There's no consistency in file formats, even MS' own products more often than not bungle when it comes to opening an older version of their file formats. ?? What? please cite examples. The only time I ever saw a newer version have issues opening a old files was when lots (and I mean lots) of custom coding was done in that old file. This was with excel (the spreadsheet program that is way to big for it's own good). I have never seen a newer version of word, or pp screw up. I uninstall access whenever I see it. That dam thing is just wrong.
I see it all the time with normal documents with minimal formatting like paragraphs and bolds and such. But the most common problmes come with documents with simple tables and bulleted lists. Opening files saved in older formats, like Word 6.0 (which used to be pretty universally acceptable) on a newer version of word has been broken Word 97 at the very least. Saving as that format in another version of Word on another platform (like the Mac vs Windows) or using StarOffice, ( or I believe even with the same version on the same platform ) will result in bullets missing or wrong or out of place, differences in whether the gridlines are visible and printed on the tables, etc, etc. This is quite apart from the fact that opening a document with a new version of Word converts that document by default and when you go to save it it saves as the new version by default, thus locking your document into the previous version.
There's also the fact that saving a document in any office program as any other format than the native one results in a file that does not look like what you just saved, which means you'd better double check by opening the new file before you move forward. (To be fair this is an annoyance that the GIMP shares as well).
There is no guarantee that the document you save will look the same from one computer to another even with the same version of Office. Default printer settings used to be a major factor in this, but nowadays things like font availability and other considerations are more likely to affect your document. Even Microsoft was quoted as recommending PDF for documents that must look the same from one system to another. Word just wasn't meant for that (despite the fact it was originally touted as a WYSIWYG editor). And now you can print Word docs to PDF anyhow on the Mac natively and on the PC thanks to open source efforts based on ps2pdf, primopdf being one of many.
Still, I never did see the justification in features like bulleting, tables, and simple paragraph formatting which have been around since the beginning of Word should be so different from one Word format to the next that the style of bullets and other such features cannot remain uniform through filter transformations. It just defies logic unless you realize that most changes to MSOFFICE formatting come from a need for planned obsolescence. After all, consider formats like TeX, html, PostScript, etc, which have been around as long as Word or longer, and have many of the complexities of Word formats, have had changes over the years just like Word, but have not required the removal or appreciable change of past functionality and have remained basically 100% backwards compatible over the years. That is because they were well designed and designed with extensibility in mind, two things clearly missing from Microsoft's plan.
Think about it. If I answer the questions truthfully, then a determined attacker would most likely be able to find out the answer to them through some means or another. If i answer the questions untruthfully then I now have to essentially remember 5 different passwords. Doable for one site, but the difficulty rises quickly if I have more than one site like this.
There are two things I hate most about "security questions" like these. The first is the ubiquity of questions that actually reduce one's security, like your mother's maiden name. That's the kind of info your bank should have, but other places like job sites sometimes ask for it as well. The second thing is that many of the questions kind of suck and are too subjective. Stuff like "what's your favorite colour/movie/book?" and "who was your favorite pet?" Even some others that are less subjective are harder to be sure of, like "who was your first pet?" which you might remember differently from oe time to another.
I really never understood why questions had to be like this. The first encounter I had with security questions was with yahoo. And they got it right right from the start. They let you choose your questions by typing them in. I had some decent ones which were mnemonic riddles that pretty much only meant something to me. Unfortunately they are about the only ones who use this method. Many of the others use the middle ground of letting you choose one or more questions from a prepared list of bad or worse security questions. The worst sites make you use all of a series of very very bad security questions.
These types of thinsg actually do reduce security in many ways. Because they encourage bad answers or using the same answer on multiple sites and expose you unnecessarily to additional security problems if you answer truthfully. It's too bad the people who make such sites don't get a clue on that front.
Wrong. If you have not saved your userid (and thus have to enter it, as you would at a phishing site) then BofA will ask your security questions before allowing you to log in with the SiteKey. If you go to a phishing site, you would not only miss your security questions, but it would then have to get the sitekey picture.
So a phishing site, even with your userid, will have to try to retrieve your security questions and present them, long before it would ever get to the SiteKey.
But that's kind of the point. Someone else mentioned man-in-the-middle and that's exactly how it would work. The phishing site would just pass on your answers to the real BofA site and send back to you exactly what the BofA site was displaying at the time. To you there would be no difference and no way to know you were not on the right site despite sitekey, especially if you are prone to the addressbar exploit (for which I still have seen no announcement of a fix on IE) that makes it possible to fake even what the address bar shows. In any case, the whole time they can be recording the transaction or, as someone already pointed out, use the open session against the user. There is no need to delve into the user's past, spy on them, or any of the outlandish theories proposed in this thread.
It's not as if no one used the tactic of redisplaying the real bank site on their phishing site before, and even to Bank Of America customers. As someone else has already pointed out the real problem is not addressed here; at best this might slow down the crudist phishers if the customers are attentive enough to notice that the sitekey stuff is out of place. However if they are inattentive enough to fall for phishing in the first place they are less likely to be clueful enough to miss the sitekey.
It's good that they are at least doing something here even if more is probably accomplished by playing whack-a-mole with the phishing sites as they are reported or as they are detected through odd traffic coming from them. Every little bit helps, I suppose, but it is folly to say that this is as foolproof a scheme as it is presented to be.
That's not going to change anytime soon. Maybe a better approach to the problem would be for BOFA to make a random phishing attempt on their customers and when fooled, the customer would get the ole'
The system encountered an error, when you entered your FUCKING BANKING PASSWORD INTO A NON BOFA site. Please come back when you're not a complete dolt.
BOFA -- Bastard Operator From America? Maybe someone like that would say that, but unfortunately their hands are tied. As much as we'd like to tell people they are idiots, and as customer-unfriendly as banks tend to be, the last thing they want is to convince people that they should take their money elsewhere. After all, people with more money than brains are the best kind of customers for banks; probably for a lot of other businesses, too. Such people provide the steady cash necessary for a good operation and are less likely to scrutinize the efficiency with which their money is put to use.
"I'm surprised to find a windows consultant claiming that a new version of windows will be successful."
