Thanks for the clarification:) Stupidly (and being primarily a windows user, I'll still admit that there are plenty of stupid things about windows!) the task manager doesn't show you where a given task is being executed from. There are other tools - such as proccessExplorer from the sysinternals suite - that give more detailed information about this. Where a file is is of course a helpful indicator, but then again just because something's in C:\windows, doesn't mean it's legit, but you already knew that. Also, it would be trivial to rename SVCHOST.exe to svchost.exe in order to avoid detection, however, both could not exist in the same directory since both are technically the same file name. And yes, the task manager uses arial (as does/. argh!!) which makes | I l hard to tell apart and rn m and I / and more. It's possible to change, but not an obvious thing to do. Arial is a lame font:P
Seems to me it would be easy enough to detect the googlebot user agent, then if so, automatically redirect it to the page on the other end (or even send it to a random 404 page or something), all without processing the form data at all.
What am I admitting? That I use sites that require CAPTCHAs? Last I checked there was nothing wrong with not being able to read squiggly things that could be almost anything and thus needing to try several times before it works. It is not at all uncommon for me to get the CAPTCHA wrong the first 5 times one some sites.
TFA says this is a service SELLING captcha breaking. If it was human powered, I'd expect it to do much better than the 20% they cite.
Ummmm... I'm not so sure about that. OK, google's captcha's are pretty easy for humans to read, but I've often had to try literally 6 different captcha's on some sites. Yes, really.
That's not Tillamook, that's evergreen, if you're talking about the place I think you're talking about. But yes, it is awesome.
All the Oregon names are of course because Intel has some major facilities in Oregon, mostly in Washington County, around the Beaverton area. They are in fact Oregon's biggest employer.
OK, how many times are we going to get asked what to bring on our trip around the world? I swear this exact same question has been asked at least twice just this year already, and the year is young! It's getting old. (tagged: gettingold)
Your plan still has the problem that the computers would have to be online. If it's not ON, then you can't do all this stuff. I guess you could use some sort of Wake-on-LAN system, and wake up all the PC's in the place at once, however, there still remains the problem of workstations that are out of service - say a computer has to go in for repairs, or its hard drive fails or something like that, then that data wouldn't be available. With regular servers, it's not that big of a deal, since it's easy to backup and monitor servers; when you start using regular workstations for data storage, you run into problems.
That took me all of about 10 minutes to find. Dell has been the best about providing XP to both businesses and consumers as an easy-to-find option; HP seems to be a bit less cooperative.
"We're seeing positive indicators that we're already starting to move from the early adoption phase into the mainstream and that more and more businesses are beginning their planning and deployment of Windows Vista," the company said. Nevertheless vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Fujitsu, and more recently NEC, all offer the opportunity to downgrade to XP Pro."
I'm sorry, did I see the word downgrade there? I'd consider Vista to XP an upgrade myself. Anyhow, kudos to the OEM's for providing XP as an option. It would be nice if more of them also offered linux as an option when selecting the OS. At least Dell does. (Thanks.)
It would be nice if Microsoft would at least extend the System Builder and OEM licenses for a while longer; there's really no reason not to people like XP, and they get money whether people buy Vista or XP. If they stop offering XP, then people may choose to use Linux or macs, and in the end MS may end up losing money.
Very true. The school district I attend is very large - think thousands of machines spread across about 30 locations, and uses Novell ZENworks. Although I find ZEN annoying at times, one of the great things it does is reimage PC's remotely. When IT wants to push out a patch, or even update to a new OS as they are doing with the XP migration right now, they re-image all the PC's remotely. I'm just a student, so I don't know everything about it, but there is a reason why they do the re-imaging operations overnight: even when they have all night to push images hundreds of megabytes large, often we return in the morning to find the network still bogged down by all the PC's imaging themselves across the network.
