..because he does not understand simple concepts about human nature and, resulting from this, the way in which modern banks conduct their business (e.g. never sending out mails about internet banking/passwords), and is apparently oblivious to the concept of such scams even though it has been reported in the mainstream press over and over again.
Somehow, it worries me that such a person would be the head of the FBI. Good thing I don't live in the States then, although I have reason to expect things aren't much different where I live.
That link is in Dutch, but you can still gather the idea from watching the movie. What you see is the prime minister (at the time) of the Netherlands who clearly has no clue whatsoever what a computer mouse is for and how it should be used (he attempts to use it like a TV remote). A six year old (!!) girl (!) then helps him out in sending an e-mail. This happened about 10 years ago, but mice had been 100% mainstream for at least a decade then (since Windows 3.11 at least - I mean, if six year old girls know, you can be pretty sure it was well out of nerd-territory by then).
The scary thing is that *these* are also the kind of persons in positions to come up with laws and regulations regarding the internet, filesharing, etc.
generally speaking you're not expecting attacks from inside your LAN. As Windows vulnerabilities go, this isn't horrible in a practical sense.
Really? That may be true in small(ish) companies, say less than 50 employees. In general, many security experts beg to differ, however.
Some select quotes:
"In 92 percent of the incidents [re. inside attacks] investigated, revenge was the primary motivator."
Common attacks:
Manipulation of Protocol Design Flaws: Protocol weaknesses in TCP/IP can result in a virtual treasure trove of problems, for example DNS spoofing, TCP sequence, hijacked sessions and authentication session / transaction replay, denial of service and TCP_SYN flooding.
Manipulation of Operating System Design Flaws: We all know the drill. Operating systems, such as Windows and Linux, have not been designed to be highly secure. Privileged users in particular have easy access to information regarding which vulnerabilities exist and which vulnerabilities have been patched. With the ability to read and administrative access, privileged users can manipulate these design flaws and exercise native vulnerabilities.
I work at a university where several years ago a server administrator purposefully set fire to an entire building (out of spite for getting fired, allegedly). By comparison, bluescreening the computers in your company out of revenge is childs play, and if you do it right, it should be very hard to detect where it originated. People do strange things out of spite - although setting buildings on fire is fortunately rare, I doubt the same can be said about such "trivial" DOS possibilities.
After all, the Exchange protocol is still proprietary and under exclusive control of Microsoft. As long as this is the case, Microsoft is free to change the Exchange protocol to freeze out third party clients.
I'm not sure about Exchange, but what you say used to be true about the CIFS (SMB) protocol as well, and that most decidedly has changed. Microsoft is losing some of its power: there are now so many (usually Linux-based) (embedded) devices running Samba, i.e. think of NAS appliances but also file servers etc., that large corporations by now *demand* functional support for Samba-based devices.
The thing is that the mentality has shifted to "oh, so the new version of Windows doesn't work with this device? Guess I'll keep using XP then". So Microsoft simply cannot afford that.
So yes, Microsoft is now testing new versions of CIFS clients against Samba, and working with Samba developers in case of problems.
All that said, the same may not *yet* be true of Exchange...but that point might easily come ("so, if we upgrade, we'll have to tell all our Mac-using clients that they're SOL? Guess we'll keep running Exchange 2007 for a while then!")
What I can see is all a sudden the friction from the water is gone, the inertia of the huge spining masses causes the turbine to over-rev and it tears itself apart.
Urrrrghhhh, my eyes! Back to high-school physics class 101. Seriously, how did this get modded +5?
The water applies a force on the turbine blades, so that the turbine keeps spinning. Remove the water flow, and the speed of the turbine will start decreasing immediately (due to friction). The spinning down phase may indeed take a while due to inertia, but without an external force (such as the water) applying pressure the speed of the turbine is going in only one direction, and that's down.
It seriously makes me wonder when something like this gets modded +5, on *slashdot*, where supposedly such knowledge is already above average level *shudder*.
As a company, you should be absolutely fine, unless you are so incredibly stupid as to put instructions like these down in writing, and making them so explicit that they cannot be read or weaseled out of in any conceivable way.
Would the Internet have blossomed into the vast information network it is today without the aid of easy-to-use software from Microsoft?
If it would have depended on Microsoft, the internet today would not exist at all. Like as not, they'd still like to pretend it doesn't exist even today, since it changed their game so dramatically (and, from their perspective, not for the better).
In addition, they touted this in their "Get The Facts" anti-Linux campaign, so I'm sorry, but pointing out this failure and blaming it on Microsoft (though perhaps not the Windows OS as such) is fair game IMO.
I mean, if a large and well-known consulting firm together with Microsoft themselves can't make a Windows-based framework perform, who can?
I'm aware this is Slashdot, but I'm going out on a limb here and suggest that you should read the linked article. As it happens, it answers precisely this question, among many others.
