I'm not sure you could turn up to the Vatican and ask that Pope Benedict open up the chart of accounts. Nor would he give you the keys to the private libraries so that you could uncover the dirty laundry.
I'm guessing that a company like PWC might get to audit the books though. Much more so than, say, Scientology.
Is there any requirement that a tax-free Charity in the US has to be audited?
"Man shall not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." Jean Meslier
Symantec has a history of turning any good products to crap.
Ghost. Once great, now a dumbed down NTBackup.
Don't know if I'd ever call Norton Anti-Virus "great", but "crap" certainly springs to mind. The number one reason (of many) to use a RIS image on any Thinkpad laptops.
BindView.
I'm really hoping Backup Exec and Netbackup don't go the same way.
Even if there are no other competing products, or they are the ONLY product to do the job, I'll never, ever approve or otherwise recommend a Norton Product.
(I feel better now. Spleen fully vented. Core meltdown averted).
Well, I stand corrected on Flash not having ANY accessibility features. I put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the marketing suits in charge of most web sites. Everyone knows the type. 3 weeks deciding which photo goes on the front page, believes that the back end happens by magic on a budget of 10 dollars.
Still don't like Flash.
Pages that are perfectly usable, without flash (advertising aside): Slashdot (big, but lots of text), Gentoo documentation pages (I have the choice, single chapters or one big page) and Mplayer documentation (same as Gentoo). All these pages are easily saved, or cached on a proxy server. So in the end, I may actually save bandwidth.
I wonder if it's because I consider the web a tool, and not a marketing opportunity. Hmmmmmm. Note to all marketing weenies, I'll much more readily bring out the credit card if you don't treat me like a moron and keep my clicking all day. Amazon makes a lot out of me, and I can see all the info on a single page.
Accessibility options. A page done almost entirely in Flash is almost guaranteed to be inaccessible to someone with a screen reader.
Another pet peeve is cropping a page so that it has only one page of info on it. I can use the scroll bar on the site. Give me (at least the option) of reading the entire article on one freeking page. It can contain ads every 'x' lines of text, I don't want to keep clicking!!!! (Carpel tunnel here I come).
If anyone wants to see just how bad a web page can be, try http://www.afl.com.au/. Australia's most popular web site. The intern was obviously given a list of technologies to include, but bugger the content and usability.
I'm generally more aware of the cops, cop-likes and cop-lites, generally anyone from the guvnmint.
For that I want something to record the spooks when they get in to my apartment. Multiply recorded off site (preferably to bittorrent). I'm happily prepared to record a weeks worth of someone elses if they do the same for me.
Government now is the big danger, not some junkie looking for a hit (unless directly confronted). The government can take your house, reputation, freedom, livelihood, car and possibly your life. The junkie will just grab your TV and DVD player.
(Man does that sound paranoid, but cops are people too. And are not above lying given enough motivation. Honest cops are not the problem)
It might not hold legal water, but I suspect MS don't want to shoot themselves in the foot.
Any moves to sue, based on an open standard would prove how useless the "standard" is. And that there is no point trusting one of MS's standards in the future.
They might like to sue, but they've pretty well painted themselves in to a corner.
Dunno, most people tend to realise that the DVD player, XBox and whatnot connect to the TV. Computers tend not to be that visible.
Maybe if thee was a cable, bright red, and the packaging was a bit more "in your face", then more people would connect their computer.
Anyway, between ripping my own DVDs and as many downloads as my ADSL can handle, I've nearly maxxed a 500GB drive in my chipped XBOX. XBOX media center is just great. Any product with a set top box will just have to beat that.
And that won't be easy. I have control of my chipped XBox and I can be sure that I won't have control of the BB Box.
1 - I never used eBay anyway. Quote: "Found it in the Trading Post" 2 - I'll absolutely, positively never use eBay now. I might have considered it, but not now.
Just alienated around 80% of their potential client base.
(note: 80% is a wild guestimate pulled out of my arse).
Unfortunately, if this is at work, it more than likely a part of "cover your arse" syndrone(sp?). They could look it that up, but rules of the blame game states that the everyone must have someone else to blame in the case of SNAFU.
Answer, and you lose time "context switching" and being annoyed. Answer wrongly and, depending upon the size of the failure, you're screwed. Don't answer and you're probably just as screwed.
The only way to win is not to play.
Don't sign in to IM. Check your email once an hour or so, don't leave your email client running in the background. Get the job done, then check these things when you're about to get, or get back from a coffee.