ZEN adds workstations to OU's depending on which school they are at, and different groups depending on which labs or classrooms they are in. It is possible to shut down all the workstations in one group or OU, so if say the physics lab had some projects running overnight, they could just not shut down that group and shut down the others, for example. Or, you could just use the regular Windows shutdown command to shut down all the computers every night at a specified time, and employees who need a computer on after hours could just unplug the ethernet cable when it's shutdown time, or inform IT and have them remove that computer from the shutdown.
Turning computers off when you want them off isn't rocket science.:) Just turn them off when you want them off and use WOL to turn them on when you need them on, then make exceptions on a case-by-case basis.
As part of a required test protocol, our previous statement suggesting that we
would not monitor this chamber was an outright fabrication. Good job. As part
of a required test protocol, we will stop enhancing the truth in three, two,
o--
Why is apple trying so darn hard to stifle every attempt to develop for their product? I can sort-of understand the other carriers thing, as they and AT&T want their money, but the 3rd part apps blocking is just ridiculous. 3rd party apps are part of what made me initially interested in them; today I'm glad iDidn't get one. Even microsoft understands the importance of Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers...
I, too, find myself at school at one end of a crowded hallway a hundred feet long, looking across it to the wall on the other side, and thinking "Oh, I sure wish..." I'm starting to think that I'm thinking with the portals too much. My computer has been portalized (portal background, portal theme, portal sound scheme, etc.) Still Alive has been playing through my head on repeat for days, occasionally interrupted by a quick message from GLaDOS. I have the whole thing memorized. I find myself looking at a package and thinking "ooh! Where shall I put this cube? Is there a big red button to put it on?". And I know what I'm going to be for Halloween next year. It involves a gray cardbard box and some pink paint.
I agree that it is great that Yahoo is supporting Apache in this way. However, their webhosting (which uses apache, by the way) is still miserable. I'm not talking geocities, I'm talking their Small Business hosting that they tout as being so great. One of the websites I maintain is hosted by Yahoo Small Business. It is possibly the most restrictive host I have ever had to use. The user has very little control over apache settings, and in fact cannot even edit the.htaccess files. The strange, unintuitive, dumbed-down interface is so annoying that working from a computer without ftp access is excruciating. So, yes this is a step in the right direction, but their web hosting services still leave much to be desired.
The next thing they need to do is take pictures inside the museum itself and make some of those quicktime 3D/360 degrees view things. I don't particularly like quicktime, but that is one cool thing about it.
Or, they could make an actual 3D museum, sort of like google earth, only inside. Now THAT would be awesome.
Windows XP Home Edition can and always had permitted just as many cores as Windows XP Professional. However, Windows XP Professional is allowed to have to physically separate processors, where as Windows XP Home may only have one. Microsoft claims that Windows XP Professional is "optimized for notebook computers", and implies that Home Edition is not. However, I have never noticed any difference in performance, though the Professional features such as remote desktop, EFS, and the ability to join a domain all make it worthwhile to get XP Pro.
Just as an aside, Windows XP Media Center Edition is actually the exact same in terms of features as Windows XP Professional, and thus can use up to two physical processors. The only difference is that Windows XP MCE can only be joined to a domain during setup or by using a special hack, and of course it has media center components that XP Pro does not have.
Instead of letting them see every single thing you do on your computer for a whole 3 months (or longer... who knows what stays on your computer after installing the software), why not install Windows XP in a VM, install their crap, run it once or twice a week to "check your email" or whatever, and then after three months, collect your software? They only see what goes on in the VM, you get your free Vista and everyone's happy. Well, if using Vista can be considered as something that would make you happy.
Just to show how bad their monitoring actually is:
3. Additional data collection
The following list describes some examples of additional data collection our software performs:
Windows settings and usage, such as the number of user accounts on the computer and the view settings for Control Panel (that is, if you use the default Category view or the Classic view to display Control Panel).
Details about your computer hardware, such as processor type and speed (as well as the number of processors), system memory, video memory, and other hardware configuration information.
File and folder information, such as the number of files and folders located in common places (for example, in Documents).
* Which programs you open (for example, which application you use to read your e-mail).
* Changes you make to your hardware or software.
* Problems you encounter, such as application crashes.
