I've come across a similar-ish problem to this, but with a twist...
Techweb.com has the story, but here's the outline...
I was testing new versions of anti-virus software for a major pharmaceuticals company. This is the kind of place where you have to keep *every* version of *every* document for many, many years - and you cannot afford mistakes. If the FDA or the European equivalent asks for a document, you'd better be able to produce it, and it had better be correct.
Anyway, I was also resposible for pricing up new desktop boxes, 99% of which were Dell. However, when I downloaded the current price list from Dell.co.uk, my PC flagged it as being infected with a macro virus, Tristate.
Strange, thought I - and I tried to download it on another PC which I knew to be clean but which had the previous week's AV software. It was quite happy it was clean, but again when I copied it to my up-to-date box, it complained it was infected.
This virus disabled MS Office 97 macro virus protection on PCs it was opened on, and also spread itself to any opened Office document - Powerpoint, Word and Excel. This meant it could spread very quickly through a company, leaving PCs wide open to all other macro virii - there were some nasty ones around at that time which changed words numbers and so on at random - very bad news. I indeed caught it on a couple of other PCs - encouraging my bosses to roll out the newest AV updates with a little less testing than normal. Problem averted.
But then I though of the thousands of people who could be downloading it unwittingly - do I did the decent thing and called Dell. And got absolutely nowhere. Jack Daniels is certainly affecting my typing now, but I am reasonably capable of getting messages through to people, and I could *not* get anyone on the Dell phone system to a) accept there was a problem, and b) pass me on to someone with the nous and/or authority to react to the information.
There was one guy who sneeringly agreed to try and virus-check the document, and he happily told me it was clean. I asked him if his AV was up-to-date, and got a snotty "Of course it is, we're Dell" in reply. Two whole days later I managed to persuade someone it was real, and soon after that it was removed from the site. And what was there? "Please update your anti-virus software, we may have given you a virus"? No. "This service is temporarily unavailable" was there for a few weeks, and then Dell launched their new XML-based site which amazingly enough didn't have a downloadable price list in any format.
Recently I have been doing business with Dell again, and sadly their internal communications are are very poor - the outsider has very little chance of speaking to someone of useful authority. I found that talking about buying a 250,000 pound SAN from them opened a few doors, however.
Very true. I took over 3 days to persuade someone at Dell that their Excel-file price list was infected with a new virus (om/tristate, IIRC).
I only found it because I had the newest AV updates available, and this found something in the file, even though it didn't know what it was. NAI confirmed it was a new one called Tristate, and that it was nasty (it later gained a payload that changed data in files in a non-reversible way).
Dell had this file as the price list for the dell.co.uk for a full week. God knows how many people downloaded it. When they *did* remove it, they put a message saying there had been a 'technical problem' - not quite the 'Sorry, you may have downloaded an infected file, here's how to remove it' message I would have liked to have seen.
Of course, when the press found out (I told them, pissed of at Dell's lack of movement and/or remorse, their statement said 'it was down within 30 minutes of the right poeple finding out' - the fact someone had tried for 3 days at his own expense to let them know was not mentioned...
An ATA133 controller isn't what is needed, an IDE controller that can use the 48-bit addressing mode is. Maxtor call it big drive.
My Intel 850 chipset-based motherboard (abit TH7-II) got a BIOS upgrade in March which enabled the big drives to work natively with the on-board ATA100 IDE controller. I've been running one of the Maxtor 160GB drives at full capacity (153GB formatted) for two months.
You say: "Quick, think: Where is that user's address book stored right now? Is it in "Documents and settings", under "Local Data" or "Applications"? Is it in the Windows directory under profiles? Is it in some folder named after some GUID?"
I say: "You apparently don't think like an admin".
The address book is in their contacts folder in the Exchange server, where it's supposed to be. You think storing user's email data in their individual home directories is a good idea? Get it all together in a decently-managed database, my friend. If you need help migrating from Outlook to Groupwise, try these tools and that link took me just 10 seconds to Google... not that there's anyone in the sane world moving from Outlook/Exchange to Groupwise.
