Ever hear of Amway? Or seen all those work at home ads? I don't know if he actualy got paid or not, but just like the "send one dollar to each of the names on this list" scams the meme may very well be better at spreading itself in the anticipation of of making some money than it is at making money.
Listen punk. Any time that you spend not working, not doing anything to fight terrorism and move the wealth of society ever further towards that top one percent you are basically stealing from society, and this sort of thinking is so incorrect it should be a crime, they could even call it thoughtcrime yeah that's it! Quick let me denounce you.
Well, what I mean is that nano-bots that can almost magically eat everything from concrete, steel and dirt and reproduce may be impossible, or at least a really tall order. What about nanomachines that eat plants and use the material to reproduce? As we sit on the pristine concrete in two feet of plant eating nanogoo (Green Goo?) I'm sure we will all feel so much better knowing the concrete is safe.
It has truly gotten difficult lately. My old motto when I did build/buy/sell/repair boxen full time was always "Build AMD, buy intel" there seems to still be something to that, if your solution is better found in name brand get an Intel, if you can really build the box you want with the price you want get an AMD chip. Buy the chip that is two price points down from whatever the premium CPU at this time is and you'll get 85% of the performance at 50% of the price.
That's better, but I think it could be even better.
Sis, this isn't working, from now on I'm not fixing your computer. I'll set you up with a working system, back it up, save your configuration for you. Load it with Anti-spyware, Antivirus and a firewall, from then on if you're just going to keep installing stuff until it stops working I'm not fixing it, or I'm going to charge you $69 for the first 15 minutes and $50 an hour after that until I leave the premises.
Microsoft is setting themselves up as the "great source of truth and trust" as it is one part of their strategy to keep their franchise strong. In case you don't know, Microsoft's franchise is providing governments and other agencies direct access to anyone's desktop, datamining, composite usage statistics, etc. Every single Microsoft app and OS has been extensively wired with backdoors and spyware. This we know.
Amen! Heck, getting them to buy Macs so you won't need to help them is one of the main reasons I promote the Mac to friends and family. As for the main negative point against macs, the one that seriously hurts their utility to some segment of the population in a very serious way. CAD, AutoCAD, Mastercam, the software that runs my CMM at work etc. I can't use Macs for those apps 'cause there isn't the softare out there, or because I've already got thousands of dollars tied up in the windows only software that does them along with a ton of corporate inertia. I so wish someone would solve that problem and I'd be able to switch the whole company over to linux or macs.
How about.
1: Sell gold, items and characters themselves, thereby short-circuiting and defeating the whole "farming" industry in one fell swoop.
2. See one.
3 Profit!
Seriously, you're buying the option to play a game, it's like buying a ticket to go to a basketball game, if you want you can pay more and set right by the court and yell directly at the players, or you can set in the cheap seats, or you can go for the open source option and shoot hoops in the park with your friends, but at no point should you bitch 'cause some idiot paid ten thousand dollars for courtside tickets.
So, what you need is to proactively close all the known vulnerabilities, back up all your important data, don't use the internet or your computer for any activities where your identity or bank information can be stolen, be appropriately paranoid about the software you download, the web browsing you do and the browser you use, huh? Anti-Virus software sucks because it's not safe to run Windows connected to internet unless you do all of the above or are truly a security expert.
I'm not entirely sure who to blame for the idea that it's okay to jack an XP box into a broadband connection, let your wife and kids play on the internet unsupervised and then fire it up on sunday morning to go online and do your online banking, investing and pay bills, to me it's insane to do all these things on a random windows box running windows even with an aftermarket AV solution.
My research starts at/. makes a quick trip over to wiki, and if I'm feeling really interested I'll read the google results pages. But not click on any of the links, by this time I'm an expert.
1: Easy there, I think you're projecting a lot into what I said that's not really in there. But I'll answer what I think is relevant.
2: I'm not actually saying Skype *IS* anything, any kind of security risk whatsoever, etc.
3: I certainly don't the company owned network is expected to support IM'ing chatting, video sharing, downloading pr0n, warez, music or playing games. This includes applications like Skype. Now, what level of effort the IT is to put into stopping any of those activities should be entirely managements decision, not up to some IT drone.
