Since this was marked informative (thank you) I thought it would be fun to dig up the actual figures. It isn't quite as bad as I seem to remember, but I still think it's indicative of a company that pays far too much to CEO's that are either temporary, or fail to perform. Feel free to correct me where I've made a mistake, this isn't the type of thing I want to spend all night on, but perhaps someone would have fun finding their actual yearly salaries and bonuses.
CEO Carly Fiorina served from 1999 to 2005, since then it looks like HP has had 5 CEO's including the current one
Carly Fiorina - July 1999 to Feb 2005 - $20m severance
Robert Wayman - Feb 2005 to Mar 2005 - $3m cash bonus - Interim CEO
Mark Hurd - April 2005 to Aug 2010 - $12.2m severance
Cathie Lesjack - Aug 2010 to Sep 2010 - $1m cash bonus, 2.5m stock grants - Interim CEO
Leo Apotheker - Sep 2010 to Sep 2011 - $7.2m severance
Meg Whitman - Sep 2011 to Present
So I was exaggerating a bit, but lets look at this from a worst case scenario.
From 2005 to 2011 (6 years) HP had 6 CEO's, that's an average of a CEO a year (not really, because we're taking the end of one's career and the beginning of another, but like I said, worst case). Not including their regular "pay", they took home a total of $45.9m in severance pay, an average of $9.18m per CEO not including Meg, who has yet to receive a severance package (we're waiting..). Basically, that's 9.2m for each for being fired. Here's the crazy part. The Interim CEO's, who by all accounts did a fine job (looking mostly at Robert Wayman), got paid less than those who were "let go" (namely Mark Hurd and Leo Apotheker)
So things aren't quite as bad with the CEO's as I seem to have remembered, but I still feel like that's fairly abismal performance for a company that has been falling off a cliff since... well, since I can remember. Granted I'm young compared to some of you, but I can remember the days before Carly Fiorina, and a time I wouldn't go near HP computers because of how terrible I thought they were, for a variety of reasons that's pointless to debate here.
Wasn't HP the one that, not long ago, hired and fired about 5 CEO's in the course of 7 years. Paying each a 8 figure severance package on their way out?
The article is exactly right from my experience, and I'm not going to speed read a book I enjoy. However, there's a lot of times where you need to pick up an idea quickly or in it's general form where that comes in handy. Great example is classroom material. I'm not reading four or more 600+ page textbooks each semester, especially when I don't need 98% of the material.
What I do need most often is a general grasp of what is going on in a particular chapter, then I might go back, work out how to use formulas, go over a specific table or case study, etc.
Speed reading the entire thing leaves out almost all of the trees, but it allows me to get a quick view of the forest.
I mean, Babylonians were doing this (granted in a different base) some 1,500 to 2,000 years prior. That's a long time. If nobody, between then and 600(ish) BC thought of doing the same thing, I would lose hope in the creativity of humans. So this really doesn't surprise me, it's not like they were idiots back then.
Simple as that, you don't, it's just not possible....
I'd start with Avast, maybe Malwarebytes. Install Chrome, put it on their desktop and change the icon to Internet Explorer. Use SpyBot to blacklist sites. Setup everything to auto-update and auto-scan so they don't have to be bothered with any of it.
Then come back in a month, Secunda PSI and Qualys Browser give you a good way to keep track of what needs to be updated. Update it all. Registry doesn't really need to be cleaned these days, unless it gets really bad, I've found it actually does help performance a bit, CCleaner does a good job of this. Make sure everything is up to date and clean. Now go to the Control Panel, uninstall all the toolbars, uninstall Mcafee, etc.
Repeat this process every month... You can make things better, but you can't secure it.
I don't believe it's illegal, but IANAL (I am not a lawyer). Plus, even if it isn't, some border agent that doesn't know the law could still make your life miserable. Easier solution, create a hidden Truecrypt volume.
Buy a really cheap computer, bare bones systems are a few hundred dollars, probably cheaper than an ipad. Install windows/browsers/antivirus/etc and create a backup image. After every use, kick the format button.