(Don't know how many more cliches I could fit in there. But it's all, sadly, true).
How does a HAL change make mass deployment easier. HAL, Harware Abstraction Layer. Mass deployment tools are more like TFTP servers and related applications.
Group Policy upgrades were more like Group Policy incompatibilities, more or less designed to ensure the early deployment of Win2008 server in corporate environments (just to support these Group Policy "enhancements").
User switching in Domain environment. Hmmm, why? Two user accounts... should be rare enough or using "Runas". Know someone elses password? Security policy violation around my parts and DCM.
Driver signing has always sucked. Not that they were signed per say, but agreed, MS quality control sucks.
The g/f has a Vista laptop. It works well enough for her. But she doesn't keep installing/uninstalling programs, nor using anything more complex than facebook. As for the test workstation here, well... it does what it wants to do... not what it has been told to do. End of story, no Vista deployment until Sp2 at least.
4 ~ 5 business apps. My arse. 10 is a realistic minimum.
A common scenario:
Outlook, with two or three emails open at any one time.
Acrobat Reader. One, perhaps two docs open.
AS/400 Client Access (Personal Communications) probably two sessions open (two windows).
Word Excel AND Powerpoint open, with documents.
At least two, probably more business Web applications, which means Internet Explorer. Maybe more for the odd "personal-use" web page.
Two custom line of business applications.
Of course, in the background: Anti-virus/Anti-spyware. All the background startup applications from legit applications. Mobile phone sync application (Blackberry or Nokia), etc.
During month close, this is a realistic scenario. And it's not that much different at other times.
XP SP2 handles this fine with a good amount of memory. Which is one or two gig. I doubt I'll see this performance from 2G of memory with Vista.
BTW: Aero is actually a benefit to Vista, most of the desktop drawing tasks and handed off to the graphics card, not consuming CPU time. So for business computers, get the minimum (cheapest?) available video card that supports Vista "X" premium. Which probably means Intel on-board card with dedicated memory.
However, on a recent train journey between Hannover and Basel, I saw plenty of suits watching Movies/TV on the Laptop. Presumably a DVD.
Per carriage? About 10 ~ 15 Dell, HP and Lenovo running full screen video.
I've had the same experience in airport lounges. Suits filling in time watching videos. Occasionally listening to a CD (and seeing Windows Media Player "visualisations").
I'm guessing these 2/3rds are business computers, the rest personal. This is purely based on suit vs jeans. A friend of mine was watching "The OC" for a communications paper on the previously mentioned train journey.
I think that a lot more than 0.01% of people watch DVDs on PCs.
Even I loaded up some Family Guy and Simpsons for business trips to the UK. (Ripped to hard disk, no physical DVD. Now THAT might be 0.01% of users).
Actually, I think that's more "Busy work". Which may (or may not) translate to job security.
At least s/he looks like they're busy.
The trick is to continually make reports on security/installations/network status. Scripting language of choice here or Zabbix or WMI queries et al. ??? Then Shaldot/Facebook/Pr0n/2girls1cup or whatever bakes your cookie.
Actually, MS dropped the ball for corporate on a number of software products in the last calendar year.
Office 2007 corporate deployment was a bitch as well.
Group Policy --- Nope.
Script --- Yes, but a be-atch.
SMS --- See script.
The was the one that gave me the most headaches during the year.
Virtual Server too is a pain. An Active-X for Pete's sake? Luckily you can get VMRCPlus. Yuk.
I refuse to support Vista until I've given an SP1 system 'time to bed'. Probably after the first few patches. And no half arsed management apps. If that means waiting until Server 2008, MS isn't getting our company's monies. (Well they are through various license agreements, but you get my drift).
This is getting complicated. It's all so simple.Just make it like a Cash Machine/ATM.
Go to voting machine.
Enter your vote(s).
Machine prints receipt.
Voter verifies receipt.
Voter places receipt in ballot box.
In case of doubt, you can count the paper ballots. Normal security applies to paper ballots. You can then add the fancy security to check that the ballot actually went in to the ballot box, such as a bar code reader, etc. But that's just icing on the cake.
Just enough intelligence to fetch a few words at a time from a central site, or all the words from a web page the user visited.
Fetch -- try -- refetch. Only a few k of memory, if that.
If it's stealthy enough, keeping a low profile, programmed well enough, it might have a very long time to attempt to brute force other routers.
