus's, third party mail products and chat programs showed more problematic and became the primary source for infection of the corporate networks.
We've also caught employees suspected of corporate espionage using third party mail services to transmit company information in an effort to side step IT monitoring their mail. That alone was enough for the Board of Directors to decree no employee may ever access such services from their offices.
We've enacted proxys at some sites, others content filtering, and others simply requiring the employees to sign a usage agreement that if caught in an audit means they can be terminated without severence.
I have several clients on SBC global and they have on occasion been shut off or fined Overage Charges for "Excessive Use". The contract "implies" unlimited use, but are actually limited in the ammount of traffic you can actually sustain each month.
In fact SBC is notorious for applying filters on high use users and begin to meter and slow down your pipe speed long before you exceed your max.
In the last three years I have seen 5 seperate sites have their contracts with SBC DSL terminated for "Excessive Use". The notice you get, or sometimes have read to you by a second tier support guru when you call to complain of the outage, goes on to state that your excessive use impacts other users and they are dropping you because of that.
In fact all service providers I have worked with and heard of have traffic limits ontop of your bandwidth limitations. Many also employ daily limits as well as monthly limits on traffic. Your monthly traffic limit might be 50gb, but you may still get shutdown for exceeding 4gb in one day... Dont be fooled by the marketing spin in to believing you have truely unlimited service...
Non-competes are standard and are typically used to curb employees jumping ship to quickly and to keep them from taking company property (ie information) to a competitor.
I have even seen Non-competes for Contract work stating I couldnt consult in a particular field for one year.
Typically they are specific to a roll or project and do not block you entirely from working in your general field.
Also, if one is overly restrictive and you are unable to find work because of it, it is non-enforceable. Meaning they can not force you out of work in your profession for any ammount of time. But they can still hold you and your new employer liable if they determine any of their processes or technology has made it into their competitors product. There have been several cases where companies have tried to enforce overly restrictive non-competes only to find them thrown out by the courts and in a few cases when enforced those companies were forced to pay benefits and salary to the person for that year they could not "work".
Example, if you are a hardware engineer at Intel working on the core architecture and jump ship to AMD, they can forbid you from working on the AMD core architecture for one year via non-compete clause. But they can not stop you from working at AMD as a hardware engineer in another department, as long as its not directly tied to the Core.
Heck, even Intel, whom Microsoft laudes as a partner in embracing Vista has publicly stated that they, as a corporation, will not even install Vista on their computers until after SP1 is released... So now you have a technology partner publicly stating they wont be so quick to upgrade either... http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/03/07/intel_wati ng_to_go_vista/
Aww, look, Microsoft Marketting people do read Slashdot...
When Dual core Xeon 5130 machines with 3gb of ram cant get a higher than a 3.1 Vista rating, (at MS's own launch day event), I dont a Pentium M with 1gb is running any better.
And yes, I was at the Launch event for Vista and tested it out on 10 different machines provided and everyone one of them dragged.
Not according to Microsoft... According to their speakers at the MS Vista launch event, even the Home and Ultimate versions need to call Microsoft every 180 days to verify their key.
n /faq.mspx
The buisness users can purchase an "Activation server" they maintain in house and can configure their workstations to call it to verify they have legit keys. The Activation server in house still has to call Microsoft every 180 days to verify all the license information it has.
The in house Activation server came about because of Government and Private organizations that want to have unconnected secured networks. Though the "Activation Server" needing to call MS every few months can result in a "potential breach" or extra wasted IT staff hours as you call the phone number to manually activate again...
Another option you have, though Microsoft claims that they did not enable it in Vista, as Volume License keys will be used in house only and no longer shipped out to customers, are the MAK license options in their Volume license 2.0 program. But as I said, MS claimed at their launch day event they will not be shipping any such versions of Vista...
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/pla
Anyone else remember the incident where the US Navy tried to automate a warship with Windows NT and it crashed shortly after leaving port... Divide by Zero error left it dead in the water... Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water The US Navy's so-call "Smart Ship technology" left the Aegis missile cruiser USS Yorktown dead in the water off the coast of Cape Charles, Va. for several hours. The shutdown of the ship's propulsion was credited to a database overflow in a Windows NT system. The crash was caused by the inability of the OS to properly handle division by zero. Said Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center, "Using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor." The Navy is still expected to spend $138 million expanding the "Smart Ship" program to the entire Aegis class, and to other ships in the fleet. (Government Computer News, 13 July 1998)
Will they ever give the game community a satisfactory resolution to the incident where their staff have cheated in the game? Any other game company would have fired those employees... Theirs kept their jobs and simply created new accounts, that with their developer access, can just quickly ramp back up... The way they treated the whistle blower was much harsher than those actually guilty of deceiving and betraying their player base. I know I will never purchase any additional services or titles from CCP as a result of this gaff.
I attended the New Day Launch conference at Moscone Center in San Francisco, Ca today. I was more impressed with Exchange 2007 than I was Vista or Office 2007. In fact I have no plans to install either for the next two years at any client site. They had demo workstations set up for you to play with Vista and I can honestly say I am less than impressed. The workstations, HP Desktops, were slow to respond. Hitting the windows logo key, you could count to two before the start menu would start to open. I tested this out on 5 different demo PC's to ensure it wasnt just the one or two machines. Always the same results. The Demo machines had a Vista Experiance rating of a lowly 3.1. So I looked at the system panel to see what the configurations were. The Demo PC's with only a 3.1 Vista Rating were Dual Core Intel Xeon 5130 2ghz with 3gb of Ram. If such a machine gets such a low rating, its likely to be 2 years before the PC hardware catches up with Vista. Further promising I'll be in no rush to considering moving to it.
The 10mb limit has been a "standard" since before I started doing IT work in 1995. Some companys in the late 90's even started implementing tighter limits around 2mb per attachment or email because of heavy traffic bogging everything down. In more recent years there has been a loosening again on the size of attachments and e-mails, but occasionally you will still run into servers rejecting over 10mb. (One of my engineer clients loves to try sending 17 to 20 mb autocad files and complains when they dont get through...) As for odd, back when I was in the military my unit was the first unit to bounce 256k data internet signals over GMF (Ground Mobil Force) Satellite links. The Cisco routers were piped through Crypto equipment, then out to a CSU/DSU modem and then out a circuit in the van. Even though we had redundant circuits, routers, and cryptographic equipment, we were also forced to carry an old 75 baud modem that weight 150 pounds, was 3 feet long by 2 feet wide as a redundancy... Never had to actually use it, so dont know if it actually worked... In North Carolina, a place known for frequent lightining storms, one organization ran 10baseT outside between two buildings but decided to run it up high so it wouldnt get hit by vehicles. The resulting twin metal towers became a magnet for lightning strikes and blew out the motherboards of more than a half dozen computers before they realized they needed a better solution. (The PC's were early model 1990 pc's at oer $10k a piece.)