However if any even halfway legitimate security or paranoia concern inconviences someone or we block port IRC on our network, or won't upgrade the video card on the users computer so they can play Quake 4, then I'm absolutely failing to see the problem with that. If there's a mandate from management to support this sort of "quality of life" application for the amusement or convience of our workers, then fine by all means, but I hardly think that's the default assumption.
You can never be too paranoid. You can never fully trust a backup, you don't even want to guess the costs of losing all your data entered since last night, or last Friday's backup, the threat to your network, to your data, to the existence of your company is both real greater than you think.
PS, Yes this an old post, and normally I wouldn't reply but you wer so strident and a bit sharp in your reply to what I said that I had to.
SILENT!!??? IN a DORM?? Either, we're debating a point that, while significant on its own, is really meaningless in the original context, or things have surely changed since I was in school... Btw, I didn't pay $1,000 for my TI/994A or my TRS 80, color, but I didn't take either of them to school either.
Well... In what context? If the users on my corporate network aren't "satisfied" with just web surfing.. Is this some kind of problem? I mean hey, don't let me get in the way of their voice chatting, game playing IMing and P2P file sharing, 'cause hey we're just paying them to hang around the office for a few hours a day, not for actually accomplishing anything. Now in other contexts you may be correct, but for the most part I'm suspicious of my corporate users even using the web, much less anything else to connect to the internet, they need e-mail to do their jobs. Some of them need the web sometimes. We have a rather nice phone system. So why would they need skype?
Send them a document that says that the presence of unauthorized, uncontrolled software on the network may be putting the entire enterprise at risk, and that they need to sign off on it and absolve you from any blame when the network and all the orginazitions data is gone. Request they give you a paper copy, with a post-it to explain there won't be any electronic copies of anything after the electronic apocalypse. Be sure and sing your note, "have a nice day"
Seriously. You can never be paranoid enough. When things go bad they'll go worse than you can imagine. You will be the one left holding the bag and the blame. Back ups always fail when you need them. Yes you'll get another job. But you might as well make your stand right where you are now.
It's *all* my money, and why does the goverment need any of it? Oh, wait, roads, defence health care education law enforcement and alla that jazz. So having accepted that civilization is a worthy thing we need taxes, and the death tax will never take a dime of your money from *you* possibly from your heirs, but geez a tax that you will never have to pay, how cool is that?
I was using DSL on a pentium II 350 mhz computer for the last few months and I loved it, that's the beauty of DSL, more so than the "small" in terms of size, the thing part is of huge usefulness! What's the street value of a PII 350? $0.5? Seriously, it's a free computer someone gave me when we installed new hardware at their location, I threw it in my graveyard, and for a while made it a DOS V6.x game box (it's back to that role now, I eventually got bored and bought a modern computer) but during its run of several months I've been web browsing on it from home and haven't had any problem running firefox.
"Mom & Pop" type shops, don't and basically can't much if anything off low end computers. I was the computer tech/sales/support/connectivity/everything for an office equipment place, very much a mom & pop shop, and while once upon a time we made nice money on building & selling them ourselves by 2000 it had gotten to the point where you were slicing the margin terribly thin and building junk to get down to the "entry" level price point for a Dell or Gateway etc, you could then, and still can make money making something that kicks butt, but there's no realistic way to make enough to cover your labor building a generic machine that's in the same price range as a low end Dell or Gateway, nevermind the same price range as whatever generic piece of junk is at the very bottom end of the price scale.
What? WTF Does a gun counter and a hunting license have to do with open source? I'm failing to see a connection. I don't have a current hunting license, but I'm certainly the sort of person who does, I also shop at Wal-Mart, I can also certainly put together a computer. I use linux I've used several different distros I was in wal-mart the other day and looked at (Although I dind't buy) a gun, just because it was there. I think you need to re-think your stereotypes a bit rural and ignorant are not synonyms.
Wrong in the sense that it's morally wrong (it *feels* wrong anyway) Wrong in the sense that it's insane that you can patent something as vauge as this, Wrong in the sense that it's yet another attempt by mega-corporations to confiscate wealth from consumers by finding another way to charge them for something they either already had or never asked for. It's insane.