How many different firmware images does it need access to? Probably not that many. 10 leading brands, 10 ~ 20 main models each? Once the type of the victim is detected and cracked, fetch an infected firmware from either a central site or a broadcasting infected router. Bingo, no local storage necessary.
Damn, this is sounding nasty.
A hardware switch that must be set to 'on' to flash a device suddenly sounds a good idea.
Well at least two European airlines are doing just that.
Rynair is charging per checked piece of luggage.
(Squw)EasyJet will be (is now?) charging for more than once piece of luggage PER group booking. 4 x bookings = 1 piece of checked luggage. 4 separate bookings = 4 pieces of luggage.
Easyjet used to say boarding in order of check-in. No longer. You can pay a small sum to get boarded first.
Of course, charging extra to use a credit card to pay is outrageous. Given that it must be 99% of bookings are done over the internet or via a telephone operator, with credit card charge.
Lets brainstorm a little here: - Charge for priority luggage: Check. - Charge for priority boarding: Check. - Charge for food and drinks: Check. - Charge for use of the toilet: Soon. - Charge for an emergency parachute/lifevest: Would if they could. - Fresh oxygen: We'll see if that one flies. - Charge for checking in early or on time: Check. - Charge for NOT turning up at all: Check. - Charge for charging charge: Check.
Actually, I would have them write out, by hand, the textual content of every spam they sent, once per recipient. Image and PDF spam would have to be nicely drawn using the correct colours. When complete, they can walk free.
Vigelante (spelling?) is just wrong. But i'm not shedding a tear here either. Even spammers have loved ones.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm wondering which company is going to put their latest, greatest, make or break game on an MB with this chip.
And fail.
Either the MB make or the game maker.
It's going to be spectacular.
I'm not sure you could turn up to the Vatican and ask that Pope Benedict open up the chart of accounts. Nor would he give you the keys to the private libraries so that you could uncover the dirty laundry.
I'm guessing that a company like PWC might get to audit the books though. Much more so than, say, Scientology.
Is there any requirement that a tax-free Charity in the US has to be audited?
"Man shall not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." Jean Meslier
Symantec has a history of turning any good products to crap.
Ghost. Once great, now a dumbed down NTBackup.
Don't know if I'd ever call Norton Anti-Virus "great", but "crap" certainly springs to mind. The number one reason (of many) to use a RIS image on any Thinkpad laptops.
BindView.
I'm really hoping Backup Exec and Netbackup don't go the same way.
Even if there are no other competing products, or they are the ONLY product to do the job, I'll never, ever approve or otherwise recommend a Norton Product.
(I feel better now. Spleen fully vented. Core meltdown averted).
Well, I stand corrected on Flash not having ANY accessibility features. I put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the marketing suits in charge of most web sites. Everyone knows the type. 3 weeks deciding which photo goes on the front page, believes that the back end happens by magic on a budget of 10 dollars.
Still don't like Flash.
Pages that are perfectly usable, without flash (advertising aside): Slashdot (big, but lots of text), Gentoo documentation pages (I have the choice, single chapters or one big page) and Mplayer documentation (same as Gentoo). All these pages are easily saved, or cached on a proxy server. So in the end, I may actually save bandwidth.
I wonder if it's because I consider the web a tool, and not a marketing opportunity. Hmmmmmm. Note to all marketing weenies, I'll much more readily bring out the credit card if you don't treat me like a moron and keep my clicking all day. Amazon makes a lot out of me, and I can see all the info on a single page.
Agreed with the lite option.
I'd even go a step further.
Accessibility options. A page done almost entirely in Flash is almost guaranteed to be inaccessible to someone with a screen reader.
Another pet peeve is cropping a page so that it has only one page of info on it. I can use the scroll bar on the site. Give me (at least the option) of reading the entire article on one freeking page. It can contain ads every 'x' lines of text, I don't want to keep clicking!!!! (Carpel tunnel here I come).
If anyone wants to see just how bad a web page can be, try http://www.afl.com.au/. Australia's most popular web site. The intern was obviously given a list of technologies to include, but bugger the content and usability.
Give a rats.
Insurance is cheap. Let the kid have the TV.
I'm generally more aware of the cops, cop-likes and cop-lites, generally anyone from the guvnmint.
For that I want something to record the spooks when they get in to my apartment. Multiply recorded off site (preferably to bittorrent). I'm happily prepared to record a weeks worth of someone elses if they do the same for me.
