You think virus protection protects your net work? You missed the entire point. Then you followed it up with a broken car analogy.
Perhaps you should try understanding what you do for a living instead of doing whatever some book and a whole bunch of marketing literature told you to do.
I check in on my machines and make sure they are working. I protect my networks, and make sure that if they *do* get infected they're not going to infect *your* network.
Judging by your comment, on the other hand, you merely install security-blanket style security software on your systems and think that makes you "responsible".
Users have no remorse because they are given zero responsibility. Why should they care if they fuck up your machines? You secured them. They're protected. They're both "safe" because of the protections, and completely disallowed from making any responsible decisions about their own machines, so they take zero responsibility.
You, sir, are the cause of your own user-troubles.
The fact that nobody is viewing it in the first place and there is a stack of Daily Express and Sun in the dining room is ignored for some reason.
That pisses me off for a whole other set of reasons.
Cosmo is allowed in the break-room, but not Maxim. One of those two magazines shows full female nudity, and it's *not* Maxim. At a previous company I worked for, it was the same woman bringing in the Cosmo and complaining about the Maxim...
How do we let people get so "sensitive" about harmless shit, and why do we appease them instead of telling them to grow the fuck up?
I've actually tried this little social experiment.
I run the network for my mother's company for free, so I'm allowed whatever liberties I'd like in deciding policy instead of having it dictated by a boss. They've got over 20 machines, and they aren't formally assigned, so if one goes down it's not the end of the world, the employee can use one at another desk for awhile. Usually they use the same one every day though.
The experiment was this:
Four new employees. Four new Windows XP Professional PCs. All use Firefox for a browser and Thunderbird for e-mail, along with the proprietary manufacturing/sales app that they run their business with. Two machines got Symantec anti-virus, and the other two got no anti-virus. They were told that since we don't have a copy for that machine, they'll just have to be extra careful about what documents they open, and how they use their e-mail. (We really were out of licenses/subscriptions, which is how this started)
After three months, both of the AV-free PCs were completely fine, and one of the machines that had the anti-virus was running a botnet spammer (the outgoing spam was being blocked by the firewall). The most amazing bit though, was that the fear of not having anti-virus protection had stopped users of those two machines from doing most of the non-viral bad stuff that average windows users do. There was no proliferation of toolbars, no weatherbug.... They didn't even have realPlayer.
It's amazing what a false sense of security people get from running anti-virus software. They don't even realize that they still have to be careful because 0-day threats aren't in the latest virus definitions yet. They think they can do whatever they want, because they are protected.
The whole company has since gone anti-virus free on the desktop, and problem reports and performance complaints have dropped way down. Education and a healthy dose of respect for the evils of the world work better than any anti-virus on the market. And the cost savings are nice too.
(There is still some basic protection in place. All internet access is through a secured web proxy. Non-http traffic isn't allowed. Intrusion detection on the firewall, etc... And the servers are still scanned, AVG on the windows servers, chkrootkit on the linux servers.)
Hard drive sleep time != ACPI aggressiveness setting.
You can set that as high as you want, and the drive will still use its internal setting to sleep more frequently if it is configured to. All the windows setting does is set how long Windows will wait before sending an explicit command to the drive to tell it to sleep.
The SlySoft stuff, especially AnyDVD, but CloneDVD is nice if you're into ripping & copying, is excellent.
It is constantly being updated for free to support any new tricks they throw onto the latest DVDs. Once you have it installed, playing DVDs works as you would have expected, instead of being the FBI warning/preview infested/disabled buttons nightmare that DVDs have become.
I don't copy DVDs, and I still think this software is worth every penny, for its ability to automatically remove annoyances from your discs without even having to think about it. And I really appreciate their extra effort to keep their existing customers (who aren't paying them anymore) up to date with amazing speed after new "protections" are introduced.
What "good" have they ever done? Sure, GTA was excellent, but it was done by DMA Design. Once Rockstar bought them, the culture slowly started to creep in.
With the exception of GTA3 games, my experiences with Rockstar titles have always been negative: buggy, rushed out, clueless business guy driven turds on a shiny disc. It really isn't all that surprising that their legal department has its head too far up its ass to talk to the PR department once in a while. It won't be surprising when GTA4 turns out to be a watered down, half baked, piece of "wishes it was as good as GTA3" crap either. After all, now that the Rockstar suits are involved, it won't be good enough to stick to the proven formula. They'll have to add more features, and make sure they don't offend anybody.
"an average of 6.7% per year over the last 10 years." Given that overall the consumer price index has averaged about a 3% increase per year over that period, cable prices are bad, but not as bad as the quote makes it sound.