I'm sure there are expensive specialty pens that will do what you want, but if you're just searching for an everyday pen that you can pick up from Walmart and lose in the parking lot the next day check out the Pilot G-2's. They come in fine (0.5) and extra fine (0.38), plus numerous colors (I like color coding things). I don't have any of the issues that you bring up, but I probably don't write the same way either.
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore
That said, governments of the world gathering to discuss peanut butter scares me for some reason. Gatherings to discuss the internet is absolutely horrifying...
Players that are upset about something are usually vocal, however, a minority doesn't usually make front page of slashdot, get on PC gamer, etc, no matter how vocal.
I think this is pretty shitty of Square. They aren't currently making any money on the chrono serious, if they are it's a drop in a bucket to someone that big. If they are planning a sequel, this isn't going to hurt sales, the fans will still buy and play their game just as much, I imagine a fan sequel will only help revive interest if anything.
but here is what I think is really shitty. Fans have been working and dedicating their time to this project since 2004, they were 98% of the way finished, days before the release date, and Square chooses this time to tell them NO YOU CAN'T DO IT! Thats not protecting your interest, thats being an asshat. Protecting your interest would have been stopping it right away, at 1% completion. Hey, that's our stuff, you need to stop. You can't tell me with all the copyright lawyers they have running around they just now noticed this. The only thing I can think of is that they purposefully waited till the last minute to crush the dreams of the fans that have been working on this. Thanks Square.
The article is interesting, imo, because of how far reaching the consequences can be. What if you made copies and this teacher latter found out, could you be sued? What about audio notes? I know a lot of people use recorders for class. Some even use video recorders. What if you take your notes on digital media, how do you go about turning those over? What if you outright refuse, does she have a right to recover the notes by force?
Personally I think that, unless you sign a contract with the school covering what you can and can't do with the notes, etc. there is a long standing precedence for students keeping their own notes that would stand up in court.
"Police Capt. George Seranko was quoted as saying that the first photograph was "a self portrait taken of a juvenile female taking pictures of her body, nude."
Under the current laws, couldn't Capt. George Seranko be charged with viewing child pornography? Charge everyone, him, the teacher that discovered it, et al with viewing and disseminating (when the passed it to the next level of enforcement) child pornography. Even if they don't win, they could tie up the legal system for enough years and make enough stink of it that hopefully someone will listen and change the laws.
Personally, I think the girls were stupid for letting pictures of themselves go around on phones, but this is certainly no reason to ruin the rest of their lives by slapping them with "sex offender" charges.
Stupid...
As others said, keep your job, you need it in this economy. However, if you really do have some skills, go make some money on the side with them. You can get jobs that range from helping some kid setup his first perl IRC bot on a server for a few bucks to helping develop specific programs for a large business. You get to pick and choose, be your own boss kinda thing. It's like EBAY for a nerd, it's not a full time job, but it'll earn you money and experience.
There's two reoccurring theme's I keep seeing in the posts here. 1) Is the media I make the backups to going to be readable in 20 years? i.e. will there be compatible hardware and software in 20 years? and 2) Off site storage in case of fire, theft, etc.
1) As one person put it
"Psh, its not like he's gonna wake up 30 years later and go "Oh yeah! My data! I need it right now!" And then feverishly try to push the USB slot into the wireless receiver, and then start screaming "OH THE FOLLY OF MAN"
If USB really started disappearing, you would go get your USB drives and copy the stuff off of them "
2) Again put perfectly by a poster, what if an asteroid came along and destroyed it! I could keep all my stuff offsite, but what happens if the offsite location burns to the ground? There is no failsafe from natural disasters, we all plan the best we can, but to me this is a separate issue and not one that I care about when I posed the question.
Several people point out that this shows up on slashdot every few months, and the reason it does is because there has yet to be an answer. Perhaps I was hoping my predicament was different and there was an answer for it, but it doesn't seem so. Maybe I should scribe all my data to papyrus and bury it in a pyramid, that's the only thing proven to last several thousand years.