As the gentleman said, comparing Linux-2002 to Win9x isn't a valid comparison. Try a Linux distro from mid-1995 and tell me it's intuitive, compatible and stable. I'll be happy to use Win98 instead.
For the record I use Linux/and/ Windows XP. I find WinXP better for most things (3D gaming, browsing and email especially), and Linux better for others (converting DVDs to AVIs, Apache). I find them both very stable. There's just more solid software available for most of what I want to do in Windows, and WinXP deals with my hardware much more smoothly - or amybe the word is intuitively.
Linux can't deal properly with my printer, sound card and scanner. In Windows, they all just work. soon as I plugged it in. In Linux, my sound card proved fiddly to get going (and still is flaky) - in Windows, it just worked. Even installing the nVidia drivers is far simpler and quicker in Windows than Linux. Windows can talk to my mobile phone (and the two I had previous to that) and my PDA (and my previous PDA) in a consistent, robust, useful and intuitive manner. Linux can't. At least if it can, it's so obscurely arcane as to be not worthwhile.
I find Windows Update once a week much more convenient (and intuitive) than recompiling things frequently.
In Windows I have the GUI. I can change the way it looks and feels to a reasonable degree, but I know that all windows programs (including back to 16-bit stuff) will work. In Linux, I have KDE installed, but some apps need Gnome... wtf? Oh well, back to the oh-so-intuitive makefiles, source.tars and suchlike.
I'm looking forward to Linux apps which are half as useful as Word, Outlook, AutoRoute and so on. But they're not there yet, and not even close. Hell, Galeon would be a great browser, but the default fonts look awful and the lack of easy Flash installation is rubbish.
Common sense is invaluable for many things, but protecting from virii isn't one of them.
Only downloading from trustworthy sites is a sensible idea, however I discovered the Tristate office virus in an excel-based price list from a little-known untrustworthy company by the name of Dell.
I do try and use my common sense in my browsing and email activities, and I do back up my data (perhaps not quite as often as I should) but I do still rest easy thanks to my AV software, which stops around a dozen virii a week right now.
Having owned several PDAs over the years, and thought about how they can be improved, I thought I'd stick my oar in here.
The last two I have owned are a Psion 5mx (great keyboard, poor screen, great PIM functions, poor PC integration) and an HP Jornada 545 (no keyboard but good enough handwriting recognition, great screen, good PIM functions and good PC integration).
I could wish for a local copy of Google, IMDB &c, DVD rip-and-play directly into my eye, and so on - but what I want is realistically doable now, it's just no-one's managed to put everything together in one package...
My wish list below is/almost/ satisfied by the existing newly-released Pocket PC 2002 machines. But not quite. I think I could do what I want with an Ipaq, but it would need a couple of sleeves and cards, making the cost really silly and the size unacceptably large.
OK, here's the hardware list;
- Integrated bluetooth to talk to my phone. Use this for synchronising my contacts with my phone and web access (GPRS always-on or HSCSD dialup). My phone's ready for this, why not the 3x more expensive PDAs?
- Integrated 802.11a. Use this for synchronising with home PC for backing up, home PC for synchronising appointments and contacts, and ditto when at work (with Exchange). Be able to map drives, use proxies for the web, and print.
- Integrated USB (2.0 ideally) socket - for putting music/movies/documents/etc to and from the PDA when and where wifi isn't available. This would also be capable of charging up the PDA, and grabbing pictures from my camera.
- Scroll buttons on the side, with a select click as well. This is essential for reading ebooks and other large documents, and is done wonderfully on the Jornada.
- Better screen - less power-hungry, brighter, sharper, and higher contrast - 480x640 would certainly be sufficient, especially with ClearType-style technologies.
- Enough CPU and RAM for all the jobs (400 MHz X-Scale and 64 MB RAM almost certainly fine).