I am not a "windows consultant", whatever that might mean. And even asuming that your ("your" as in people like you) prophecies of doom and gloom about this "kludgy piece of crap" become true, simple and sheer inertia will make sure that Vista is installed eventually everywhere.
A company in the midwest I do some consulting for just did a 1,200 desktop test rollout to one of their divisions. They didn't have any legacy problems and were upgrading to Office 2007 anyway, plus they had fairly new machines.
So you admitted that you are a consultant who installs Windows for a living. What's so dirty about that that two comments down you can't admit it to yourself? Why further down you profess even to be doing well for yourself in this practice:
I really don't the time to explain to you how much money I made last year on the "Windoze monopoly", but that's just as well. You'd probably have a seizure anyway.
So what's the deal? If it weren't for the fact you've at least made a few points in between all the "blastin on fools" you've done in this flamewar I'd be more certain you were trolling. And from the looks of it with quite a bountiful harvest!
"If you don't like it then don't come here to other open source / open standards sites."
Fair and balanced, like your name calling, mmm? ROFL!
Absolutely! Here at slashdot we counter the "closed-source bias" of the "mainstream media" with "fair and balanced" reporting that includes the Free Software point of view! Remember, every copy of Free as in Freedom you download comes with a free copy of _Free_as_in_Freedom_! Read about the war on Open Source waged by the Closed-Source zealots! Coming soon, _Linux_Advocacy_for_Kids_!
Write to submissionsd@slashdot.org, submissions@slashdot.org, nameandtown nameandtown nameandtown if you wish to opine... and no bloviating.. that is the slashdot commentors' job.
A Ghz+ processor, 1G of RAM and a US$30 video card is all you need to comfortably run Vista.
I'm not sure what you mean by "comforatbly." Perhaps with all the bells and whistles stripped down to Windows 2000 era functionality you might be able to run Vista by itself on such a rig, but not much else and if it is anything like previous versions of windows running on such a reduced rig (far less than Microsoft recommends) must surely affect performance. Quite apart from the fact that Microsoft has routinely given far lower system requirements than are really required to actually run the system with applications without constant thrashing from paging, etc, Microsoft recommends a 3d card with 128MB of memory just to hold the textures for the GUI. One shudders to think what you need to actually play a 3d game on such a system. It is true that they are claiming you can run on the reduced rig you describe, but again that is without any of the new interface features running.
Given that they are saying 1GB is required, it is likely that the reports that 2GB is really the requirement to run smoothly are not out of line. Historically Windows memory requirements have included the requirement of a paging file of 2x memory which is constantly thrashing just to run the OS at the amount of memory Microsoft claims to require, which really leads one swiftly to the conclusion that 2-3x the claimed requirement is necessary to prevent excessive paging (which really slows things down) and give at least some breathing room for an application or two. This is especially important when one considers how much memory the MS Office suite will tend to require and the fact there is a new version involved there as well.
I seriously doubt the 40GB HD is realistic here, either since they say at least a hefty 15GB is required for the most stripped down install of Vista itself. The only saving grace here is that you basically can't buy drives that small these days; even laptop drives are getting more respectable in size. BUt you are talking about the upgrade case, and an old XP system with a hoary 40GB drive is likely not to make it through an upgrade.
As cheap as video cards are these days and as cheap as memory is we are still talking a few hundred dollars to upgrade a lot of computers that ran XP pretty comfortably. Much much cheaper than a new Mac, even than a Mac Mini. But it's silly to suggest that moving from a system that runs XP very well to barely running Vista without any of the new interface features is an "upgrade." Why would you deliberately make your computer run slower? If you want to upgrade to the new OS it only makes sense if you have the beef in your system to really run the full monte. None of this "Basic" business. Ultimate or nothing. If you can settle for less, you may as well stick with XP or 2000.
Vista will be Microsoft's best seller ever. You wait and see.
That's a no brainer because it is simple mathematics. 12 years after Microsoft promised and swore to repeal their "tax" to the DOJ (that's right, in the first antitrust case they had), it is still going strong. Every computer sold must come with a Windows license no matter what. Every year more computers are sold than the year before. Therefore Windows will continue to sell in record numbers every year.
If they had to actually compete and there was a real choice and they had to actually sell their product like everyone else there might be a different result. Unfortunately that is a lot of "ifs" and to date no commercial venture has been able to compete with their advantage and no open source venture has been able to beat the technological edge on the desktop. So for now such happenings are relegated to pure slashdot fantasy.
BTW I'm not sure which was cooler. Zakk Wilde on a white carriage pulled by a team of white stallions with a snow machine on the back followed by Getty Lee flying a jet shaped by a bass guitar, or the episode where Meatwad mistakenly worships Ted Nugent as his messiah.
I don't know where you live, but floor plans aren't available at city halls around here. You can find out who owns what house, how much they paid for it, what the taxes are, and basic info (number of rooms, finished basement, etc....used for tax assessment purposes), but no floor plans.
"No it doesn't make sense. At a time when the internet provide dozens of different way to get that specific information, be it in several other on-line aerial-photo mapping softwares, or on various other online source,"
I don't buy that. Sure there is a lot of stuff on the internet but super high res satellite photographs of sensitive government installations ? Give me a break. That wont happen until every tom dick and harry gets his own satellite.
There are multiple sources of satellite and aerial photographs, especially when we are talking about public areas like government buildings. Someone already mentioned digitalglobe as a source google themselves might use (and which others use -- it draws on multiple sources apparently itself), and this site lists several different sources for satellite imagery which is available to the public. So yes, there are a lot of toms dicks and harrys out there with satellites. Welcome to the 21st century.
"And besides, it's just security through obscurity, and we all know very well how much that strategy works well."
Your trying to draw a parallel between two completely different fields with different goals and purposes. A government installation is not "open source software" that everyone gets a chance to get a peek see and everyone by and large is benevolent when looking at the source. When you have a country's defense on the line and a lot of baddies want to maim and kill people, obscurity is one of the best weapons. What next ? Show people on the witness relocation program on national television ?