It seems odd to me though that, as a whole, as a world that's invented so much technology, we don't have any media that will reliably last beyond 5 years, much less 20. Sure, anything could happen to any media, I could have my data inscribed on steel plates and they would eventually rust. Failure is always an unknown, but I'm talking about reliably. We know HDD's are reliable for at least 2 years, most are warranted for 5. In this technological era, why don't we have anything that's reliable in for 20 years? Who cares if it's readable, sure, a fire could burn it down, but we don't have one digital storage solution that's reliable for that long? I guess this was what I was hoping would be answered, but as has been stated, there is no good answer yet.
BTW, the best solution I've seen so far is a 500GB external and a live backup living on my computer. Hopefully someone can come up with something better when this question is posed again in 3-6 months.
Dell is usually pretty good, I was in Iraq and got my replacement for a failed hard drive within 2 weeks. I don't know exactly how hard you've been trying to push them on the issue but I'd call and force the phone biscuit to pass me to higher management, and then tell the management biscuit I wanted his boss, -then- start complaining. Usually when you get to the level where people can start firing those below them, the ones below start doing something. I've run into this problem with other companies though, especially though (cough)iPod(cough) who don't seem to value customers overseas and will only ship to US and require some f'ed up methods of shipping to them. As someone who just came from overseas I feel you, and all I can tell you is goodluck.
Last note: as others said, you can always go hardline and call the BBB, credit card companies, etc. Though I've noticed a lot of times going outside the company (Dell) will many times make things take longer as files are sorted through to find out who's right and wrong. It may help if you have someone in the US (my parents help me out a lot) that are able to spend hours on the phone dealing with it. Again, goodluck to you.
I tried tooling around with TrueCrypt a while ago, creating a hidden operating system and all that. I don't know if the process confused everyone, or just me, but does anyone know of any good guides out there that show you exactly what to do? Idealy I'd like to install XP or even Ubuntu on one partition, the one I'd show off to customs inspectors because it's either light on resources, confusing for them to use (hehe) or both, and have Vista on the other (laugh all you want, I like it). I've yet to find a really good step by step guide though.
I do like the idea of using a live CD and SD cards though, that'd throw um off!
Is this what idle.slashdot was built for? To post pictures of 10 year old thinkgeek shirts? How did this even qualify to get on here, who chooses this kinda stuff?
Worthless, -1 out of 10, don't post anything like this again, nobody else even bothers to comment on it, common.
I'm guessing that this tool also gives access to the windows encrypted directories, though I'm not exactly sure as I haven't had the chance to test it:P I'm not a security professional, so I can't comment on the security differences between windows and various *nix environments, but I do know that they are -somewhat- more secure, if for no other reason than because there's not widespread toolkits out there that simply allow you to remove and/or bypass admin passwords.
Anyone that wants to truly protect your data, IMO, there's no better place to look than TrueCrypt, but even that can be circumvented with keyloggers. There's no perfect solution, just better, and I have to say Windows is probably at the bottom of the pile when it comes to security.
It's nothing new. While other products might not be Microsoft made, there are tools out there. UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) comes with a utility for blanking XP passwords (I don't know if theres one for Vista yet, but if not, there will be soon). I've used it to blank passwords on US Army Secret computers (FYI, I work for the army and had permission) that users had lost their password to, took me 10 minutes max. Windows isn't/hasn't been secure. While I shake my finger at MS for providing a back door to anyone that allows access to others data (and I'm sure it's only a matter of time until this gets leaked to a torrent site), it's not exactly groundbreaking.
The debate seems to be if crashing a critical machine is worth taking out a bot net. Personally, I say yes, reasoning to follow.
The administrators of these critical machines that run Windows know what they are doing, ok, maybe not as well as some of us, but better than most, and certainly better than average joe who's home computer became part of a botnet 3 years ago. They know what security updates are, they know how to patch systems, and they know that windows are the most vulnerable machines. They are prepared for attacks, BSODs, viruses, and any number of things which are much worse than a "friendly worm".
