I still haven't installed IE 7 after the WGA scandal and all the PC's I had to de-WGA for months. IE8 is kind of like "that guy I hate"s kid bro.
If you support enough machines, set up Windows Server Update Services on a machine that can be accessed via the Internet, and point all the machines you support to your WSUS for updates (use the "Local Computer Policy" MMC plugin). Then, you can completely control which updates get applied.
WGA isn't approved on the WSUS server I have, and none of my machines have had any problems with any updates (including test installs of IE7 to virtual machines). I'm sure there are some optional things you could download from Microsoft that require WGA, but you could always have one VM that has WGA installed and download using that. I don't know of anything that checks for WGA inside the install file itself, but I wouldn't be surprised if MS started doing that, too.
For those who like to test newer bleeding edge software : WinPooch software can launch a scan when ever an executable is opened - it's almost as good as an on demand scanner.
Scanning when an executable (or other file) is opened is the worst type of real-time scanning, and what makes people complain about anti-virus software slowing down their machine.
The system I have to use at work has on-open scanning and does a full scan in the background every time someone logs in or the virus definition file is updated, both of which tend to happen when I'm most interested in getting the machine to do something quickly.
For the Windows boxes I use at home, I have the A/V software set to scan only on write or modify, and exclude certain files that get written to a lot but are very unlikely to carry an infection (e.g., log files). Using this setup, files are generally only scanned a few times (depending on how the download and install system uses temporary space), but the system is still just as protected.
This wouldn't work if you don't really have control over the system, and someone evil came in and turned off the A/V and then loaded a virus. Just in case, though, I have scheduled full drive scans run weekly during low use hours.
There are these brand new things called "capacitors" that can be used to smooth the output of a rectifier bridge. I guess that the $60+ LED bulbs designed to replace incandescent bulbs can't afford the extra $0.20 in parts to do this.
Bit more difficult this time, I think. The shortage is not artificial like in the 70s.
There's no actual shortage on oil right now, although there is less in the supply chain than in the past few years. OPEC has repeatedly not increased production (despite there being plenty of oil in the ground), and the futures market is artificially driving up the price of a barrel of oil.
The price of a barrel of oil has risen 300% in the past few years, which would tend to indicate that suddenly there was less than half the oil available as before, but that's obviously not the case.
I know many people with IE6 who actively downloaded IE7 instead of getting it via Windows Update.
I actively downloaded IE7 and then ripped it right back out of my machine because it offered nothing of real value over IE6 (on XP, with a good spyware blocker installed) and was slower and less configurable. And, IE7 is now part of my "Declined" list in WSUS...critical update my ass.
Firefox 2.x wasn't quite up to what I wanted in configurability even with add-ons (close, but not quite), but Firefox 3.0 does the job.
It was a bit more of an effort to get FF3 working in that the IE6 to IE7 wasn't a default browser change, but now all the machines I use regularly (including work, where IE is mandatory) have FF3 as the default browser.
Their "90% utilization is congested" figure is for an OC-48, so that would still leave 240Mbps free on that line. I don't know if this is enough to cause "congestion", but I can't see how it would make a 50-byte DNS request/reponse take a minute to get through.
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I still haven't installed IE 7 after the WGA scandal and all the PC's I had to de-WGA for months. IE8 is kind of like "that guy I hate"s kid bro.
If you support enough machines, set up Windows Server Update Services on a machine that can be accessed via the Internet, and point all the machines you support to your WSUS for updates (use the "Local Computer Policy" MMC plugin). Then, you can completely control which updates get applied.
WGA isn't approved on the WSUS server I have, and none of my machines have had any problems with any updates (including test installs of IE7 to virtual machines). I'm sure there are some optional things you could download from Microsoft that require WGA, but you could always have one VM that has WGA installed and download using that. I don't know of anything that checks for WGA inside the install file itself, but I wouldn't be surprised if MS started doing that, too.
And how does one get the angle brackets to not be parsed when posting? (is "parsed" even the right word?)
Either post as plain text, or use the HTML escapes: "<" for left angle bracket (<) and ">" for right angle bracket (>).
Also, to create the "source" in this post, I had to escape the ampersand that starts each sequence by using "&".
For those who like to test newer bleeding edge software : WinPooch software can launch a scan when ever an executable is opened - it's almost as good as an on demand scanner.
Scanning when an executable (or other file) is opened is the worst type of real-time scanning, and what makes people complain about anti-virus software slowing down their machine.
The system I have to use at work has on-open scanning and does a full scan in the background every time someone logs in or the virus definition file is updated, both of which tend to happen when I'm most interested in getting the machine to do something quickly.
For the Windows boxes I use at home, I have the A/V software set to scan only on write or modify, and exclude certain files that get written to a lot but are very unlikely to carry an infection (e.g., log files). Using this setup, files are generally only scanned a few times (depending on how the download and install system uses temporary space), but the system is still just as protected.
This wouldn't work if you don't really have control over the system, and someone evil came in and turned off the A/V and then loaded a virus. Just in case, though, I have scheduled full drive scans run weekly during low use hours.
There are these brand new things called "capacitors" that can be used to smooth the output of a rectifier bridge. I guess that the $60+ LED bulbs designed to replace incandescent bulbs can't afford the extra $0.20 in parts to do this.
Bit more difficult this time, I think. The shortage is not artificial like in the 70s.
There's no actual shortage on oil right now, although there is less in the supply chain than in the past few years. OPEC has repeatedly not increased production (despite there being plenty of oil in the ground), and the futures market is artificially driving up the price of a barrel of oil.
The price of a barrel of oil has risen 300% in the past few years, which would tend to indicate that suddenly there was less than half the oil available as before, but that's obviously not the case.
I know many people with IE6 who actively downloaded IE7 instead of getting it via Windows Update.
I actively downloaded IE7 and then ripped it right back out of my machine because it offered nothing of real value over IE6 (on XP, with a good spyware blocker installed) and was slower and less configurable. And, IE7 is now part of my "Declined" list in WSUS...critical update my ass.
Firefox 2.x wasn't quite up to what I wanted in configurability even with add-ons (close, but not quite), but Firefox 3.0 does the job.
It was a bit more of an effort to get FF3 working in that the IE6 to IE7 wasn't a default browser change, but now all the machines I use regularly (including work, where IE is mandatory) have FF3 as the default browser.
I knew the reference even though I've never even seen the movie.
Yeah, I know that's probably just as bad, but...I was sick the day we were going to go see it...yeah, that's it.
Their "90% utilization is congested" figure is for an OC-48, so that would still leave 240Mbps free on that line. I don't know if this is enough to cause "congestion", but I can't see how it would make a 50-byte DNS request/reponse take a minute to get through.