- CF Type II slot for a 1 GB Microdrive. This would give me the albums I'm listening to right now, a collection of reference and fiction ebooks, some offline websites, and any other bits and bats I might need. Given the USB and wifi links, a few handy PC utilities might be good too - WinZIP, Acrobat Reader, a handful of network tools, a basic browser, etc.
- A PC-card slot for a PC-Card hard drive, if this can be done for the same physical size and battery life as the Microdrive. 10 GB of stuff would be very useful to have around, even though 1 GB is Good Enough(tm).
- NO SLEEVES! Good idea, in principle. Doesn't work, in reality. Makes it too big, too flimsy, and too fiddly.
- A hard cover for the screen. The Jornada got this right with a metal integrated cover. Saved my screen many times, and is easily removable for extended use.
- Speaker, maybe built into the LCD - as someone else said, the tech is there. Backed up by a good quality line out for headphones or those inflatable speakers...
- Physically the same size and weight as current Ipaqs, Jornadas and so on (without the sleeve). It must live comfortably in my jeans pocket.
- Battery life; a working day of a couple of hours playing music and a couple of hours using it with the screen on high. The more the better, as long as charging is quick. A car cigarette lighter socket charger would *really* help here.
GPS would be nice, but the USB port would let me use the one I already have...
The software side is pretty simple;
- As good a PIM as the Psions had 4-5 years ago would be great - critically a clever calendar, good contact management and a quick-to-use todo list. Outlook on the PC is almost there - that would be good enough.
- Smart, automagic synchronisation. Once I've got in the house and/or office and sat down, I want it to have happened.
- Separate text editor and word processor. Sometimes I want one, sometimes another. And a basic spreadsheet.
- MP3 player, image slideshow, movie player.
- Voice memo taking is handy, as well as a simple quick way of scribbling a note at a moment's notice.
- Compatible and stable enough a platform that there is a decent library of other software - too many apps run on Ipaq but not the Hitachi-based Jornada, for instance.
- Acrobat e-book reader or something that does the same.
There, simple!
I'd pay happily for a machine such as this - say 500 UKP (750 USD) for the unit with everything in it except the microdrive/PC card HDD. And please, whoever does make it, make it tough. Please. I drop things. Rubber-edged titanium would make it very appealing...
You can buy Nescafe coffee self-heating cans here in England, and they've been out at least a year - rubbish though. The choices are white coffee with sugar, or white coffee without sugar.
If they released black coffee without, I'd have a crate in the back of my car at all times (with the disposable barbecue, inflatable bed, and other essentials).
Cool - spelling and grammar like that in a quality debate...
Anyway, I can't subscribe to the 'Linux has... instant (and _real_ - not stolen) innovation' arguments for several reasons, for example since my last few Linux installs made fvwm95 the default X wm - all the derision aimed at the MS interface and the MS way of doing things and what does the Linux community do? Copy the innovation that MS paid millions to research. I know there have been some good steps forward in that direction recently, but please stop trying to imply we have nothing good to learn from Microsoft.
I use Linux, but not on my main machine. There's just too much I still can't do with it. The MS products are far from perfect, but seven years in I still can't get Linux doing the things that NT helps me do in my job.
Linux has been fun, but a lot of the Linux people I know are sick of the creeping commercialism and the constant whining and sniping that infest the Linux world today. They (and I) enjoyed the early years of tinkering, learning and developing, but it's not fun any more - people are taking it way too seriously. What a shame.
Slashdot Mirror
None? Thought so.
I've come across a similar-ish problem to this, but with a twist...
Techweb.com has the story, but here's the outline...
I was testing new versions of anti-virus software for a major pharmaceuticals company. This is the kind of place where you have to keep *every* version of *every* document for many, many years - and you cannot afford mistakes. If the FDA or the European equivalent asks for a document, you'd better be able to produce it, and it had better be correct.
Anyway, I was also resposible for pricing up new desktop boxes, 99% of which were Dell. However, when I downloaded the current price list from Dell.co.uk, my PC flagged it as being infected with a macro virus, Tristate.