In case you haven't faced it yet, those that control bot nets aren't playing by the rules. If a friendly worm can whipe them out, then lets be on with it! If average joes computer crashes in the process, guess what, in a technological age, he should have learned the basics, in the modern world it's the equivalent of not being able to read or do basic math. Maybe that's stretching it a bit, but if you don't think it's true yet, then it will be soon. His computer was already infected, probably with more than just a bot, but with other viruses as well. If my computer becomes infected, I HOPE one of you sends a friendly worm my way, I don't want to be adding to a bot net.
Basically, if Average Joe gets screwed, a) he was already infected and b) sucks to be him. If a critical matching becomes infected. a) it was already infected and b) they are prepared to deal with it.
After reading most of the comments, here's my input...
If your looking to protect your property while your home, get a gun. Before all the gun-toters start screaming YAY! and all the hippies start clubbing me to death, understand this. A gun is both a weapon and a tool, and one you must have the maturity and responsibility to handle. They say the sound of a shotgun racking is one of the most frightening sounds in the world to a robber. If its a handgun, get a TacLight put on it (like surefire), this will blind the crook, and allow you to positively ID that it's not your son sneaking out of the house or something. If it was me staring down the barrel and hardly able to see, it'd scare the shit out of me. I've had several friends, including a female that was home alone, use guns to simply scare away robbers. A cheap VCR might not be worth pulling a gun out for, but what else are they there for? Will they rape you, your wife, your daughter? Are they willing to kill to keep from leaving witnesses? There's all sorts of messed up humans out there today. Owning a gun and doesn't mean you have to pull the trigger, but be prepared to if you must. I realize this wasn't in the original topic (I'm getting to that) but feel it should be addressed after all the other comments. Personally I think everyone should own a gun, and I also believe EVERYONE (especially said owners) should learn how to properly use one and should learn the maturity involved in having one.
If your looking to protect your stuff while your not home... A dog is a good deterrent, sure, the guy on that show might not be afraid of one, but he's a professional crook, not a petty low life. Personally, I'm a dog lover, so I'll have one anyway. If you hate dogs though, the extra protection probably isn't worth your misery, don't bother...
Cameras probably aren't going to help unless you actually spend some money on them, which is the whole point of what your trying to do. If you setup some cheap cameras directly in front of the windows and doors, the crook might get close enough for you to catch a face, but in the dark, or if hes stealing your car 40 feet away from the camera, probably not. Personally, I'd use them more for insurance claims, so you can clearly prove what was stolen. If you catch the crook in the act, hey, bonus, but I wouldn't rely on them being a case breaker unless you spend some money on them.
I think the best thing to do is setup motion lights around your house, and perhaps get a good alarm system. I know if I was scouting a house and my movement made the place light up like noon on a cloudless summer day, I'd move on to another house in a hurry, and if I kept going and broke a window/busted a door and suddenly an alarm started blaring, I'd be out of there. I know they say audio alarms are worthless, but that's mainly on cars because people are so used to hearing them go off when someone bumps into a car too hard in a mall parking lot, but I think there's a big difference when it's going off in the middle of the night in a neighborhood.
Defiantly motion lights though, if you do go the route of cheap cameras, at least they'll light up the crooks face. If that leads to catching him, bonus.
You could always go the home alone route and setup a net to catch the crook and a swinging cinder block to knock him out until you get home to call the cops...
Recently, a file was uploaded to the Internet purporting to be a copy of a letter from Big Spring High School to a student regarding a two hour detention. The uploaded letter was an altered version of a detention letter sent to a student. Unfortunately, privacy concerns prevent the School District from giving a full explanation of the nature and source of the letter's alteration at this time. The Big Spring School District does have confirmation that the discipline letter was altered.
The reports, blogs and other sources on the Internet indicating that a Big Spring student was assigned detention for using the Firefox internet browser instead of Internet Explorer are untrue and were based on the fake letter. Detention is assigned in our schools after appropriate warnings are given, if students continue to engage in non-academic activities or fail to follow a teacher's directive during class time discipline can and will be assigned.
Sincerely yours,
John C. Scudder
Don't get me wrong, I'm usually not on the school's side, but a student with computer knowledge altering a document to gain popularity and to raise a cry from everyone on the internet over this isn't unheard of. So who are we to believe?