There has to be a path to reward companies and individuals who innovate and produce new products, or real wealth while not rewarding jerks who figure out how to charge us extra for something that either used to be free, or that we never needed.
Are surely much more valuable domain names than amazon.com, google.com, and ebay.com? The thing no one has explained to me yet is are these idiots making money squatting on all these domains? Or is this like all those "work from home" things, where none of them really make any money, but the meme of the multi-level marketing thing is infectious and spreads prolifically? Same question could be asked about spammers, how many of them make any real profit, and how many more are either spamming at a loss or at a rate less than they could make the kwikky mart per hour? Seems to me if these things are all as usually un-profitable as I imagine we could educate away at least some of the annoyance caused by spam and domain spam etc.
Then once you've got a command prompt you can make directories and delete files and stuff, and they used have this killer file manager app. called Norton Commander, it was great it was just like Midnight Commander only for DOS, and then besides notepad there's charmap and ipconfig and ping and telnet and even more!
Oh, wait, you were looking for something useful that's a windows ap? Well there's autocad and mastercam and my CMM software and a bunch of crap like that, but there's nothing else to recommend windows for, dude this is slashdot. (Although if you telnet to a unix shell you can probably use PICO or VI and maybe PINE or ELM)
First, e-sports are barely "sports" yet at all, whatever they may become they aren't really a "sport" yet, not even in the way that bowling and darts are a sport.
Second, Shirley Muldowney was probably the best drag racer ever. So she got sponsorships, attention and fame (within the context of that sport) Danica Patrick is a "pretty good" Indy car driver, but also a hottie, so she gets more attention fame etc, within the context of that sports personality. Also see Anna K, and Maria Sharpova or similar examples.
Before you think I'm being sexist and oversimplistic this works for men in sports as well, whether it's that they come across as having the personality type that the male fans of the sport would want to go drinking with, (John Daly for ex.) or if it's that the female fans of the sport think they're attractive. (NASCAR drivers & NFL quarterbacks mostly, but I'm sure there are other examples in sports I don't pay any attention to)
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Ever hear of Amway? Or seen all those work at home ads? I don't know if he actualy got paid or not, but just like the "send one dollar to each of the names on this list" scams the meme may very well be better at spreading itself in the anticipation of of making some money than it is at making money.
Same as any other spammer, is this a trick question?
Listen punk. Any time that you spend not working, not doing anything to fight terrorism and move the wealth of society ever further towards that top one percent you are basically stealing from society, and this sort of thinking is so incorrect it should be a crime, they could even call it thoughtcrime yeah that's it! Quick let me denounce you.
Well, what I mean is that nano-bots that can almost magically eat everything from concrete, steel and dirt and reproduce may be impossible, or at least a really tall order. What about nanomachines that eat plants and use the material to reproduce? As we sit on the pristine concrete in two feet of plant eating nanogoo (Green Goo?) I'm sure we will all feel so much better knowing the concrete is safe.
It has truly gotten difficult lately. My old motto when I did build/buy/sell/repair boxen full time was always "Build AMD, buy intel" there seems to still be something to that, if your solution is better found in name brand get an Intel, if you can really build the box you want with the price you want get an AMD chip. Buy the chip that is two price points down from whatever the premium CPU at this time is and you'll get 85% of the performance at 50% of the price.
That's better, but I think it could be even better.
Sis, this isn't working, from now on I'm not fixing your computer. I'll set you up with a working system, back it up, save your configuration for you. Load it with Anti-spyware, Antivirus and a firewall, from then on if you're just going to keep installing stuff until it stops working I'm not fixing it, or I'm going to charge you $69 for the first 15 minutes and $50 an hour after that until I leave the premises.
Got any cites or proof for that?
Amen! Heck, getting them to buy Macs so you won't need to help them is one of the main reasons I promote the Mac to friends and family. As for the main negative point against macs, the one that seriously hurts their utility to some segment of the population in a very serious way. CAD, AutoCAD, Mastercam, the software that runs my CMM at work etc. I can't use Macs for those apps 'cause there isn't the softare out there, or because I've already got thousands of dollars tied up in the windows only software that does them along with a ton of corporate inertia. I so wish someone would solve that problem and I'd be able to switch the whole company over to linux or macs.