Government now is the big danger, not some junkie looking for a hit (unless directly confronted). The government can take your house, reputation, freedom, livelihood, car and possibly your life. The junkie will just grab your TV and DVD player.
(Man does that sound paranoid, but cops are people too. And are not above lying given enough motivation. Honest cops are not the problem)
I suggest staring with the Dandenong-Cranbourne area. But leave the rest of Melbourne alone.
It might not hold legal water, but I suspect MS don't want to shoot themselves in the foot.
Any moves to sue, based on an open standard would prove how useless the "standard" is. And that there is no point trusting one of MS's standards in the future.
They might like to sue, but they've pretty well painted themselves in to a corner.
Dunno, most people tend to realise that the DVD player, XBox and whatnot connect to the TV. Computers tend not to be that visible.
Maybe if thee was a cable, bright red, and the packaging was a bit more "in your face", then more people would connect their computer.
Anyway, between ripping my own DVDs and as many downloads as my ADSL can handle, I've nearly maxxed a 500GB drive in my chipped XBOX. XBOX media center is just great. Any product with a set top box will just have to beat that.
And that won't be easy. I have control of my chipped XBox and I can be sure that I won't have control of the BB Box.
1 - I never used eBay anyway.
Quote: "Found it in the Trading Post"
2 - I'll absolutely, positively never use eBay now. I might have considered it, but not now.
Just alienated around 80% of their potential client base.
(note: 80% is a wild guestimate pulled out of my arse).
Unfortunately, if this is at work, it more than likely a part of "cover your arse" syndrone(sp?). They could look it that up, but rules of the blame game states that the everyone must have someone else to blame in the case of SNAFU.
Answer, and you lose time "context switching" and being annoyed. Answer wrongly and, depending upon the size of the failure, you're screwed. Don't answer and you're probably just as screwed.
The only way to win is not to play.
Don't sign in to IM. Check your email once an hour or so, don't leave your email client running in the background. Get the job done, then check these things when you're about to get, or get back from a coffee.
(Don't know how many more cliches I could fit in there. But it's all, sadly, true).
I call bullshot.
... should be rare enough or using "Runas". Know someone elses password? Security policy violation around my parts and DCM.
... it does what it wants to do ... not what it has been told to do. End of story, no Vista deployment until Sp2 at least.
Well, true to an extent.
How does a HAL change make mass deployment easier. HAL, Harware Abstraction Layer. Mass deployment tools are more like TFTP servers and related applications.
Group Policy upgrades were more like Group Policy incompatibilities, more or less designed to ensure the early deployment of Win2008 server in corporate environments (just to support these Group Policy "enhancements").
User switching in Domain environment. Hmmm, why? Two user accounts
Driver signing has always sucked. Not that they were signed per say, but agreed, MS quality control sucks.
The g/f has a Vista laptop. It works well enough for her. But she doesn't keep installing/uninstalling programs, nor using anything more complex than facebook. As for the test workstation here, well
With 4+ Gig of ram, the first this I'll do is make a 1G ram disk.
Then I'll put my swap file on it.
Thats the best speed boost my swap file/partition ever got.
4 ~ 5 business apps. My arse. 10 is a realistic minimum.
A common scenario:
Outlook, with two or three emails open at any one time.
Acrobat Reader. One, perhaps two docs open.
AS/400 Client Access (Personal Communications) probably two sessions open (two windows).
Word Excel AND Powerpoint open, with documents.
At least two, probably more business Web applications, which means Internet Explorer. Maybe more for the odd "personal-use" web page.
Two custom line of business applications.
Of course, in the background: Anti-virus/Anti-spyware. All the background startup applications from legit applications. Mobile phone sync application (Blackberry or Nokia), etc.
During month close, this is a realistic scenario. And it's not that much different at other times.
XP SP2 handles this fine with a good amount of memory. Which is one or two gig. I doubt I'll see this performance from 2G of memory with Vista.
BTW: Aero is actually a benefit to Vista, most of the desktop drawing tasks and handed off to the graphics card, not consuming CPU time. So for business computers, get the minimum (cheapest?) available video card that supports Vista "X" premium. Which probably means Intel on-board card with dedicated memory.
Don't know about blue-ray.
However, on a recent train journey between Hannover and Basel, I saw plenty of suits watching Movies/TV on the Laptop. Presumably a DVD.
Per carriage? About 10 ~ 15 Dell, HP and Lenovo running full screen video.
I've had the same experience in airport lounges. Suits filling in time watching videos. Occasionally listening to a CD (and seeing Windows Media Player "visualisations").