No, the problems and solutions are not at all as disparate as you claim, by your own admission. Government facilities are indeed places where everyone gets a peek and by and large everyone is benevolent looking at the source. If you are talking about less public areas, like military installations, you would be surprised perhaps how much the public is allowed to see. Some military bases are pretty much completely ope to civilian traffic, and those which aren't often have very close perimeters. Even places like Area 51 regularly attract civilians who are able to record an awful lot of information about location of buildings, security measures, and activity. A telephoto lens and/or a telescope or set of binoculars can reveal an awful lot with little chance that the observer will be observed. And those people mostly are not trying to blow the place up.
The argument about security through obscurity is not about the moral question of keeping secrets. It is an indictment based on the fact that any security plan that cannot withstand scrutiny is weaker than one which can. And in this case the attempt to restrict information from one source when there are many others including local surveillance is, besides being a fool's errand in itself, indicative of a fear that the security measures in place will not measure up to an actual attempt. It is also very much in the same vein as the "fig-leaf" faux security that has marked the "war on terror" in general; it is clearly a justified criticism.
Nifty stuff... of course the hard part is sitting in the region and getting people to give you genetic samples. I forgot to ask her what exactly they collect for samples.
Simple... she swabs the crockery/silverware after eating dinner with them. Bon appetit!:D
What, you thought she captured specimens of some other *ahem* genetic material? Well that was just wishful thinking:D.
But if YouTube shut down that would also be the end of a lot of cool non-copyrighted stuff... there's lots of things I think to find, so I search on YouTube and lo and behold, there it is.
That's a good point. YouTube has done a lot of good, particularly for democratizing the process of content publishing (like for movies, music videos, etc). They even have a special account for amateur filmmakers that allows you to upload much longer clips. There was a story on one of the conventional news channels about how law enforcement is using YouTube to catch criminals, both by uploading clips with a plea for people who recognize the perpetrators to step forward, and by checking out other clips that depict crimes either uploaded by the perpetrators, victims, or bystanders. People have also used YouTube to protest and publish news that the major media refuse to report on and footage of stuff like police brutality.
YouTube is an important part of our society and represents the future of the communication revolution. They are just the beginning of a new era in which more and more power is vested in ordinary folk and more information is readily available rather than being kept in the darkness. This is precisely why small minds with big pocketbooks and vast power are afraid of its potential. It's not all silly videos of puppets singing dirty songs and naked WoW elves dancing. There's a lot of good stuff on YouTube.
Viacom does not object to their content being on YouTube as such. What they don't agree with is that YouTube gets ad revenue from their videos, and Viacom doesn't get a cut. YouTube (Google) has already negotiated deals to pay a portion of ad revenue to other content providers, such as CBS. Viacom, however, feels (probably rightly so) that their content provides far more traffic to YouTube than the other providers that have deals, and so they want a sweeter deal than the others got. Until they have that deal, they will continue to make YouTube take down their content.
It's not so much that Viacom hates their stuff being on the Internet, it's that they don't like other people posting their stuff on the Internet without getting a piece of the pie themselves.
This does make a certain amount of sense. After all Colbert frequently refers to YouTube and has even directed his audience there to look at parts of his show, like the infamous chinese caricature voice bit that was only initially (and accidentally) broadcast to certain markets. He even covers YouTube stuff on his show (as have a number of "real" news shows. And as I have said before YouTube does a better job of hosting Viacom's content than Viacom does. If they were smart they would negotiate a deal with YouTube for some of the revenue and post the shows themselves, or else make their site better and easier to use like YouTube has.
What use are the internets without my daily fix of Stewart and Colbert?
Every Comedy Central show (or at least several, including The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, South Park, et al) has a presence on comedydentral.com that includes the shows as video clips similar to YouTube. The problem is that although the advertisements for their "motherload" section claim you can watch entire seasons of those shows online, the simple fact is that that is not true. In the case of the Daily Show and Colbert the shows are broken up so that you can see the interviews and a few seperate bits that Comedy Central considered especially funny, but not the whole show. In the case of South Park, what episodes are on there are inexplicably missing bits that come in between the breaks they have made in the episodes. They also don't really have the episodes that just came on even though even the website claims that they do.
When I missed "Go God Go part II" which was part 2 of a humourous South Park take on the debates on religion, the causes for war, and teaching evolution in public schools (which still does not happen in way too many districts for a 21st century America), I had to wait for it to come on YouTube because unlike every other South Park episode in existence it was not repeated ad nauseum through the week (they showed some ancient episodes instead) and it was never available on the comedycentral.com website (which would have been missing parts and laden with advertisements anyhow). There is the additional problem that though YouTube seems to have no problem giving you a direct link to any video on their site, there is no way to navigate Motherload other than the obscene and fairly broken flash interface Comedy Central foists upon us.
If Viacom just did what consumers wanted and actually made shows available for viewing in their entirety when you miss them or when you want to refer to them later there would be no need for YouTube for these shows. No one would care about putting stuff up there otherwise. As it is, YouTube is easier to use and provides the content people want. In any event their very complaint is unjustified and proves that YouTube's policy works. They quickly remove any content that breaks copyright as soon as the copyright holder complains. That's what happened here. And, again, just like the music industry, they have created their own problem because they cannot see that this "violation" fills a void in the market that they could exploit themselves if they had a brain in their head instead of a head in their ass.
The former employer had to pay the costs of the proceedings so this threat has lost a lot of it's terror value on this side of the Atlantic. Of course laws may differ in the USA....
Unfortunately they do. Despite all attempts to get a "loser pays" system in place here to stop this kind of abuse, it's never made it. That's why you see so many big companies abusing the legal system on this side of the pond.
Personally I will treat an employer with no more respect I get from him.
With some employers, that isn't much. But then you probably would not be as likely to quit an employer who treated their employees with respect.
But, gut feeling tells me that no they dont have a basis for suing you if you followed all the rules about giving them sufficient notice and all that.
IANAL but Texas is a "right to work" state, which in part is an anti-union measure (the phrase "right to work" refers to one's right to work without haveing to join a compulsory union), but as part of that all employment is "at will." It does mean that an employer can fire you without having a reason but it also means you can quit at any time without a reason. The two weeks notice thing is just a common professional courtesy which usually, for reasons of NDA, etc, is rendered moot by the employer asking you to go ahead and leave anyhow.
If the poster signed a contract or something there might be some reason the employer thinks they can sue, but even then because of at-will employment (which apart from being the law is also usually included in contracts) there's probably not grounds.