To summarize the argument: it has become clear that including the requirement in the standard will not change the mind of the browser vendors. A standard that nobody adheres to is worse than useless. Also note that such "gaps" in the HTML requirements are not unheard of: the IMG tag doesn't specify required supported image formats, either.
Rather than pointing out a gap in my summary, please read the original, I think he covers pretty much every angle.
What can happen, though, is the high power draw form shorting a battery will cause a LOT of heat generation. The stuff inside the battery expands with this heat, maybe even vaporizes, and if the battery casing is relatively inflexible it could burst. Bursting is not *quite* the same as exploding.
You're right of course, but even so I'm not convinced I'd want those acids splattering all over me. The combination of acid and heat is an added bonus.
Parent had me confused. I'm European and love to drink wine -- apparently 'blush' means rosee wine.
Rosee should however certainly not be made by mixing red and white wines (and in France, it is forbidden to sell such a mixture as "rosee", if I'm not mistaken).
That's like focusing on how much gas a vehicle consumes at stop lights instead of when it's moving.
No, it's not. As usual, car analogies are stupid.
Cars do no spend the majority of their time idling at traffic lights. Computers (especially servers) however do often end up idling a very large percentage of the time.
Data centers do charge for (actual) power usage, so of course the actual (typically 95th percentile) usage should be taken into account, but still it's a broken analogy.
1) The company is big 2) The company is essentially a monopoly 3) The company is American
I'd say Google. Maybe Oracle.
You get a 1.5 out of 3. The first item is likely true, in part because smaller cases are probably either handled at the national level (do not need to involve the EU) or perhaps such cases exist but do not get the same media coverage. But OK, I'll give you that one.
As to item 3: the EU also regularly heavily fines large European companies. For example, Siemens got fined for 400 million euro for forming a price cartel. Also see here: "The total fines slapped on 11 companies based in the EU and Japan amount to some 750.7 million euros. [..] The total penalty for the cartel is the second-highest imposed by the commission [as of 2007], following a record 790.5 million euros for fixing vitamin prices in 2001".
Oh, and before you ask, that vitamin cartel involved Hoffman-La Roche of Switzerland, which got fined 462m euros, and BASF of Germany, which got fined to the tune of 296m.
As to 2: the company doesn't have to be a monopoly either, although such fines do indeed commonly concern oligopolies (since forming cartels is a very lucrative prospect in such an environment, for obvious reasons). See above examples. Because of such cartels you could perhaps call this "essentially a monopoly", so ok, half point there.
I'd have assumed you where just trolling, but since you are getting upmodded and I've seen such sentiments in other discussions as well, I thought I'd point this out.
It's not bloat, it's taking advantage of current hardware to implement new technologies.
Where by "new technologies", you mean mainly "DRM".
Oh, and also a GUI that gives the impression that some Microsoft techies looked at Mac OS X, decided that the important technical improvement was that it uses OpenGL to draw the GUI, and then implemented some design-by-committee monstrosity on top of that, too.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick to Mac OS X, Linux, and XP for the occasional gaming session, thank you very much. If I saw any actual "improvements" that I would care about in Vista, I'd have installed it long ago. Unfortunately for Microsoft, I don't.
DNF is now the gold-standard for vapor-ware. How much money did they spend, I wonder, producing nothing?
With such an acronym as the abbreviated name of the game, who could have expected anything less, to be honest? Maybe it was just a practical joke all along!
Arguing whether one design might break more easily is missing the point (although it's true, of course).
The "it does not matter" is stated with regard to the efficiency of the windmills. The point is that some manufacturers have been aggressively marketing small windmills with "unusual" designs, promising that they work much better (more efficiently) than "old" designs etc. etc.
This research shows that rotor diameter is by far (orders of magnitude) the most important factor determining yield, and that although different small designs may differ on a scale between "terrible" and "utterly useless", discussing the importance of this difference is like arguing whether you would prefer a 2m world-wide sea-level rise over, say, a nuclear holocaust.
To put this another way, if you have like $5000 burning a hole in your pocket, you could flush it through the toilet, or buy a small windmill, and you won't notice much difference in ROI.
(We are of course talking about general-purpose windmills used to partially replace the "regular grid". Of course there might be niche markets, like ships, where it could make sense to use small windmills)
No, this is another case of someone getting screwed out of a partnership with Microsoft. They weren't the first, they won't be the last. If you go into a partnership in any way with Microsoft, make sure you have the contract nailed down, and nothing is left to trust. Because if they can get an extra dollar from screwing you over, they will. You may say this is flamebait, but it is true: there is a long list of companies who have gone down because of underestimating the dangers of doing business with Microsoft.
This sounds like a much more plausible explanation to me.