Strange, thought I - and I tried to download it on another PC which I knew to be clean but which had the previous week's AV software. It was quite happy it was clean, but again when I copied it to my up-to-date box, it complained it was infected.
This virus disabled MS Office 97 macro virus protection on PCs it was opened on, and also spread itself to any opened Office document - Powerpoint, Word and Excel. This meant it could spread very quickly through a company, leaving PCs wide open to all other macro virii - there were some nasty ones around at that time which changed words numbers and so on at random - very bad news. I indeed caught it on a couple of other PCs - encouraging my bosses to roll out the newest AV updates with a little less testing than normal. Problem averted.
But then I though of the thousands of people who could be downloading it unwittingly - do I did the decent thing and called Dell. And got absolutely nowhere. Jack Daniels is certainly affecting my typing now, but I am reasonably capable of getting messages through to people, and I could *not* get anyone on the Dell phone system to a) accept there was a problem, and b) pass me on to someone with the nous and/or authority to react to the information.
There was one guy who sneeringly agreed to try and virus-check the document, and he happily told me it was clean. I asked him if his AV was up-to-date, and got a snotty "Of course it is, we're Dell" in reply. Two whole days later I managed to persuade someone it was real, and soon after that it was removed from the site. And what was there? "Please update your anti-virus software, we may have given you a virus"? No. "This service is temporarily unavailable" was there for a few weeks, and then Dell launched their new XML-based site which amazingly enough didn't have a downloadable price list in any format.
Recently I have been doing business with Dell again, and sadly their internal communications are are very poor - the outsider has very little chance of speaking to someone of useful authority. I found that talking about buying a 250,000 pound SAN from them opened a few doors, however.
Mr. Tambourine Man. Why? http://frogstar.com/trek/index.asp
Very true. I took over 3 days to persuade someone at Dell that their Excel-file price list was infected with a new virus (om/tristate, IIRC).
I only found it because I had the newest AV updates available, and this found something in the file, even though it didn't know what it was. NAI confirmed it was a new one called Tristate, and that it was nasty (it later gained a payload that changed data in files in a non-reversible way).
Dell had this file as the price list for the dell.co.uk for a full week. God knows how many people downloaded it. When they *did* remove it, they put a message saying there had been a 'technical problem' - not quite the 'Sorry, you may have downloaded an infected file, here's how to remove it' message I would have liked to have seen.
Of course, when the press found out (I told them, pissed of at Dell's lack of movement and/or remorse, their statement said 'it was down within 30 minutes of the right poeple finding out' - the fact someone had tried for 3 days at his own expense to let them know was not mentioned...
Or doesn't that fit with your "MS=bad" politics?
An ATA133 controller isn't what is needed, an IDE controller that can use the 48-bit addressing mode is. Maxtor call it big drive.
My Intel 850 chipset-based motherboard (abit TH7-II) got a BIOS upgrade in March which enabled the big drives to work natively with the on-board ATA100 IDE controller. I've been running one of the Maxtor 160GB drives at full capacity (153GB formatted) for two months.
Details here
ATA133 is totally unnecessary as these are not fast drives, ATA100 is plenty fast enough.
However it only extends IDE to 144 PB - when will they learn?
This makes the 20-odd that my XP installation has needed over the past 9 months look very good indeed...
You say:
/and/ Windows XP. I find WinXP better for most things (3D gaming, browsing and email especially), and Linux better for others (converting DVDs to AVIs, Apache). I find them both very stable. There's just more solid software available for most of what I want to do in Windows, and WinXP deals with my hardware much more smoothly - or amybe the word is intuitively.
.tars and suchlike.
"Quick, think: Where is that user's address book stored right now? Is it in "Documents and settings", under "Local Data" or "Applications"? Is it in the Windows directory under profiles? Is it in some folder named after some GUID?"
I say:
"You apparently don't think like an admin".