Unless there is something the poster is not telling us (like technology that he was planning to transfer or is accused of trying to transfer in violation of an NDA, which is unlikely in the case of hosting companies) it doesn't look like the original company has a leg to stand on. However, unless a judge throws a case out right on its ears, you can sue anyone for anything as long as you're willing to pony up the cash. Judges are supposed to prevent completely frivolous cases from coming into court, but something like this might actually end up being heard just so the judge can decide what merit the arguments have. And as long as appeals are granted, the big hosting company can keep the case going on and on for years, and since they are suing two little fish (the small company and the poor IT guy) they can outlast their ability to pay legal fees as well, and effectively punish them for perfectly legal actions out of pure vindictiveness.
If I were running the small company I would be filing a pile of countersuits against these guys. In addition I think it would make sense for the small company and the IT guy to share lawyers, but it's up to the small company. It would be nice if we knew who the big hosting company was, because I sure as hell don't ever want to work for a com[pany like that, and I don't think anyone else would either.
D:H+1:M:S: Half of the companies in the US have incorporated somewhere else. Liechtenstein and friends are reporting a boom in number of corporations incorporated.
D+1:H:M:S+1: Most of the remaining corporations have left.
This has already happened. Or haven't you been paying attention to all the companies that moved their headquarters to Bermuda, etc to avoid paying taxes?
""A company doesn't have the right to incorporate in the USA if it can't follow US laws, and it doesn't have the right to operate in China if it can't obey Chinese laws."
I'm not disagreeing with your logic, but reframing something we currently take for granted. Should U.S. incorporated companies have to pay minimium wage to overseas employees?
Yes they should and they should have to abide by all the other labour laws we have here as well. There are in fact companies who already do this. For instance when the first Xbox came out there was an article talking about the fact the machines were being manufactured in Mexico. But the workers were being paid $15US per hour in those factories. It was still cheaper to operate there, but it was a much less exploitive practice. I honestly don't think that requiring companies to pay programmers in India at least $5/hour is really too much to ask. Even when the minimum wage finally gets raised it's not that horrible for the kind of companies who are outsourcing labour to other countries and it's not so unfair for the types of jobs these people are doing (well, actually, it's low, but it's a low bar anyhow. They deserve to be paid at least that much).
And as for environmental laws why the hell not? First off it is bad business to deliberately pollute the environment no matter what country you are in, and eventually any country has a potential to increase environmental protection even if it is simply in response to treaties that may or may not be pushed on them by the US and the EU. It costs a lot more to change from doing things the wrong way to doing things the right way than it does to do things the right way from the start. Being good from an environmental standpoint is a good marketing ploy that even large multinational oil companies know to exploit. It makes people happier here in the Us but it also makes people happier in the country in which you are doing business. It does boggle the mind that businesses would deliberately create unsafe factories and spew pollution; I mean it's just sloppy and can't be a good sign for the efficiency of your operation. Especially when some environmental practices actually result in lower costs or cost the same. I really think for the most part the biggest cost to a company trying to comply with environmental laws comes from having to stop everything and convert their operation over, which they would not have to do if they built their operation right from the start.
Except that if you tried to do that, all corporations would simply up and reincorporate somewhere with less restrictive rules. And no one would want to invest in those American companies which do remain because good citizens simply can't compete with ruthless bastards. It would work only you had one set of rules for the entire world. It's not like we actually manufacture much here anymore, all those companies only stay because we have some of the most non-restrictive and capital friendly laws in the world, and a history of putting American business interests above, well, pretty much everything.
The simple fix to that is to make any company that wishes to do business in or with the US create a corporation in the US and have offices in the US. Besides which, your scenario already exists and such a law would reign these corporations back in. Too many "US" corporations have "official headquarters" in and/or are incorporated in other countries simply to get away with not paying taxes and not abiding by our laws; meanwhile they are headed by US citizens and employ them. That is blatantly wrong. And before you scream "protectionism" this is actually a requirement in other countries including China.
The US is the largest consumer of products in the world. No one will give up all chance of selling to that market lightly, especially when the requirements are so small. We just haven't had politicians with the balls to exert the power that, say, Brazil has. Considering who we think we are, that is damn pitiful.
By the way, in the UK nowadays, nobody comes out to vote because our politicians are mostly self-serving, corrupt, lying, cheating, incompetant, lazy, useless c*nts.
Sounds like the same reason people vote less on this side of the pond. But your description of politicians is redundant, and unfairly insulting to cunts.
Oh that's right, I forgot. Slashdot. Mentioned both in Genesis as the reason for the ultimate destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and in Revelation as a sign of the apocolypse. Then there's that bit about Adam being banned for flamebaiting, the serpent for trolling (and phishing!) and Eve because she was a woman.
"Yahoo thoughtfully displays a second search box as if to tell you,"
They don't actually say anything, that was just the summary author being facetious.
I think it was the fact that they mentioned sex in the google part of the story. I have to admit I missed the "as if," too, and thought it was a prank done on purpose. Yahoo replacing sex on google, and searching for google on yahoo giving you the "Hey cutie, you have a search engine right in front of you!" line. But that does make less sense now than it did at first.
I think the story is actually portrayed in a confusing way. The real story here is that Yahoo is the #1 search term on Google. That might be because of some shenanigans on the part of Yahoo, just like the fact they won't give you real results for other search engines (which has been covered before).
Hang on, your data speed on the water is too slow to do online activation (understandable), but yet you hit WGA activation issues? The same WGA that only gets triggered by downloading patches and updates etc etc? If your data speed is fast enough for that, it's not "too slow" for online activation.
No, he did not say he has Windows Genuine Advantage issues. He said that he had to reinstall (or restore) Windows after the hard drive died, which requires activation. If you install Windows you have a limited time to get it activated, and every time you lose a drive you have to go through this again. (Not to mention how often you have to reinstall anyhow just to overcome the cruft and barnacles that build up on a typical Windows installation).
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There's no consistency in file formats, even MS' own products more often than not bungle when it comes to opening an older version of their file formats. ?? What? please cite examples. The only time I ever saw a newer version have issues opening a old files was when lots (and I mean lots) of custom coding was done in that old file. This was with excel (the spreadsheet program that is way to big for it's own good). I have never seen a newer version of word, or pp screw up. I uninstall access whenever I see it. That dam thing is just wrong.