I'm guessing these 2/3rds are business computers, the rest personal. This is purely based on suit vs jeans. A friend of mine was watching "The OC" for a communications paper on the previously mentioned train journey.
I think that a lot more than 0.01% of people watch DVDs on PCs.
Even I loaded up some Family Guy and Simpsons for business trips to the UK. (Ripped to hard disk, no physical DVD. Now THAT might be 0.01% of users).
This is an entirely sensible and well thought out solution.
Sadly, this means it has around zero percent chance of ever being implemented.
I vote with the others. You now have a license for the movie. Download immediately.
Actually, I think that's more "Busy work". Which may (or may not) translate to job security.
At least s/he looks like they're busy.
The trick is to continually make reports on security/installations/network status. Scripting language of choice here or Zabbix or WMI queries et al. ??? Then Shaldot/Facebook/Pr0n/2girls1cup or whatever bakes your cookie.
Actually, MS dropped the ball for corporate on a number of software products in the last calendar year.
Office 2007 corporate deployment was a bitch as well.
Group Policy --- Nope.
Script --- Yes, but a be-atch.
SMS --- See script.
The was the one that gave me the most headaches during the year.
Virtual Server too is a pain. An Active-X for Pete's sake? Luckily you can get VMRCPlus. Yuk.
I refuse to support Vista until I've given an SP1 system 'time to bed'. Probably after the first few patches. And no half arsed management apps. If that means waiting until Server 2008, MS isn't getting our company's monies. (Well they are through various license agreements, but you get my drift).
"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
That sums it up nicely.
Wow.
This is getting complicated. It's all so simple.Just make it like a Cash Machine/ATM.
Go to voting machine.
Enter your vote(s).
Machine prints receipt.
Voter verifies receipt.
Voter places receipt in ballot box.
In case of doubt, you can count the paper ballots. Normal security applies to paper ballots. You can then add the fancy security to check that the ballot actually went in to the ballot box, such as a bar code reader, etc. But that's just icing on the cake.
Complexity is the enemy of security.
Doesn't need a lot of storage.
Just enough intelligence to fetch a few words at a time from a central site, or all the words from a web page the user visited.
Fetch -- try -- refetch. Only a few k of memory, if that.
If it's stealthy enough, keeping a low profile, programmed well enough, it might have a very long time to attempt to brute force other routers.
How many different firmware images does it need access to? Probably not that many. 10 leading brands, 10 ~ 20 main models each? Once the type of the victim is detected and cracked, fetch an infected firmware from either a central site or a broadcasting infected router. Bingo, no local storage necessary.
Damn, this is sounding nasty.
A hardware switch that must be set to 'on' to flash a device suddenly sounds a good idea.
Well at least two European airlines are doing just that.
Rynair is charging per checked piece of luggage.
(Squw)EasyJet will be (is now?) charging for more than once piece of luggage PER group booking. 4 x bookings = 1 piece of checked luggage. 4 separate bookings = 4 pieces of luggage.
Easyjet used to say boarding in order of check-in. No longer. You can pay a small sum to get boarded first.
Of course, charging extra to use a credit card to pay is outrageous. Given that it must be 99% of bookings are done over the internet or via a telephone operator, with credit card charge.
Lets brainstorm a little here:
- Charge for priority luggage: Check.
- Charge for priority boarding: Check.
- Charge for food and drinks: Check.
- Charge for use of the toilet: Soon.
- Charge for an emergency parachute/lifevest: Would if they could.
- Fresh oxygen: We'll see if that one flies.
- Charge for checking in early or on time: Check.
- Charge for NOT turning up at all: Check.
- Charge for charging charge: Check.
There is only one way this is going.
Actually, I would have them write out, by hand, the textual content of every spam they sent, once per recipient. Image and PDF spam would have to be nicely drawn using the correct colours. When complete, they can walk free.
Vigelante (spelling?) is just wrong. But i'm not shedding a tear here either. Even spammers have loved ones.
As pointed out many times before, it's not the honest cop you have to worry about.
Cop doesn't like the colour of your skin? Too bad, no car for you. Cop doesn't like your (lack of) religion, too bad, no car for you. Et cetera.
And that's if you're doing nothing wrong.
Regardless of the crime, a bozo that films or photographs themselves doing it deserves to be caught.
As here in "Yes, Minister"
Sir Humphrey: "He that would keep a secret, must keep it secret that he has a secret to keep."
Moron.