How about. 1: Sell gold, items and characters themselves, thereby short-circuiting and defeating the whole "farming" industry in one fell swoop. 2. See one. 3 Profit! Seriously, you're buying the option to play a game, it's like buying a ticket to go to a basketball game, if you want you can pay more and set right by the court and yell directly at the players, or you can set in the cheap seats, or you can go for the open source option and shoot hoops in the park with your friends, but at no point should you bitch 'cause some idiot paid ten thousand dollars for courtside tickets.
So, what you need is to proactively close all the known vulnerabilities, back up all your important data, don't use the internet or your computer for any activities where your identity or bank information can be stolen, be appropriately paranoid about the software you download, the web browsing you do and the browser you use, huh? Anti-Virus software sucks because it's not safe to run Windows connected to internet unless you do all of the above or are truly a security expert. I'm not entirely sure who to blame for the idea that it's okay to jack an XP box into a broadband connection, let your wife and kids play on the internet unsupervised and then fire it up on sunday morning to go online and do your online banking, investing and pay bills, to me it's insane to do all these things on a random windows box running windows even with an aftermarket AV solution.
My research starts at /. makes a quick trip over to wiki, and if I'm feeling really interested I'll read the google results pages. But not click on any of the links, by this time I'm an expert.
1: Easy there, I think you're projecting a lot into what I said that's not really in there. But I'll answer what I think is relevant. 2: I'm not actually saying Skype *IS* anything, any kind of security risk whatsoever, etc. 3: I certainly don't the company owned network is expected to support IM'ing chatting, video sharing, downloading pr0n, warez, music or playing games. This includes applications like Skype. Now, what level of effort the IT is to put into stopping any of those activities should be entirely managements decision, not up to some IT drone. However if any even halfway legitimate security or paranoia concern inconviences someone or we block port IRC on our network, or won't upgrade the video card on the users computer so they can play Quake 4, then I'm absolutely failing to see the problem with that. If there's a mandate from management to support this sort of "quality of life" application for the amusement or convience of our workers, then fine by all means, but I hardly think that's the default assumption. You can never be too paranoid. You can never fully trust a backup, you don't even want to guess the costs of losing all your data entered since last night, or last Friday's backup, the threat to your network, to your data, to the existence of your company is both real greater than you think. PS, Yes this an old post, and normally I wouldn't reply but you wer so strident and a bit sharp in your reply to what I said that I had to.
SILENT!!??? IN a DORM?? Either, we're debating a point that, while significant on its own, is really meaningless in the original context, or things have surely changed since I was in school... Btw, I didn't pay $1,000 for my TI/994A or my TRS 80, color, but I didn't take either of them to school either.
Well... In what context? If the users on my corporate network aren't "satisfied" with just web surfing.. Is this some kind of problem? I mean hey, don't let me get in the way of their voice chatting, game playing IMing and P2P file sharing, 'cause hey we're just paying them to hang around the office for a few hours a day, not for actually accomplishing anything. Now in other contexts you may be correct, but for the most part I'm suspicious of my corporate users even using the web, much less anything else to connect to the internet, they need e-mail to do their jobs. Some of them need the web sometimes. We have a rather nice phone system. So why would they need skype?
Send them a document that says that the presence of unauthorized, uncontrolled software on the network may be putting the entire enterprise at risk, and that they need to sign off on it and absolve you from any blame when the network and all the orginazitions data is gone. Request they give you a paper copy, with a post-it to explain there won't be any electronic copies of anything after the electronic apocalypse. Be sure and sing your note, "have a nice day" Seriously. You can never be paranoid enough. When things go bad they'll go worse than you can imagine. You will be the one left holding the bag and the blame. Back ups always fail when you need them. Yes you'll get another job. But you might as well make your stand right where you are now.
So, it's true?