I see it all the time with normal documents with minimal formatting like paragraphs and bolds and such. But the most common problmes come with documents with simple tables and bulleted lists. Opening files saved in older formats, like Word 6.0 (which used to be pretty universally acceptable) on a newer version of word has been broken Word 97 at the very least. Saving as that format in another version of Word on another platform (like the Mac vs Windows) or using StarOffice, ( or I believe even with the same version on the same platform ) will result in bullets missing or wrong or out of place, differences in whether the gridlines are visible and printed on the tables, etc, etc. This is quite apart from the fact that opening a document with a new version of Word converts that document by default and when you go to save it it saves as the new version by default, thus locking your document into the previous version.
There's also the fact that saving a document in any office program as any other format than the native one results in a file that does not look like what you just saved, which means you'd better double check by opening the new file before you move forward. (To be fair this is an annoyance that the GIMP shares as well).
There is no guarantee that the document you save will look the same from one computer to another even with the same version of Office. Default printer settings used to be a major factor in this, but nowadays things like font availability and other considerations are more likely to affect your document. Even Microsoft was quoted as recommending PDF for documents that must look the same from one system to another. Word just wasn't meant for that (despite the fact it was originally touted as a WYSIWYG editor). And now you can print Word docs to PDF anyhow on the Mac natively and on the PC thanks to open source efforts based on ps2pdf, primopdf being one of many.
Still, I never did see the justification in features like bulleting, tables, and simple paragraph formatting which have been around since the beginning of Word should be so different from one Word format to the next that the style of bullets and other such features cannot remain uniform through filter transformations. It just defies logic unless you realize that most changes to MSOFFICE formatting come from a need for planned obsolescence. After all, consider formats like TeX, html, PostScript, etc, which have been around as long as Word or longer, and have many of the complexities of Word formats, have had changes over the years just like Word, but have not required the removal or appreciable change of past functionality and have remained basically 100% backwards compatible over the years. That is because they were well designed and designed with extensibility in mind, two things clearly missing from Microsoft's plan.
Think about it. If I answer the questions truthfully, then a determined attacker would most likely be able to find out the answer to them through some means or another. If i answer the questions untruthfully then I now have to essentially remember 5 different passwords. Doable for one site, but the difficulty rises quickly if I have more than one site like this.
There are two things I hate most about "security questions" like these. The first is the ubiquity of questions that actually reduce one's security, like your mother's maiden name. That's the kind of info your bank should have, but other places like job sites sometimes ask for it as well. The second thing is that many of the questions kind of suck and are too subjective. Stuff like "what's your favorite colour/movie/book?" and "who was your favorite pet?" Even some others that are less subjective are harder to be sure of, like "who was your first pet?" which you might remember differently from oe time to another.
I really never understood why questions had to be like this. The first encounter I had with security questions was with yahoo. And they got it right right from the start. They let you choose your questions by typing them in. I had some decent ones which were mnemonic riddles that pretty much only meant something to me. Unfortunately they are about the only ones who use this method. Many of the others use the middle ground of letting you choose one or more questions from a prepared list of bad or worse security questions. The worst sites make you use all of a series of very very bad security questions.
These types of thinsg actually do reduce security in many ways. Because they encourage bad answers or using the same answer on multiple sites and expose you unnecessarily to additional security problems if you answer truthfully. It's too bad the people who make such sites don't get a clue on that front.
Wrong. If you have not saved your userid (and thus have to enter it, as you would at a phishing site) then BofA will ask your security questions before allowing you to log in with the SiteKey. If you go to a phishing site, you would not only miss your security questions, but it would then have to get the sitekey picture.
So a phishing site, even with your userid, will have to try to retrieve your security questions and present them, long before it would ever get to the SiteKey.
But that's kind of the point. Someone else mentioned man-in-the-middle and that's exactly how it would work. The phishing site would just pass on your answers to the real BofA site and send back to you exactly what the BofA site was displaying at the time. To you there would be no difference and no way to know you were not on the right site despite sitekey, especially if you are prone to the addressbar exploit (for which I still have seen no announcement of a fix on IE) that makes it possible to fake even what the address bar shows. In any case, the whole time they can be recording the transaction or, as someone already pointed out, use the open session against the user. There is no need to delve into the user's past, spy on them, or any of the outlandish theories proposed in this thread.
It's not as if no one used the tactic of redisplaying the real bank site on their phishing site before, and even to Bank Of America customers. As someone else has already pointed out the real problem is not addressed here; at best this might slow down the crudist phishers if the customers are attentive enough to notice that the sitekey stuff is out of place. However if they are inattentive enough to fall for phishing in the first place they are less likely to be clueful enough to miss the sitekey.
It's good that they are at least doing something here even if more is probably accomplished by playing whack-a-mole with the phishing sites as they are reported or as they are detected through odd traffic coming from them. Every little bit helps, I suppose, but it is folly to say that this is as foolproof a scheme as it is presented to be.
That's not going to change anytime soon. Maybe a better approach to the problem would be for BOFA to make a random phishing attempt on their customers and when fooled, the customer would get the ole'
The system encountered an error, when you entered your FUCKING BANKING PASSWORD INTO A NON BOFA site. Please come back when you're not a complete dolt.
BOFA -- Bastard Operator From America? Maybe someone like that would say that, but unfortunately their hands are tied. As much as we'd like to tell people they are idiots, and as customer-unfriendly as banks tend to be, the last thing they want is to convince people that they should take their money elsewhere. After all, people with more money than brains are the best kind of customers for banks; probably for a lot of other businesses, too. Such people provide the steady cash necessary for a good operation and are less likely to scrutinize the efficiency with which their money is put to use.
"I'm surprised to find a windows consultant claiming that a new version of windows will be successful."
I am not a "windows consultant", whatever that might mean. And even asuming that your ("your" as in people like you) prophecies of doom and gloom about this "kludgy piece of crap" become true, simple and sheer inertia will make sure that Vista is installed eventually everywhere.
You yourself said in this comment:
A company in the midwest I do some consulting for just did a 1,200 desktop test rollout to one of their divisions. They didn't have any legacy problems and were upgrading to Office 2007 anyway, plus they had fairly new machines.