The pub owner will go bankrupt, which means there will be a firesale of the pub properties. Then, in a couple months, it will turn out that it has been indirectly bought by Microsoft, who will lease it to a new owner. I expect that bar to open in less than half a year with a different "owner" leasing the complete building + properties from Microsoft.
There is no doubt that some pressure was brought to bear against management when this pub was announced, and though it hasn't been publicized, the Washington state Mormon leaders have been visiting the campus to lobby against the pub.
I sure hope you're actually kidding, right?
In any case, people would blog about such occurrences. In this day and age, we don't need "official" news outlets to cover such events for us. If such a thing happened there would be rumors about it, which would certainly be reported by any of the large number of Microsoft employees who write a blog. Maybe this happened, but I sure would like to see some links to people at least talking about such rumors, before I would give this any amount of credibility.
Slashdot Mirror
..because he does not understand simple concepts about human nature and, resulting from this, the way in which modern banks conduct their business (e.g. never sending out mails about internet banking/passwords), and is apparently oblivious to the concept of such scams even though it has been reported in the mainstream press over and over again.
Somehow, it worries me that such a person would be the head of the FBI. Good thing I don't live in the States then, although I have reason to expect things aren't much different where I live.
That link is in Dutch, but you can still gather the idea from watching the movie. What you see is the prime minister (at the time) of the Netherlands who clearly has no clue whatsoever what a computer mouse is for and how it should be used (he attempts to use it like a TV remote). A six year old (!!) girl (!) then helps him out in sending an e-mail. This happened about 10 years ago, but mice had been 100% mainstream for at least a decade then (since Windows 3.11 at least - I mean, if six year old girls know, you can be pretty sure it was well out of nerd-territory by then).
The scary thing is that *these* are also the kind of persons in positions to come up with laws and regulations regarding the internet, filesharing, etc.
Why yes, yes it is. /completely offtopic
Really? That may be true in small(ish) companies, say less than 50 employees. In general, many security experts beg to differ, however.
Some select quotes:
"In 92 percent of the incidents [re. inside attacks] investigated, revenge was the primary motivator."
Common attacks:
I work at a university where several years ago a server administrator purposefully set fire to an entire building (out of spite for getting fired, allegedly). By comparison, bluescreening the computers in your company out of revenge is childs play, and if you do it right, it should be very hard to detect where it originated. People do strange things out of spite - although setting buildings on fire is fortunately rare, I doubt the same can be said about such "trivial" DOS possibilities.
I'm not sure about Exchange, but what you say used to be true about the CIFS (SMB) protocol as well, and that most decidedly has changed. Microsoft is losing some of its power: there are now so many (usually Linux-based) (embedded) devices running Samba, i.e. think of NAS appliances but also file servers etc., that large corporations by now *demand* functional support for Samba-based devices.
The thing is that the mentality has shifted to "oh, so the new version of Windows doesn't work with this device? Guess I'll keep using XP then". So Microsoft simply cannot afford that.
So yes, Microsoft is now testing new versions of CIFS clients against Samba, and working with Samba developers in case of problems.
All that said, the same may not *yet* be true of Exchange...but that point might easily come ("so, if we upgrade, we'll have to tell all our Mac-using clients that they're SOL? Guess we'll keep running Exchange 2007 for a while then!")
Urrrrghhhh, my eyes! Back to high-school physics class 101. Seriously, how did this get modded +5?
The water applies a force on the turbine blades, so that the turbine keeps spinning. Remove the water flow, and the speed of the turbine will start decreasing immediately (due to friction). The spinning down phase may indeed take a while due to inertia, but without an external force (such as the water) applying pressure the speed of the turbine is going in only one direction, and that's down.
It seriously makes me wonder when something like this gets modded +5, on *slashdot*, where supposedly such knowledge is already above average level *shudder*.
Part of the reason why they needed a new driver model was to facilitate DRM. DRM definitely has a lot to do with it.
Translation: as opposed to last time, when our beloved DRM overlords were firmly in control.
Trust in dealing with Microsoft is not sadly lacking.
It is understandably lacking for anyone who has been paying any attention at all to Microsofts history.
As a company, you should be absolutely fine, unless you are so incredibly stupid as to put instructions like these down in writing, and making them so explicit that they cannot be read or weaseled out of in any conceivable way.
This is absolutely not true at all.
For any version prior to Windows 2000, this is absolutely not a myth.
If it would have depended on Microsoft, the internet today would not exist at all. Like as not, they'd still like to pretend it doesn't exist even today, since it changed their game so dramatically (and, from their perspective, not for the better).
Then again, TradElect was written by Microsoft and Accenture, so Microsoft where heavily involved in this project themselves - not just from the perspective of Windows only.
In addition, they touted this in their "Get The Facts" anti-Linux campaign, so I'm sorry, but pointing out this failure and blaming it on Microsoft (though perhaps not the Windows OS as such) is fair game IMO.