The address book is in their contacts folder in the Exchange server, where it's supposed to be. You think storing user's email data in their individual home directories is a good idea? Get it all together in a decently-managed database, my friend. If you need help migrating from Outlook to Groupwise, try these tools and that link took me just 10 seconds to Google... not that there's anyone in the sane world moving from Outlook/Exchange to Groupwise.
As the gentleman said, comparing Linux-2002 to Win9x isn't a valid comparison. Try a Linux distro from mid-1995 and tell me it's intuitive, compatible and stable. I'll be happy to use Win98 instead.
For the record I use Linux
Linux can't deal properly with my printer, sound card and scanner. In Windows, they all just work. soon as I plugged it in. In Linux, my sound card proved fiddly to get going (and still is flaky) - in Windows, it just worked. Even installing the nVidia drivers is far simpler and quicker in Windows than Linux. Windows can talk to my mobile phone (and the two I had previous to that) and my PDA (and my previous PDA) in a consistent, robust, useful and intuitive manner. Linux can't. At least if it can, it's so obscurely arcane as to be not worthwhile.
I find Windows Update once a week much more convenient (and intuitive) than recompiling things frequently.
In Windows I have the GUI. I can change the way it looks and feels to a reasonable degree, but I know that all windows programs (including back to 16-bit stuff) will work. In Linux, I have KDE installed, but some apps need Gnome... wtf? Oh well, back to the oh-so-intuitive makefiles, source
I'm looking forward to Linux apps which are half as useful as Word, Outlook, AutoRoute and so on. But they're not there yet, and not even close. Hell, Galeon would be a great browser, but the default fonts look awful and the lack of easy Flash installation is rubbish.
How dare those britishers! They still think that us Yankees are a colony of theirs.
Now tell me, ye fine young lad, just who is my Parlimentary Representative for California?
Same place as all the congressmen and senators I keep being exhorted to write to for my area of England... if you find them, let me know.
Common sense is invaluable for many things, but protecting from virii isn't one of them.
Only downloading from trustworthy sites is a sensible idea, however I discovered the Tristate office virus in an excel-based price list from a little-known untrustworthy company by the name of Dell.
I do try and use my common sense in my browsing and email activities, and I do back up my data (perhaps not quite as often as I should) but I do still rest easy thanks to my AV software, which stops around a dozen virii a week right now.
Having owned several PDAs over the years, and thought about how they can be improved, I thought I'd stick my oar in here.
/almost/ satisfied by the existing newly-released Pocket PC 2002 machines. But not quite. I think I could do what I want with an Ipaq, but it would need a couple of sleeves and cards, making the cost really silly and the size unacceptably large.
The last two I have owned are a Psion 5mx (great keyboard, poor screen, great PIM functions, poor PC integration) and an HP Jornada 545 (no keyboard but good enough handwriting recognition, great screen, good PIM functions and good PC integration).
I could wish for a local copy of Google, IMDB &c, DVD rip-and-play directly into my eye, and so on - but what I want is realistically doable now, it's just no-one's managed to put everything together in one package...
My wish list below is
OK, here's the hardware list;
- Integrated bluetooth to talk to my phone. Use this for synchronising my contacts with my phone and web access (GPRS always-on or HSCSD dialup). My phone's ready for this, why not the 3x more expensive PDAs?
- Integrated 802.11a. Use this for synchronising with home PC for backing up, home PC for synchronising appointments and contacts, and ditto when at work (with Exchange). Be able to map drives, use proxies for the web, and print.
- Integrated USB (2.0 ideally) socket - for putting music/movies/documents/etc to and from the PDA when and where wifi isn't available. This would also be capable of charging up the PDA, and grabbing pictures from my camera.
- Scroll buttons on the side, with a select click as well. This is essential for reading ebooks and other large documents, and is done wonderfully on the Jornada.
- Better screen - less power-hungry, brighter, sharper, and higher contrast - 480x640 would certainly be sufficient, especially with ClearType-style technologies.