So you admitted that you are a consultant who installs Windows for a living. What's so dirty about that that two comments down you can't admit it to yourself? Why further down you profess even to be doing well for yourself in this practice:
I really don't the time to explain to you how much money I made last year on the "Windoze monopoly", but that's just as well. You'd probably have a seizure anyway.
So what's the deal? If it weren't for the fact you've at least made a few points in between all the "blastin on fools" you've done in this flamewar I'd be more certain you were trolling. And from the looks of it with quite a bountiful harvest!
"If you don't like it then don't come here to other open source / open standards sites."
Fair and balanced, like your name calling, mmm? ROFL!
Absolutely! Here at slashdot we counter the "closed-source bias" of the "mainstream media" with "fair and balanced" reporting that includes the Free Software point of view! Remember, every copy of Free as in Freedom you download comes with a free copy of _Free_as_in_Freedom_! Read about the war on Open Source waged by the Closed-Source zealots! Coming soon, _Linux_Advocacy_for_Kids_!
Write to submissionsd@slashdot.org, submissions@slashdot.org, nameandtown nameandtown nameandtown if you wish to opine... and no bloviating .. that is the slashdot commentors' job.
A Ghz+ processor, 1G of RAM and a US$30 video card is all you need to comfortably run Vista.
I'm not sure what you mean by "comforatbly." Perhaps with all the bells and whistles stripped down to Windows 2000 era functionality you might be able to run Vista by itself on such a rig, but not much else and if it is anything like previous versions of windows running on such a reduced rig (far less than Microsoft recommends) must surely affect performance. Quite apart from the fact that Microsoft has routinely given far lower system requirements than are really required to actually run the system with applications without constant thrashing from paging, etc, Microsoft recommends a 3d card with 128MB of memory just to hold the textures for the GUI. One shudders to think what you need to actually play a 3d game on such a system. It is true that they are claiming you can run on the reduced rig you describe, but again that is without any of the new interface features running.
Given that they are saying 1GB is required, it is likely that the reports that 2GB is really the requirement to run smoothly are not out of line. Historically Windows memory requirements have included the requirement of a paging file of 2x memory which is constantly thrashing just to run the OS at the amount of memory Microsoft claims to require, which really leads one swiftly to the conclusion that 2-3x the claimed requirement is necessary to prevent excessive paging (which really slows things down) and give at least some breathing room for an application or two. This is especially important when one considers how much memory the MS Office suite will tend to require and the fact there is a new version involved there as well.
I seriously doubt the 40GB HD is realistic here, either since they say at least a hefty 15GB is required for the most stripped down install of Vista itself. The only saving grace here is that you basically can't buy drives that small these days; even laptop drives are getting more respectable in size. BUt you are talking about the upgrade case, and an old XP system with a hoary 40GB drive is likely not to make it through an upgrade.
As cheap as video cards are these days and as cheap as memory is we are still talking a few hundred dollars to upgrade a lot of computers that ran XP pretty comfortably. Much much cheaper than a new Mac, even than a Mac Mini. But it's silly to suggest that moving from a system that runs XP very well to barely running Vista without any of the new interface features is an "upgrade." Why would you deliberately make your computer run slower? If you want to upgrade to the new OS it only makes sense if you have the beef in your system to really run the full monte. None of this "Basic" business. Ultimate or nothing. If you can settle for less, you may as well stick with XP or 2000.
Vista will be Microsoft's best seller ever. You wait and see.
That's a no brainer because it is simple mathematics. 12 years after Microsoft promised and swore to repeal their "tax" to the DOJ (that's right, in the first antitrust case they had), it is still going strong. Every computer sold must come with a Windows license no matter what. Every year more computers are sold than the year before. Therefore Windows will continue to sell in record numbers every year.
If they had to actually compete and there was a real choice and they had to actually sell their product like everyone else there might be a different result. Unfortunately that is a lot of "ifs" and to date no commercial venture has been able to compete with their advantage and no open source venture has been able to beat the technological edge on the desktop. So for now such happenings are relegated to pure slashdot fantasy.
What has that got to do with anything? That song blows anyway. Perhaps I should write a new Happy Birthday.
It is funny to see that stepped around on new TV shows.
"Oh for he's a jolly-good fellow, for he's a jolly-good fellow..."
Actually, Master Shake has already beaten you to it!
BTW I'm not sure which was cooler. Zakk Wilde on a white carriage pulled by a team of white stallions with a snow machine on the back followed by Getty Lee flying a jet shaped by a bass guitar, or the episode where Meatwad mistakenly worships Ted Nugent as his messiah.
I don't know where you live, but floor plans aren't available at city halls around here. You can find out who owns what house, how much they paid for it, what the taxes are, and basic info (number of rooms, finished basement, etc....used for tax assessment purposes), but no floor plans.
Actually they are ; it's just that they are at the bottom of the broken stairs of an unlit basement in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard!"
That got modded insightful ? Get real!
"No it doesn't make sense. At a time when the internet provide dozens of different way to get that specific information, be it in several other on-line aerial-photo mapping softwares, or on various other online source,"
I don't buy that. Sure there is a lot of stuff on the internet but super high res satellite photographs of sensitive government installations ? Give me a break. That wont happen until every tom dick and harry gets his own satellite.
There are multiple sources of satellite and aerial photographs, especially when we are talking about public areas like government buildings. Someone already mentioned digitalglobe as a source google themselves might use (and which others use -- it draws on multiple sources apparently itself), and this site lists several different sources for satellite imagery which is available to the public. So yes, there are a lot of toms dicks and harrys out there with satellites. Welcome to the 21st century.
"And besides, it's just security through obscurity, and we all know very well how much that strategy works well."
Your trying to draw a parallel between two completely different fields with different goals and purposes. A government installation is not "open source software" that everyone gets a chance to get a peek see and everyone by and large is benevolent when looking at the source. When you have a country's defense on the line and a lot of baddies want to maim and kill people, obscurity is one of the best weapons. What next ? Show people on the witness relocation program on national television ?