I mean, if a large and well-known consulting firm together with Microsoft themselves can't make a Windows-based framework perform, who can?
I'm aware this is Slashdot, but I'm going out on a limb here and suggest that you should read the linked article. As it happens, it answers precisely this question, among many others.
To summarize the argument: it has become clear that including the requirement in the standard will not change the mind of the browser vendors. A standard that nobody adheres to is worse than useless. Also note that such "gaps" in the HTML requirements are not unheard of: the IMG tag doesn't specify required supported image formats, either.
Rather than pointing out a gap in my summary, please read the original, I think he covers pretty much every angle.
You're right of course, but even so I'm not convinced I'd want those acids splattering all over me. The combination of acid and heat is an added bonus.
Because it is hard to tax the collection of rainwater?
Maybe I'm too cynical but I just cannot honestly imagine that this has anything to do with any actual environmental concern.
Rosee should however certainly not be made by mixing red and white wines (and in France, it is forbidden to sell such a mixture as "rosee", if I'm not mistaken).
No, it's not. As usual, car analogies are stupid.
Cars do no spend the majority of their time idling at traffic lights. Computers (especially servers) however do often end up idling a very large percentage of the time.
Data centers do charge for (actual) power usage, so of course the actual (typically 95th percentile) usage should be taken into account, but still it's a broken analogy.
...they should just go to the 3D Realms headquarters, rip their heads off and shit down their neck.
You get a 1.5 out of 3. The first item is likely true, in part because smaller cases are probably either handled at the national level (do not need to involve the EU) or perhaps such cases exist but do not get the same media coverage. But OK, I'll give you that one.
As to item 3: the EU also regularly heavily fines large European companies. For example, Siemens got fined for 400 million euro for forming a price cartel. Also see here: "The total fines slapped on 11 companies based in the EU and Japan amount to some 750.7 million euros. [..] The total penalty for the cartel is the second-highest imposed by the commission [as of 2007], following a record 790.5 million euros for fixing vitamin prices in 2001".
Oh, and before you ask, that vitamin cartel involved Hoffman-La Roche of Switzerland, which got fined 462m euros, and BASF of Germany, which got fined to the tune of 296m.
As to 2: the company doesn't have to be a monopoly either, although such fines do indeed commonly concern oligopolies (since forming cartels is a very lucrative prospect in such an environment, for obvious reasons). See above examples. Because of such cartels you could perhaps call this "essentially a monopoly", so ok, half point there.
I'd have assumed you where just trolling, but since you are getting upmodded and I've seen such sentiments in other discussions as well, I thought I'd point this out.
Where by "new technologies", you mean mainly "DRM".
Oh, and also a GUI that gives the impression that some Microsoft techies looked at Mac OS X, decided that the important technical improvement was that it uses OpenGL to draw the GUI, and then implemented some design-by-committee monstrosity on top of that, too.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick to Mac OS X, Linux, and XP for the occasional gaming session, thank you very much. If I saw any actual "improvements" that I would care about in Vista, I'd have installed it long ago. Unfortunately for Microsoft, I don't.
With such an acronym as the abbreviated name of the game, who could have expected anything less, to be honest? Maybe it was just a practical joke all along!
Arguing whether one design might break more easily is missing the point (although it's true, of course).
The "it does not matter" is stated with regard to the efficiency of the windmills. The point is that some manufacturers have been aggressively marketing small windmills with "unusual" designs, promising that they work much better (more efficiently) than "old" designs etc. etc.
This research shows that rotor diameter is by far (orders of magnitude) the most important factor determining yield, and that although different small designs may differ on a scale between "terrible" and "utterly useless", discussing the importance of this difference is like arguing whether you would prefer a 2m world-wide sea-level rise over, say, a nuclear holocaust.
To put this another way, if you have like $5000 burning a hole in your pocket, you could flush it through the toilet, or buy a small windmill, and you won't notice much difference in ROI.
(We are of course talking about general-purpose windmills used to partially replace the "regular grid". Of course there might be niche markets, like ships, where it could make sense to use small windmills)
This sounds like a much more plausible explanation to me.
The pub owner will go bankrupt, which means there will be a firesale of the pub properties. Then, in a couple months, it will turn out that it has been indirectly bought by Microsoft, who will lease it to a new owner. I expect that bar to open in less than half a year with a different "owner" leasing the complete building + properties from Microsoft.
I sure hope you're actually kidding, right?
In any case, people would blog about such occurrences. In this day and age, we don't need "official" news outlets to cover such events for us. If such a thing happened there would be rumors about it, which would certainly be reported by any of the large number of Microsoft employees who write a blog. Maybe this happened, but I sure would like to see some links to people at least talking about such rumors, before I would give this any amount of credibility.