High School Principal
Slashdot Mirror
Section 3 (d), Avoid conducting official Department business from your personal e-mail accounts.
So she was aware of these problems in 2011 and did everything she told other people not to do anyway?
http://www.foxnews.com/politic...
heh :)
Since this was marked informative (thank you) I thought it would be fun to dig up the actual figures. It isn't quite as bad as I seem to remember, but I still think it's indicative of a company that pays far too much to CEO's that are either temporary, or fail to perform. Feel free to correct me where I've made a mistake, this isn't the type of thing I want to spend all night on, but perhaps someone would have fun finding their actual yearly salaries and bonuses.
CEO Carly Fiorina served from 1999 to 2005, since then it looks like HP has had 5 CEO's including the current one
Carly Fiorina - July 1999 to Feb 2005 - $20m severance
Robert Wayman - Feb 2005 to Mar 2005 - $3m cash bonus - Interim CEO
Mark Hurd - April 2005 to Aug 2010 - $12.2m severance
Cathie Lesjack - Aug 2010 to Sep 2010 - $1m cash bonus, 2.5m stock grants - Interim CEO
Leo Apotheker - Sep 2010 to Sep 2011 - $7.2m severance
Meg Whitman - Sep 2011 to Present
So I was exaggerating a bit, but lets look at this from a worst case scenario.
From 2005 to 2011 (6 years) HP had 6 CEO's, that's an average of a CEO a year (not really, because we're taking the end of one's career and the beginning of another, but like I said, worst case). Not including their regular "pay", they took home a total of $45.9m in severance pay, an average of $9.18m per CEO not including Meg, who has yet to receive a severance package (we're waiting..). Basically, that's 9.2m for each for being fired. Here's the crazy part. The Interim CEO's, who by all accounts did a fine job (looking mostly at Robert Wayman), got paid less than those who were "let go" (namely Mark Hurd and Leo Apotheker)
So things aren't quite as bad with the CEO's as I seem to have remembered, but I still feel like that's fairly abismal performance for a company that has been falling off a cliff since... well, since I can remember. Granted I'm young compared to some of you, but I can remember the days before Carly Fiorina, and a time I wouldn't go near HP computers because of how terrible I thought they were, for a variety of reasons that's pointless to debate here.
Wasn't HP the one that, not long ago, hired and fired about 5 CEO's in the course of 7 years. Paying each a 8 figure severance package on their way out?
The article is exactly right from my experience, and I'm not going to speed read a book I enjoy. However, there's a lot of times where you need to pick up an idea quickly or in it's general form where that comes in handy. Great example is classroom material. I'm not reading four or more 600+ page textbooks each semester, especially when I don't need 98% of the material.
What I do need most often is a general grasp of what is going on in a particular chapter, then I might go back, work out how to use formulas, go over a specific table or case study, etc.
Speed reading the entire thing leaves out almost all of the trees, but it allows me to get a quick view of the forest.
I mean, Babylonians were doing this (granted in a different base) some 1,500 to 2,000 years prior. That's a long time. If nobody, between then and 600(ish) BC thought of doing the same thing, I would lose hope in the creativity of humans. So this really doesn't surprise me, it's not like they were idiots back then.
Simple as that, you don't, it's just not possible....
I'd start with Avast, maybe Malwarebytes. Install Chrome, put it on their desktop and change the icon to Internet Explorer. Use SpyBot to blacklist sites. Setup everything to auto-update and auto-scan so they don't have to be bothered with any of it.
Then come back in a month, Secunda PSI and Qualys Browser give you a good way to keep track of what needs to be updated. Update it all. Registry doesn't really need to be cleaned these days, unless it gets really bad, I've found it actually does help performance a bit, CCleaner does a good job of this. Make sure everything is up to date and clean. Now go to the Control Panel, uninstall all the toolbars, uninstall Mcafee, etc.
Repeat this process every month... You can make things better, but you can't secure it.
I don't believe it's illegal, but IANAL (I am not a lawyer). Plus, even if it isn't, some border agent that doesn't know the law could still make your life miserable. Easier solution, create a hidden Truecrypt volume.