That's another way of saying cable rate increases have been 100% higher than for other goods and services in the economy.
They didn't make it sound bad enough. Especially since the cost of telecommunications services has actually gone down over that period.
What part of my response led you to believe I hadn't?
Let's see... How about this part:
Seriously, all I see modded up are "this'll NEVAH EVAH EVAH EVAH happen" from the typical slashtroll doomsayers, who've never seen a good idea in their lives,
The rest of it is pretty bad too though.
You see, intelligent people realize that to solve a problem, you start by understanding the cause of the problem. This, instead of your proposal of "not bitching" and, apparently, just pulling "solutions" out of our ass. You probably don't even realize the irony of your hypothetical question, considering you're doing exactly the thing you claim to be against. Of course, even if you did realize it, you'd still be a troll, whether that was your intention or not.
It's not shirking duty, it's not knowing what the duty is in the first place. Bring back highschool civics!
If only...
And while they're at it, they should bring back home-ec. It would solve a large portion of our health care "crisis".
But it won't happen. It won't happen because education is politicized. Teaching civics might mean that the school is imposing political beliefs of one direction or the other on kids; just like those other classes had inconvenient political implications.
It probably wouldn't matter anyway though... It's politically infeasible to actually fail a kid in many localities, so teaching civics would far from imply that our graduates had actually learned anything.
A lot of people can answer that question in a way any given individual would find appropriate, but that doesn't mean they are qualified to be President. I can think of many cases where I may choose to vote for somebody who answers that question incorrectly, because they answer more of the task-specific questions appropriately than the other candidate.
I wish people would look at the big picture, and stop trying to boil the candidates down to 15 words or less.
It would be interesting (I'm not necessarily saying it would be a good idea, but it would be interesting) to see what would happen if the VP spot went to the #2 candidate in the election. Not only would it provide contrast in the administration in most cases, but it would probably get other candidates from outside the two major parties some additional clout.
I don't think your Obama/Clinton idea would ever work. Clinton wants the power and the office too much to ever agree to that, and Obama wouldn't have enough clout as VP under Clinton to push his agenda. As much as they agree on some issues, I think they are polar opposites when it comes to why they want to be President.
So as a candidate, which would you rather be labeled as: an idiot, or a heathen? Keep in mind that the country is divided almost 50/50, and to get elected you need at least a few people from the other side to vote for you. Where's the positive label that could come out of this?
The candidates are only accountable to the voters beyond the very minimal rules specified in the constitution.
Why aren't they obligated to answer a set of questions? Simple; it's because people are willing to vote for them without them answering a set of questions. Worse, the media will punish them for answering some questions by picking the worst bits and playing them on a 24 hour loop. We actually reward our candidates for shutting up about all but the most divisive (based on belief, not fact) or irrelevant (the Supreme Court isn't going to change their mind, no matter who gets appointed) issues.
Think of this from a politician's perspective. This type of debate could really hurt them if they answer poorly, but it probably wouldn't help them at all with the vast majority of the population if they did well. So why would they agree to participate?
There are all sorts of great ideas for debates (including an actual debate instead of the charade debates we have now), that will never happen for the same reason. People, and the media, aren't willing to hold candidates accountable for refusing to hold a real debate, so it doesn't happen.
That won't even get us to start using fission again, and we already know how to do that sufficiently well to more than supplant our oil and coal consumption...
Energy research will be stuck with the cripplingly impractical until environmental activists drop their lifestyle agendas.
I'm outside of Boston. I have a business Fios 20/5 to my house right now. It's only $79/month, which is only $20 more than I was paying for 7/768k Cable with Comcast before. The cable only dreamed it could hit the advertised 7Mbit down, had crappy upstream, and was down at least 15 minutes out of every 24 hours and whenever it was raining. The Fios has been like a rock for two years. It didn't even go down when they replaced the telephone poles on my street.
VNC & X sessions to work over the line are *fast* thanks to the 5mbit upstream, plus I have statics, so I pay half my bill by hosting a few small websites on my server. As an added bonus, business Verizon lines don't use PPPoE, so ping times in online games are always really low. Connected to WoW, for example, I average about 100ms.
Not only can you get 35mbit for a little more, but they also have a 50mbit option.
Ok, so you don't like baseball. To each their own. But can you honestly say with a straight face that there isn't enough NFL coverage on TV? You can probably find NFL commentary on at least one channel at any given moment during the football season, and if you don't get the NFL network, you can probably still have about a 50/50 chance of finding some during the offseason too.