They're basically looking at everything you do. Here's my favorite bit from the whole thing:
This sounds good, but I'm still concerned. Is this anything like the "spyware" I've heard about?
No, this is not spyware. You choose to participate in the Windows Feedback Program and you can easily withdraw from the Program at any time with no penalty whatsoever.
This sounds like spyware? Yeah, I'll say. But noooooooo, it's not at all harmful for your computer. Rigghhhtttt....
In other news, a mad internet subscriber broke into the headquarters of a Canadian ISP called Rogers. Upon entering, he hit shot two techs, broke 3 servers with a sledgehammer and then proceeded to start a fire in the CEO's office. Upon being apprehended by police, he was let go after informing them that he meant no harm and was just trying some different things to see how the company would react.
I guess it's time to make a new internet abbreviation: IANAS (I am not a surgeon.)
Really. I'm not. I was just speculating; I have never been operated on or seen someone operated on, so I guess I wouldn't really know. Thank you for clarifying.
A surgical procedure cannot end until all sponges are accounted for.
Somehow I can't totally believe that. True, it will obviously remind them and stop them from leaving them accidentally, but what if the doctor just leaves? Does it lock the door?
</sadattemptandhumor>
Seriously though, what if there's a fire or something and not all the sponges can be accounted for? What if a doctor accidentally walks out with one? I agree that this will be useful a lot of the time, but it looks to me like their plan may not be 100% effective, and I sure wouldn't want to be left in the hospital to die because one sponge fell under the bed.
There have been two articles this week about Wikipedia's politics and internal ring of over-powered admins. And then Jimbo Wales tells us that students should use Wikipedia. Are they running out of people to block, is that the problem? Add some student users, then we can block them, too!
I live in Oregon, and let me say, things are still a huge mess around here. Although I personally didn't need rescuing (although someone I know did!), I must say that the HAM operators are an invaluable asset in an event like this. On the coast, communications are still spotty, if existent at all. There was an article in the Oregonian today about how some places on the coast don't even have 911 service, since all of the fiber links for phones are out, and the 911 center doesn't have power anyway - the gas for the generator ran out. It's situations like this where HAM radio operators are particularly useful.
It's still a mess out here. Lots of roads are still closed - Interstate 5 is closed in Washington, effectively cutting off all transportation between Portland and Seattle. Thousands of cars, and most importantly, trucks, travel[ed] this highway daily. The train tracks are closed too, so there's no amtrak or freight trains. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens... things are improving, but in no speedy fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the clarification :) Stupidly (and being primarily a windows user, I'll still admit that there are plenty of stupid things about windows!) the task manager doesn't show you where a given task is being executed from. There are other tools - such as proccessExplorer from the sysinternals suite - that give more detailed information about this. Where a file is is of course a helpful indicator, but then again just because something's in C:\windows, doesn't mean it's legit, but you already knew that. Also, it would be trivial to rename SVCHOST.exe to svchost.exe in order to avoid detection, however, both could not exist in the same directory since both are technically the same file name. And yes, the task manager uses arial (as does /. argh!!) which makes | I l hard to tell apart and rn m and I / and more. It's possible to change, but not an obvious thing to do. Arial is a lame font :P
Seems to me it would be easy enough to detect the googlebot user agent, then if so, automatically redirect it to the page on the other end (or even send it to a random 404 page or something), all without processing the form data at all.
<? if ($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']=="User_agentMozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"); { header( 'Location:Of course, this would have to be implemented, which would be a PITA, but it seems to me that it would work just fine.
Except the W3C didn't make the Acid tests...
What am I admitting? That I use sites that require CAPTCHAs? Last I checked there was nothing wrong with not being able to read squiggly things that could be almost anything and thus needing to try several times before it works. It is not at all uncommon for me to get the CAPTCHA wrong the first 5 times one some sites.
Ummmm... I'm not so sure about that. OK, google's captcha's are pretty easy for humans to read, but I've often had to try literally 6 different captcha's on some sites. Yes, really.
That's not Tillamook, that's evergreen, if you're talking about the place I think you're talking about. But yes, it is awesome.