Buy a really cheap computer, bare bones systems are a few hundred dollars, probably cheaper than an ipad. Install windows/browsers/antivirus/etc and create a backup image. After every use, kick the format button.
I'm sure there are expensive specialty pens that will do what you want, but if you're just searching for an everyday pen that you can pick up from Walmart and lose in the parking lot the next day check out the Pilot G-2's. They come in fine (0.5) and extra fine (0.38), plus numerous colors (I like color coding things). I don't have any of the issues that you bring up, but I probably don't write the same way either.
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -John Gilmore That said, governments of the world gathering to discuss peanut butter scares me for some reason. Gatherings to discuss the internet is absolutely horrifying...
Players that are upset about something are usually vocal, however, a minority doesn't usually make front page of slashdot, get on PC gamer, etc, no matter how vocal.
I think this is pretty shitty of Square. They aren't currently making any money on the chrono serious, if they are it's a drop in a bucket to someone that big. If they are planning a sequel, this isn't going to hurt sales, the fans will still buy and play their game just as much, I imagine a fan sequel will only help revive interest if anything.
but here is what I think is really shitty. Fans have been working and dedicating their time to this project since 2004, they were 98% of the way finished, days before the release date, and Square chooses this time to tell them NO YOU CAN'T DO IT! Thats not protecting your interest, thats being an asshat. Protecting your interest would have been stopping it right away, at 1% completion. Hey, that's our stuff, you need to stop. You can't tell me with all the copyright lawyers they have running around they just now noticed this. The only thing I can think of is that they purposefully waited till the last minute to crush the dreams of the fans that have been working on this. Thanks Square.
The article is interesting, imo, because of how far reaching the consequences can be. What if you made copies and this teacher latter found out, could you be sued? What about audio notes? I know a lot of people use recorders for class. Some even use video recorders. What if you take your notes on digital media, how do you go about turning those over? What if you outright refuse, does she have a right to recover the notes by force?
Personally I think that, unless you sign a contract with the school covering what you can and can't do with the notes, etc. there is a long standing precedence for students keeping their own notes that would stand up in court.
"Police Capt. George Seranko was quoted as saying that the first photograph was "a self portrait taken of a juvenile female taking pictures of her body, nude."
Under the current laws, couldn't Capt. George Seranko be charged with viewing child pornography? Charge everyone, him, the teacher that discovered it, et al with viewing and disseminating (when the passed it to the next level of enforcement) child pornography. Even if they don't win, they could tie up the legal system for enough years and make enough stink of it that hopefully someone will listen and change the laws.
Personally, I think the girls were stupid for letting pictures of themselves go around on phones, but this is certainly no reason to ruin the rest of their lives by slapping them with "sex offender" charges.
Stupid...
Sorry if this is already posted, I didn't see it though...
http://www.rentacoder.com/
As others said, keep your job, you need it in this economy. However, if you really do have some skills, go make some money on the side with them. You can get jobs that range from helping some kid setup his first perl IRC bot on a server for a few bucks to helping develop specific programs for a large business. You get to pick and choose, be your own boss kinda thing. It's like EBAY for a nerd, it's not a full time job, but it'll earn you money and experience.
There's two reoccurring theme's I keep seeing in the posts here. 1) Is the media I make the backups to going to be readable in 20 years? i.e. will there be compatible hardware and software in 20 years? and 2) Off site storage in case of fire, theft, etc.
1) As one person put it
"Psh, its not like he's gonna wake up 30 years later and go "Oh yeah! My data! I need it right now!" And then feverishly try to push the USB slot into the wireless receiver, and then start screaming "OH THE FOLLY OF MAN"
If USB really started disappearing, you would go get your USB drives and copy the stuff off of them "
2) Again put perfectly by a poster, what if an asteroid came along and destroyed it! I could keep all my stuff offsite, but what happens if the offsite location burns to the ground? There is no failsafe from natural disasters, we all plan the best we can, but to me this is a separate issue and not one that I care about when I posed the question.