No, the problems and solutions are not at all as disparate as you claim, by your own admission. Government facilities are indeed places where everyone gets a peek and by and large everyone is benevolent looking at the source. If you are talking about less public areas, like military installations, you would be surprised perhaps how much the public is allowed to see. Some military bases are pretty much completely ope to civilian traffic, and those which aren't often have very close perimeters. Even places like Area 51 regularly attract civilians who are able to record an awful lot of information about location of buildings, security measures, and activity. A telephoto lens and/or a telescope or set of binoculars can reveal an awful lot with little chance that the observer will be observed. And those people mostly are not trying to blow the place up.
The argument about security through obscurity is not about the moral question of keeping secrets. It is an indictment based on the fact that any security plan that cannot withstand scrutiny is weaker than one which can. And in this case the attempt to restrict information from one source when there are many others including local surveillance is, besides being a fool's errand in itself, indicative of a fear that the security measures in place will not measure up to an actual attempt. It is also very much in the same vein as the "fig-leaf" faux security that has marked the "war on terror" in general; it is clearly a justified criticism.
Nifty stuff... of course the hard part is sitting in the region and getting people to give you genetic samples. I forgot to ask her what exactly they collect for samples.
Simple ... she swabs the crockery/silverware after eating dinner with them. Bon appetit! :D
What, you thought she captured specimens of some other *ahem* genetic material? Well that was just wishful thinking :D.
But if YouTube shut down that would also be the end of a lot of cool non-copyrighted stuff... there's lots of things I think to find, so I search on YouTube and lo and behold, there it is.
That's a good point. YouTube has done a lot of good, particularly for democratizing the process of content publishing (like for movies, music videos, etc). They even have a special account for amateur filmmakers that allows you to upload much longer clips. There was a story on one of the conventional news channels about how law enforcement is using YouTube to catch criminals, both by uploading clips with a plea for people who recognize the perpetrators to step forward, and by checking out other clips that depict crimes either uploaded by the perpetrators, victims, or bystanders. People have also used YouTube to protest and publish news that the major media refuse to report on and footage of stuff like police brutality.
YouTube is an important part of our society and represents the future of the communication revolution. They are just the beginning of a new era in which more and more power is vested in ordinary folk and more information is readily available rather than being kept in the darkness. This is precisely why small minds with big pocketbooks and vast power are afraid of its potential. It's not all silly videos of puppets singing dirty songs and naked WoW elves dancing. There's a lot of good stuff on YouTube.
Viacom does not object to their content being on YouTube as such. What they don't agree with is that YouTube gets ad revenue from their videos, and Viacom doesn't get a cut. YouTube (Google) has already negotiated deals to pay a portion of ad revenue to other content providers, such as CBS. Viacom, however, feels (probably rightly so) that their content provides far more traffic to YouTube than the other providers that have deals, and so they want a sweeter deal than the others got. Until they have that deal, they will continue to make YouTube take down their content.
It's not so much that Viacom hates their stuff being on the Internet, it's that they don't like other people posting their stuff on the Internet without getting a piece of the pie themselves.
This does make a certain amount of sense. After all Colbert frequently refers to YouTube and has even directed his audience there to look at parts of his show, like the infamous chinese caricature voice bit that was only initially (and accidentally) broadcast to certain markets. He even covers YouTube stuff on his show (as have a number of "real" news shows. And as I have said before YouTube does a better job of hosting Viacom's content than Viacom does. If they were smart they would negotiate a deal with YouTube for some of the revenue and post the shows themselves, or else make their site better and easier to use like YouTube has.
What use are the internets without my daily fix of Stewart and Colbert?
Every Comedy Central show (or at least several, including The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, South Park, et al) has a presence on comedydentral.com that includes the shows as video clips similar to YouTube. The problem is that although the advertisements for their "motherload" section claim you can watch entire seasons of those shows online, the simple fact is that that is not true. In the case of the Daily Show and Colbert the shows are broken up so that you can see the interviews and a few seperate bits that Comedy Central considered especially funny, but not the whole show. In the case of South Park, what episodes are on there are inexplicably missing bits that come in between the breaks they have made in the episodes. They also don't really have the episodes that just came on even though even the website claims that they do.
When I missed "Go God Go part II" which was part 2 of a humourous South Park take on the debates on religion, the causes for war, and teaching evolution in public schools (which still does not happen in way too many districts for a 21st century America), I had to wait for it to come on YouTube because unlike every other South Park episode in existence it was not repeated ad nauseum through the week (they showed some ancient episodes instead) and it was never available on the comedycentral.com website (which would have been missing parts and laden with advertisements anyhow). There is the additional problem that though YouTube seems to have no problem giving you a direct link to any video on their site, there is no way to navigate Motherload other than the obscene and fairly broken flash interface Comedy Central foists upon us.
If Viacom just did what consumers wanted and actually made shows available for viewing in their entirety when you miss them or when you want to refer to them later there would be no need for YouTube for these shows. No one would care about putting stuff up there otherwise. As it is, YouTube is easier to use and provides the content people want. In any event their very complaint is unjustified and proves that YouTube's policy works. They quickly remove any content that breaks copyright as soon as the copyright holder complains. That's what happened here. And, again, just like the music industry, they have created their own problem because they cannot see that this "violation" fills a void in the market that they could exploit themselves if they had a brain in their head instead of a head in their ass.
And I'm assuming plans for a giant "laser" have already been considered.
Ridiculous. How are the sharks supposed to swim up to the moon just so we can get big frickin lasers up there? On the backs of the mutated sea bass?
The former employer had to pay the costs of the proceedings so this threat has lost a lot of it's terror value on this side of the Atlantic. Of course laws may differ in the USA....
Unfortunately they do. Despite all attempts to get a "loser pays" system in place here to stop this kind of abuse, it's never made it. That's why you see so many big companies abusing the legal system on this side of the pond.
Personally I will treat an employer with no more respect I get from him.
With some employers, that isn't much. But then you probably would not be as likely to quit an employer who treated their employees with respect.
But, gut feeling tells me that no they dont have a basis for suing you if you followed all the rules about giving them sufficient notice and all that.
IANAL but Texas is a "right to work" state, which in part is an anti-union measure (the phrase "right to work" refers to one's right to work without haveing to join a compulsory union), but as part of that all employment is "at will." It does mean that an employer can fire you without having a reason but it also means you can quit at any time without a reason. The two weeks notice thing is just a common professional courtesy which usually, for reasons of NDA, etc, is rendered moot by the employer asking you to go ahead and leave anyhow.