All the Oregon names are of course because Intel has some major facilities in Oregon, mostly in Washington County, around the Beaverton area. They are in fact Oregon's biggest employer.
OK, how many times are we going to get asked what to bring on our trip around the world? I swear this exact same question has been asked at least twice just this year already, and the year is young! It's getting old. (tagged: gettingold)
Portal.
Enough said.
OK, maybe not enough. Want classic video games? How about tetris? Mario?
Your plan still has the problem that the computers would have to be online. If it's not ON, then you can't do all this stuff. I guess you could use some sort of Wake-on-LAN system, and wake up all the PC's in the place at once, however, there still remains the problem of workstations that are out of service - say a computer has to go in for repairs, or its hard drive fails or something like that, then that data wouldn't be available. With regular servers, it's not that big of a deal, since it's easy to backup and monitor servers; when you start using regular workstations for data storage, you run into problems.
What about an HP?
Dell Business, can have up to a 512MB 8800GT, 4GB RAM, Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4 GHz.
You asked for power
That took me all of about 10 minutes to find. Dell has been the best about providing XP to both businesses and consumers as an easy-to-find option; HP seems to be a bit less cooperative.
I'm sorry, did I see the word downgrade there? I'd consider Vista to XP an upgrade myself. Anyhow, kudos to the OEM's for providing XP as an option. It would be nice if more of them also offered linux as an option when selecting the OS. At least Dell does. (Thanks.)
It would be nice if Microsoft would at least extend the System Builder and OEM licenses for a while longer; there's really no reason not to people like XP, and they get money whether people buy Vista or XP. If they stop offering XP, then people may choose to use Linux or macs, and in the end MS may end up losing money.
Very true. The school district I attend is very large - think thousands of machines spread across about 30 locations, and uses Novell ZENworks. Although I find ZEN annoying at times, one of the great things it does is reimage PC's remotely. When IT wants to push out a patch, or even update to a new OS as they are doing with the XP migration right now, they re-image all the PC's remotely. I'm just a student, so I don't know everything about it, but there is a reason why they do the re-imaging operations overnight: even when they have all night to push images hundreds of megabytes large, often we return in the morning to find the network still bogged down by all the PC's imaging themselves across the network.
ZEN adds workstations to OU's depending on which school they are at, and different groups depending on which labs or classrooms they are in. It is possible to shut down all the workstations in one group or OU, so if say the physics lab had some projects running overnight, they could just not shut down that group and shut down the others, for example. Or, you could just use the regular Windows shutdown command to shut down all the computers every night at a specified time, and employees who need a computer on after hours could just unplug the ethernet cable when it's shutdown time, or inform IT and have them remove that computer from the shutdown.
Turning computers off when you want them off isn't rocket science. :) Just turn them off when you want them off and use WOL to turn them on when you need them on, then make exceptions on a case-by-case basis.
Of course AI's lie!
Sheesh, who doesn't know that.
Why is apple trying so darn hard to stifle every attempt to develop for their product? I can sort-of understand the other carriers thing, as they and AT&T want their money, but the 3rd part apps blocking is just ridiculous. 3rd party apps are part of what made me initially interested in them; today I'm glad iDidn't get one. Even microsoft understands the importance of Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers...
P.S: article tagged cryphone.
I, too, find myself at school at one end of a crowded hallway a hundred feet long, looking across it to the wall on the other side, and thinking "Oh, I sure wish..." I'm starting to think that I'm thinking with the portals too much. My computer has been portalized (portal background, portal theme, portal sound scheme, etc.) Still Alive has been playing through my head on repeat for days, occasionally interrupted by a quick message from GLaDOS. I have the whole thing memorized. I find myself looking at a package and thinking "ooh! Where shall I put this cube? Is there a big red button to put it on?". And I know what I'm going to be for Halloween next year. It involves a gray cardbard box and some pink paint.