Several people point out that this shows up on slashdot every few months, and the reason it does is because there has yet to be an answer. Perhaps I was hoping my predicament was different and there was an answer for it, but it doesn't seem so. Maybe I should scribe all my data to papyrus and bury it in a pyramid, that's the only thing proven to last several thousand years.
It seems odd to me though that, as a whole, as a world that's invented so much technology, we don't have any media that will reliably last beyond 5 years, much less 20. Sure, anything could happen to any media, I could have my data inscribed on steel plates and they would eventually rust. Failure is always an unknown, but I'm talking about reliably. We know HDD's are reliable for at least 2 years, most are warranted for 5. In this technological era, why don't we have anything that's reliable in for 20 years? Who cares if it's readable, sure, a fire could burn it down, but we don't have one digital storage solution that's reliable for that long? I guess this was what I was hoping would be answered, but as has been stated, there is no good answer yet.
BTW, the best solution I've seen so far is a 500GB external and a live backup living on my computer. Hopefully someone can come up with something better when this question is posed again in 3-6 months.
Dell is usually pretty good, I was in Iraq and got my replacement for a failed hard drive within 2 weeks. I don't know exactly how hard you've been trying to push them on the issue but I'd call and force the phone biscuit to pass me to higher management, and then tell the management biscuit I wanted his boss, -then- start complaining. Usually when you get to the level where people can start firing those below them, the ones below start doing something. I've run into this problem with other companies though, especially though (cough)iPod(cough) who don't seem to value customers overseas and will only ship to US and require some f'ed up methods of shipping to them. As someone who just came from overseas I feel you, and all I can tell you is goodluck.
Last note: as others said, you can always go hardline and call the BBB, credit card companies, etc. Though I've noticed a lot of times going outside the company (Dell) will many times make things take longer as files are sorted through to find out who's right and wrong. It may help if you have someone in the US (my parents help me out a lot) that are able to spend hours on the phone dealing with it. Again, goodluck to you.
I tried tooling around with TrueCrypt a while ago, creating a hidden operating system and all that. I don't know if the process confused everyone, or just me, but does anyone know of any good guides out there that show you exactly what to do? Idealy I'd like to install XP or even Ubuntu on one partition, the one I'd show off to customs inspectors because it's either light on resources, confusing for them to use (hehe) or both, and have Vista on the other (laugh all you want, I like it). I've yet to find a really good step by step guide though.
I do like the idea of using a live CD and SD cards though, that'd throw um off!
Is this what idle.slashdot was built for? To post pictures of 10 year old thinkgeek shirts? How did this even qualify to get on here, who chooses this kinda stuff?
Worthless, -1 out of 10, don't post anything like this again, nobody else even bothers to comment on it, common.
Anyone that wants to truly protect your data, IMO, there's no better place to look than TrueCrypt, but even that can be circumvented with keyloggers. There's no perfect solution, just better, and I have to say Windows is probably at the bottom of the pile when it comes to security.
It's nothing new. While other products might not be Microsoft made, there are tools out there. UBCD (Ultimate Boot CD) comes with a utility for blanking XP passwords (I don't know if theres one for Vista yet, but if not, there will be soon). I've used it to blank passwords on US Army Secret computers (FYI, I work for the army and had permission) that users had lost their password to, took me 10 minutes max. Windows isn't/hasn't been secure. While I shake my finger at MS for providing a back door to anyone that allows access to others data (and I'm sure it's only a matter of time until this gets leaked to a torrent site), it's not exactly groundbreaking.
The debate seems to be if crashing a critical machine is worth taking out a bot net. Personally, I say yes, reasoning to follow. The administrators of these critical machines that run Windows know what they are doing, ok, maybe not as well as some of us, but better than most, and certainly better than average joe who's home computer became part of a botnet 3 years ago. They know what security updates are, they know how to patch systems, and they know that windows are the most vulnerable machines. They are prepared for attacks, BSODs, viruses, and any number of things which are much worse than a "friendly worm". In case you haven't faced it yet, those that control bot nets aren't playing by the rules. If a friendly worm can whipe them out, then lets be on with it! If average joes computer crashes in the process, guess what, in a technological age, he should have learned the basics, in the modern world it's the equivalent of not being able to read or do basic math. Maybe that's stretching it a bit, but if you don't think it's true yet, then it will be soon. His computer was already infected, probably with more than just a bot, but with other viruses as well. If my computer becomes infected, I HOPE one of you sends a friendly worm my way, I don't want to be adding to a bot net. Basically, if Average Joe gets screwed, a) he was already infected and b) sucks to be him. If a critical matching becomes infected. a) it was already infected and b) they are prepared to deal with it.