If the poster signed a contract or something there might be some reason the employer thinks they can sue, but even then because of at-will employment (which apart from being the law is also usually included in contracts) there's probably not grounds.
Unless there is something the poster is not telling us (like technology that he was planning to transfer or is accused of trying to transfer in violation of an NDA, which is unlikely in the case of hosting companies) it doesn't look like the original company has a leg to stand on. However, unless a judge throws a case out right on its ears, you can sue anyone for anything as long as you're willing to pony up the cash. Judges are supposed to prevent completely frivolous cases from coming into court, but something like this might actually end up being heard just so the judge can decide what merit the arguments have. And as long as appeals are granted, the big hosting company can keep the case going on and on for years, and since they are suing two little fish (the small company and the poor IT guy) they can outlast their ability to pay legal fees as well, and effectively punish them for perfectly legal actions out of pure vindictiveness.
If I were running the small company I would be filing a pile of countersuits against these guys. In addition I think it would make sense for the small company and the IT guy to share lawyers, but it's up to the small company. It would be nice if we knew who the big hosting company was, because I sure as hell don't ever want to work for a com[pany like that, and I don't think anyone else would either.
D:H+1:M:S: Half of the companies in the US have incorporated somewhere else. Liechtenstein and friends are reporting a boom in number of corporations incorporated.
D+1:H:M:S+1: Most of the remaining corporations have left.
This has already happened. Or haven't you been paying attention to all the companies that moved their headquarters to Bermuda, etc to avoid paying taxes?
""A company doesn't have the right to incorporate in the USA if it can't follow US laws, and it doesn't have the right to operate in China if it can't obey Chinese laws."
I'm not disagreeing with your logic, but reframing something we currently take for granted. Should U.S. incorporated companies have to pay minimium wage to overseas employees?
Yes they should and they should have to abide by all the other labour laws we have here as well. There are in fact companies who already do this. For instance when the first Xbox came out there was an article talking about the fact the machines were being manufactured in Mexico. But the workers were being paid $15US per hour in those factories. It was still cheaper to operate there, but it was a much less exploitive practice. I honestly don't think that requiring companies to pay programmers in India at least $5/hour is really too much to ask. Even when the minimum wage finally gets raised it's not that horrible for the kind of companies who are outsourcing labour to other countries and it's not so unfair for the types of jobs these people are doing (well, actually, it's low, but it's a low bar anyhow. They deserve to be paid at least that much).
And as for environmental laws why the hell not? First off it is bad business to deliberately pollute the environment no matter what country you are in, and eventually any country has a potential to increase environmental protection even if it is simply in response to treaties that may or may not be pushed on them by the US and the EU. It costs a lot more to change from doing things the wrong way to doing things the right way than it does to do things the right way from the start. Being good from an environmental standpoint is a good marketing ploy that even large multinational oil companies know to exploit. It makes people happier here in the Us but it also makes people happier in the country in which you are doing business. It does boggle the mind that businesses would deliberately create unsafe factories and spew pollution; I mean it's just sloppy and can't be a good sign for the efficiency of your operation. Especially when some environmental practices actually result in lower costs or cost the same. I really think for the most part the biggest cost to a company trying to comply with environmental laws comes from having to stop everything and convert their operation over, which they would not have to do if they built their operation right from the start.
Except that if you tried to do that, all corporations would simply up and reincorporate somewhere with less restrictive rules. And no one would want to invest in those American companies which do remain because good citizens simply can't compete with ruthless bastards. It would work only you had one set of rules for the entire world. It's not like we actually manufacture much here anymore, all those companies only stay because we have some of the most non-restrictive and capital friendly laws in the world, and a history of putting American business interests above, well, pretty much everything.
The simple fix to that is to make any company that wishes to do business in or with the US create a corporation in the US and have offices in the US. Besides which, your scenario already exists and such a law would reign these corporations back in. Too many "US" corporations have "official headquarters" in and/or are incorporated in other countries simply to get away with not paying taxes and not abiding by our laws; meanwhile they are headed by US citizens and employ them. That is blatantly wrong. And before you scream "protectionism" this is actually a requirement in other countries including China.
The US is the largest consumer of products in the world. No one will give up all chance of selling to that market lightly, especially when the requirements are so small. We just haven't had politicians with the balls to exert the power that, say, Brazil has. Considering who we think we are, that is damn pitiful.
By the way, in the UK nowadays, nobody comes out to vote because our politicians are mostly self-serving, corrupt, lying, cheating, incompetant, lazy, useless c*nts.
Sounds like the same reason people vote less on this side of the pond. But your description of politicians is redundant, and unfairly insulting to cunts.
At BibleGateway, using KJV:
kjv slashdot
Oh that's right, I forgot. Slashdot. Mentioned both in Genesis as the reason for the ultimate destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and in Revelation as a sign of the apocolypse. Then there's that bit about Adam being banned for flamebaiting, the serpent for trolling (and phishing!) and Eve because she was a woman.
"Yahoo thoughtfully displays a second search box as if to tell you,"
They don't actually say anything, that was just the summary author being facetious.
I think it was the fact that they mentioned sex in the google part of the story. I have to admit I missed the "as if," too, and thought it was a prank done on purpose. Yahoo replacing sex on google, and searching for google on yahoo giving you the "Hey cutie, you have a search engine right in front of you!" line. But that does make less sense now than it did at first.
I think the story is actually portrayed in a confusing way. The real story here is that Yahoo is the #1 search term on Google. That might be because of some shenanigans on the part of Yahoo, just like the fact they won't give you real results for other search engines (which has been covered before).
Hang on, your data speed on the water is too slow to do online activation (understandable), but yet you hit WGA activation issues? The same WGA that only gets triggered by downloading patches and updates etc etc? If your data speed is fast enough for that, it's not "too slow" for online activation.
No, he did not say he has Windows Genuine Advantage issues. He said that he had to reinstall (or restore) Windows after the hard drive died, which requires activation. If you install Windows you have a limited time to get it activated, and every time you lose a drive you have to go through this again. (Not to mention how often you have to reinstall anyhow just to overcome the cruft and barnacles that build up on a typical Windows installation).