I agree that it is great that Yahoo is supporting Apache in this way. However, their webhosting (which uses apache, by the way) is still miserable. I'm not talking geocities, I'm talking their Small Business hosting that they tout as being so great. One of the websites I maintain is hosted by Yahoo Small Business. It is possibly the most restrictive host I have ever had to use. The user has very little control over apache settings, and in fact cannot even edit the .htaccess files. The strange, unintuitive, dumbed-down interface is so annoying that working from a computer without ftp access is excruciating. So, yes this is a step in the right direction, but their web hosting services still leave much to be desired.
The next thing they need to do is take pictures inside the museum itself and make some of those quicktime 3D/360 degrees view things. I don't particularly like quicktime, but that is one cool thing about it.
Or, they could make an actual 3D museum, sort of like google earth, only inside. Now THAT would be awesome.
Windows XP Home Edition can and always had permitted just as many cores as Windows XP Professional. However, Windows XP Professional is allowed to have to physically separate processors, where as Windows XP Home may only have one. Microsoft claims that Windows XP Professional is "optimized for notebook computers", and implies that Home Edition is not. However, I have never noticed any difference in performance, though the Professional features such as remote desktop, EFS, and the ability to join a domain all make it worthwhile to get XP Pro.
Just as an aside, Windows XP Media Center Edition is actually the exact same in terms of features as Windows XP Professional, and thus can use up to two physical processors. The only difference is that Windows XP MCE can only be joined to a domain during setup or by using a special hack, and of course it has media center components that XP Pro does not have.
Instead of letting them see every single thing you do on your computer for a whole 3 months (or longer... who knows what stays on your computer after installing the software), why not install Windows XP in a VM, install their crap, run it once or twice a week to "check your email" or whatever, and then after three months, collect your software? They only see what goes on in the VM, you get your free Vista and everyone's happy. Well, if using Vista can be considered as something that would make you happy.
Just to show how bad their monitoring actually is:
They're basically looking at everything you do. Here's my favorite bit from the whole thing:
This sounds like spyware? Yeah, I'll say. But noooooooo, it's not at all harmful for your computer. Rigghhhtttt....
In other news, a mad internet subscriber broke into the headquarters of a Canadian ISP called Rogers. Upon entering, he hit shot two techs, broke 3 servers with a sledgehammer and then proceeded to start a fire in the CEO's office. Upon being apprehended by police, he was let go after informing them that he meant no harm and was just trying some different things to see how the company would react.
I guess it's time to make a new internet abbreviation:
IANAS
(I am not a surgeon.)
Really. I'm not. I was just speculating; I have never been operated on or seen someone operated on, so I guess I wouldn't really know. Thank you for clarifying.
Somehow I can't totally believe that. True, it will obviously remind them and stop them from leaving them accidentally, but what if the doctor just leaves? Does it lock the door?
</sadattemptandhumor>
Seriously though, what if there's a fire or something and not all the sponges can be accounted for? What if a doctor accidentally walks out with one? I agree that this will be useful a lot of the time, but it looks to me like their plan may not be 100% effective, and I sure wouldn't want to be left in the hospital to die because one sponge fell under the bed.
There have been two articles this week about Wikipedia's politics and internal ring of over-powered admins. And then Jimbo Wales tells us that students should use Wikipedia. Are they running out of people to block, is that the problem? Add some student users, then we can block them, too!
I live in Oregon, and let me say, things are still a huge mess around here. Although I personally didn't need rescuing (although someone I know did!), I must say that the HAM operators are an invaluable asset in an event like this. On the coast, communications are still spotty, if existent at all. There was an article in the Oregonian today about how some places on the coast don't even have 911 service, since all of the fiber links for phones are out, and the 911 center doesn't have power anyway - the gas for the generator ran out. It's situations like this where HAM radio operators are particularly useful.
It's still a mess out here. Lots of roads are still closed - Interstate 5 is closed in Washington, effectively cutting off all transportation between Portland and Seattle. Thousands of cars, and most importantly, trucks, travel[ed] this highway daily. The train tracks are closed too, so there's no amtrak or freight trains. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens... things are improving, but in no speedy fashion.