If your looking to protect your property while your home, get a gun. Before all the gun-toters start screaming YAY! and all the hippies start clubbing me to death, understand this. A gun is both a weapon and a tool, and one you must have the maturity and responsibility to handle. They say the sound of a shotgun racking is one of the most frightening sounds in the world to a robber. If its a handgun, get a TacLight put on it (like surefire), this will blind the crook, and allow you to positively ID that it's not your son sneaking out of the house or something. If it was me staring down the barrel and hardly able to see, it'd scare the shit out of me. I've had several friends, including a female that was home alone, use guns to simply scare away robbers. A cheap VCR might not be worth pulling a gun out for, but what else are they there for? Will they rape you, your wife, your daughter? Are they willing to kill to keep from leaving witnesses? There's all sorts of messed up humans out there today. Owning a gun and doesn't mean you have to pull the trigger, but be prepared to if you must. I realize this wasn't in the original topic (I'm getting to that) but feel it should be addressed after all the other comments. Personally I think everyone should own a gun, and I also believe EVERYONE (especially said owners) should learn how to properly use one and should learn the maturity involved in having one.
If your looking to protect your stuff while your not home... A dog is a good deterrent, sure, the guy on that show might not be afraid of one, but he's a professional crook, not a petty low life. Personally, I'm a dog lover, so I'll have one anyway. If you hate dogs though, the extra protection probably isn't worth your misery, don't bother...
Cameras probably aren't going to help unless you actually spend some money on them, which is the whole point of what your trying to do. If you setup some cheap cameras directly in front of the windows and doors, the crook might get close enough for you to catch a face, but in the dark, or if hes stealing your car 40 feet away from the camera, probably not. Personally, I'd use them more for insurance claims, so you can clearly prove what was stolen. If you catch the crook in the act, hey, bonus, but I wouldn't rely on them being a case breaker unless you spend some money on them.
I think the best thing to do is setup motion lights around your house, and perhaps get a good alarm system. I know if I was scouting a house and my movement made the place light up like noon on a cloudless summer day, I'd move on to another house in a hurry, and if I kept going and broke a window/busted a door and suddenly an alarm started blaring, I'd be out of there. I know they say audio alarms are worthless, but that's mainly on cars because people are so used to hearing them go off when someone bumps into a car too hard in a mall parking lot, but I think there's a big difference when it's going off in the middle of the night in a neighborhood.
Defiantly motion lights though, if you do go the route of cheap cameras, at least they'll light up the crooks face. If that leads to catching him, bonus.
You could always go the home alone route and setup a net to catch the crook and a swinging cinder block to knock him out until you get home to call the cops...
Response to Internet Hoax
December 17, 2007
Recently, a file was uploaded to the Internet purporting to be a copy of a letter from Big Spring High School to a student regarding a two hour detention. The uploaded letter was an altered version of a detention letter sent to a student. Unfortunately, privacy concerns prevent the School District from giving a full explanation of the nature and source of the letter's alteration at this time. The Big Spring School District does have confirmation that the discipline letter was altered.
The reports, blogs and other sources on the Internet indicating that a Big Spring student was assigned detention for using the Firefox internet browser instead of Internet Explorer are untrue and were based on the fake letter. Detention is assigned in our schools after appropriate warnings are given, if students continue to engage in non-academic activities or fail to follow a teacher's directive during class time discipline can and will be assigned.
Sincerely yours,
John C. Scudder
Don't get me wrong, I'm usually not on the school's side, but a student with computer knowledge altering a document to gain popularity and to raise a cry from everyone on the internet over this isn't unheard of. So who are we to believe? High School Principal