- Enough CPU and RAM for all the jobs (400 MHz X-Scale and 64 MB RAM almost certainly fine).
- CF Type II slot for a 1 GB Microdrive. This would give me the albums I'm listening to right now, a collection of reference and fiction ebooks, some offline websites, and any other bits and bats I might need. Given the USB and wifi links, a few handy PC utilities might be good too - WinZIP, Acrobat Reader, a handful of network tools, a basic browser, etc.
- A PC-card slot for a PC-Card hard drive, if this can be done for the same physical size and battery life as the Microdrive. 10 GB of stuff would be very useful to have around, even though 1 GB is Good Enough(tm).
- NO SLEEVES! Good idea, in principle. Doesn't work, in reality. Makes it too big, too flimsy, and too fiddly.
- A hard cover for the screen. The Jornada got this right with a metal integrated cover. Saved my screen many times, and is easily removable for extended use.
- Speaker, maybe built into the LCD - as someone else said, the tech is there. Backed up by a good quality line out for headphones or those inflatable speakers...
- Physically the same size and weight as current Ipaqs, Jornadas and so on (without the sleeve). It must live comfortably in my jeans pocket.
- Battery life; a working day of a couple of hours playing music and a couple of hours using it with the screen on high. The more the better, as long as charging is quick. A car cigarette lighter socket charger would *really* help here.
GPS would be nice, but the USB port would let me use the one I already have...
The software side is pretty simple;
- As good a PIM as the Psions had 4-5 years ago would be great - critically a clever calendar, good contact management and a quick-to-use todo list. Outlook on the PC is almost there - that would be good enough.
- Smart, automagic synchronisation. Once I've got in the house and/or office and sat down, I want it to have happened.
- Separate text editor and word processor. Sometimes I want one, sometimes another. And a basic spreadsheet.
- MP3 player, image slideshow, movie player.
- Voice memo taking is handy, as well as a simple quick way of scribbling a note at a moment's notice.
- Compatible and stable enough a platform that there is a decent library of other software - too many apps run on Ipaq but not the Hitachi-based Jornada, for instance.
- Acrobat e-book reader or something that does the same.
There, simple!
I'd pay happily for a machine such as this - say 500 UKP (750 USD) for the unit with everything in it except the microdrive/PC card HDD. And please, whoever does make it, make it tough. Please. I drop things. Rubber-edged titanium would make it very appealing...
Yes, congrats - I've been enjoying KDE 3.0 for a week now, and it's mainly very good (except for a silly sound server problem, mutter grumble).
:-)
But HTML security holes? You'd be forgiven for thinking only IE and MS had those...
And I hope the upgrade from 3.0 to 3.0.1 is as easy as Windows Update updates... I hope, but I don't expect.
At least when Gentoo get round to GCC 3.1 support it'll be worth doing the whole shebang over again.
You can buy Nescafe coffee self-heating cans here in England, and they've been out at least a year - rubbish though. The choices are white coffee with sugar, or white coffee without sugar.
If they released black coffee without, I'd have a crate in the back of my car at all times (with the disposable barbecue, inflatable bed, and other essentials).
Cool - spelling and grammar like that in a quality debate...
... instant (and _real_ - not stolen) innovation' arguments for several reasons, for example since my last few Linux installs made fvwm95 the default X wm - all the derision aimed at the MS interface and the MS way of doing things and what does the Linux community do? Copy the innovation that MS paid millions to research. I know there have been some good steps forward in that direction recently, but please stop trying to imply we have nothing good to learn from Microsoft.
Anyway, I can't subscribe to the 'Linux has
I use Linux, but not on my main machine. There's just too much I still can't do with it. The MS products are far from perfect, but seven years in I still can't get Linux doing the things that NT helps me do in my job.
Linux has been fun, but a lot of the Linux people I know are sick of the creeping commercialism and the constant whining and sniping that infest the Linux world today. They (and I) enjoyed the early years of tinkering, learning and developing, but it's not fun any more - people are taking it way too seriously. What a shame.