It's *all* my money, and why does the goverment need any of it? Oh, wait, roads, defence health care education law enforcement and alla that jazz. So having accepted that civilization is a worthy thing we need taxes, and the death tax will never take a dime of your money from *you* possibly from your heirs, but geez a tax that you will never have to pay, how cool is that?
I was using DSL on a pentium II 350 mhz computer for the last few months and I loved it, that's the beauty of DSL, more so than the "small" in terms of size, the thing part is of huge usefulness! What's the street value of a PII 350? $0.5? Seriously, it's a free computer someone gave me when we installed new hardware at their location, I threw it in my graveyard, and for a while made it a DOS V6.x game box (it's back to that role now, I eventually got bored and bought a modern computer) but during its run of several months I've been web browsing on it from home and haven't had any problem running firefox.
"Mom & Pop" type shops, don't and basically can't much if anything off low end computers. I was the computer tech/sales/support/connectivity/everything for an office equipment place, very much a mom & pop shop, and while once upon a time we made nice money on building & selling them ourselves by 2000 it had gotten to the point where you were slicing the margin terribly thin and building junk to get down to the "entry" level price point for a Dell or Gateway etc, you could then, and still can make money making something that kicks butt, but there's no realistic way to make enough to cover your labor building a generic machine that's in the same price range as a low end Dell or Gateway, nevermind the same price range as whatever generic piece of junk is at the very bottom end of the price scale.
What? WTF Does a gun counter and a hunting license have to do with open source? I'm failing to see a connection. I don't have a current hunting license, but I'm certainly the sort of person who does, I also shop at Wal-Mart, I can also certainly put together a computer. I use linux I've used several different distros I was in wal-mart the other day and looked at (Although I dind't buy) a gun, just because it was there. I think you need to re-think your stereotypes a bit rural and ignorant are not synonyms.
Wrong in the sense that it's morally wrong (it *feels* wrong anyway) Wrong in the sense that it's insane that you can patent something as vauge as this, Wrong in the sense that it's yet another attempt by mega-corporations to confiscate wealth from consumers by finding another way to charge them for something they either already had or never asked for. It's insane.
There has to be a path to reward companies and individuals who innovate and produce new products, or real wealth while not rewarding jerks who figure out how to charge us extra for something that either used to be free, or that we never needed.
Are surely much more valuable domain names than amazon.com, google.com, and ebay.com? The thing no one has explained to me yet is are these idiots making money squatting on all these domains? Or is this like all those "work from home" things, where none of them really make any money, but the meme of the multi-level marketing thing is infectious and spreads prolifically? Same question could be asked about spammers, how many of them make any real profit, and how many more are either spamming at a loss or at a rate less than they could make the kwikky mart per hour? Seems to me if these things are all as usually un-profitable as I imagine we could educate away at least some of the annoyance caused by spam and domain spam etc.
Then once you've got a command prompt you can make directories and delete files and stuff, and they used have this killer file manager app. called Norton Commander, it was great it was just like Midnight Commander only for DOS, and then besides notepad there's charmap and ipconfig and ping and telnet and even more!
Oh, wait, you were looking for something useful that's a windows ap? Well there's autocad and mastercam and my CMM software and a bunch of crap like that, but there's nothing else to recommend windows for, dude this is slashdot. (Although if you telnet to a unix shell you can probably use PICO or VI and maybe PINE or ELM)
First, e-sports are barely "sports" yet at all, whatever they may become they aren't really a "sport" yet, not even in the way that bowling and darts are a sport. Second, Shirley Muldowney was probably the best drag racer ever. So she got sponsorships, attention and fame (within the context of that sport) Danica Patrick is a "pretty good" Indy car driver, but also a hottie, so she gets more attention fame etc, within the context of that sports personality. Also see Anna K, and Maria Sharpova or similar examples. Before you think I'm being sexist and oversimplistic this works for men in sports as well, whether it's that they come across as having the personality type that the male fans of the sport would want to go drinking with, (John Daly for ex.) or if it's that the female fans of the sport think they're attractive. (NASCAR drivers & NFL quarterbacks mostly, but I'm sure there are other examples in sports I don't pay any attention to)
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas A gigantic nuclear furnace Where hydrogen is built into helium At a temperature of millions of degrees