Not only that, but compared to Football, Baseball is actually a fun game to go see live. Football, you go to the game, and then go home to watch the replays after to find out what actually happened. Baseball, on the other hand, is actually better in person than on the couch.
Slashdot Mirror
They *are* running as non-admin users.
You can still install a lot of things as a regular user.
You really have no grasp on reality, do you?
You think virus protection protects your net work? You missed the entire point. Then you followed it up with a broken car analogy.
Perhaps you should try understanding what you do for a living instead of doing whatever some book and a whole bunch of marketing literature told you to do.
I check in on my machines and make sure they are working. I protect my networks, and make sure that if they *do* get infected they're not going to infect *your* network.
Judging by your comment, on the other hand, you merely install security-blanket style security software on your systems and think that makes you "responsible".
Users have no remorse because they are given zero responsibility. Why should they care if they fuck up your machines? You secured them. They're protected. They're both "safe" because of the protections, and completely disallowed from making any responsible decisions about their own machines, so they take zero responsibility.
You, sir, are the cause of your own user-troubles.
That pisses me off for a whole other set of reasons.
Cosmo is allowed in the break-room, but not Maxim. One of those two magazines shows full female nudity, and it's *not* Maxim. At a previous company I worked for, it was the same woman bringing in the Cosmo and complaining about the Maxim...
How do we let people get so "sensitive" about harmless shit, and why do we appease them instead of telling them to grow the fuck up?
I've actually tried this little social experiment.
I run the network for my mother's company for free, so I'm allowed whatever liberties I'd like in deciding policy instead of having it dictated by a boss. They've got over 20 machines, and they aren't formally assigned, so if one goes down it's not the end of the world, the employee can use one at another desk for awhile. Usually they use the same one every day though.
The experiment was this:
Four new employees. Four new Windows XP Professional PCs. All use Firefox for a browser and Thunderbird for e-mail, along with the proprietary manufacturing/sales app that they run their business with. Two machines got Symantec anti-virus, and the other two got no anti-virus. They were told that since we don't have a copy for that machine, they'll just have to be extra careful about what documents they open, and how they use their e-mail. (We really were out of licenses/subscriptions, which is how this started)
After three months, both of the AV-free PCs were completely fine, and one of the machines that had the anti-virus was running a botnet spammer (the outgoing spam was being blocked by the firewall). The most amazing bit though, was that the fear of not having anti-virus protection had stopped users of those two machines from doing most of the non-viral bad stuff that average windows users do. There was no proliferation of toolbars, no weatherbug.... They didn't even have realPlayer.
It's amazing what a false sense of security people get from running anti-virus software. They don't even realize that they still have to be careful because 0-day threats aren't in the latest virus definitions yet. They think they can do whatever they want, because they are protected.
The whole company has since gone anti-virus free on the desktop, and problem reports and performance complaints have dropped way down. Education and a healthy dose of respect for the evils of the world work better than any anti-virus on the market. And the cost savings are nice too.
(There is still some basic protection in place. All internet access is through a secured web proxy. Non-http traffic isn't allowed. Intrusion detection on the firewall, etc... And the servers are still scanned, AVG on the windows servers, chkrootkit on the linux servers.)
1/3 admit to it.... The other 2/3rds don't even know what the policies are in the first place.
They say "actually" like it's so unbelievable.
I regularly use bittorrent to download work-related files at work. And it's not against IT policy at all. Imagine that.
Sounds like they should rename it to "Everything 3"
Hard drive sleep time != ACPI aggressiveness setting.
You can set that as high as you want, and the drive will still use its internal setting to sleep more frequently if it is configured to. All the windows setting does is set how long Windows will wait before sending an explicit command to the drive to tell it to sleep.
Nice guess though.
The SlySoft stuff, especially AnyDVD, but CloneDVD is nice if you're into ripping & copying, is excellent.
It is constantly being updated for free to support any new tricks they throw onto the latest DVDs. Once you have it installed, playing DVDs works as you would have expected, instead of being the FBI warning/preview infested/disabled buttons nightmare that DVDs have become.
I don't copy DVDs, and I still think this software is worth every penny, for its ability to automatically remove annoyances from your discs without even having to think about it. And I really appreciate their extra effort to keep their existing customers (who aren't paying them anymore) up to date with amazing speed after new "protections" are introduced.
Why weren't they on your list before?
What "good" have they ever done? Sure, GTA was excellent, but it was done by DMA Design. Once Rockstar bought them, the culture slowly started to creep in.
With the exception of GTA3 games, my experiences with Rockstar titles have always been negative: buggy, rushed out, clueless business guy driven turds on a shiny disc. It really isn't all that surprising that their legal department has its head too far up its ass to talk to the PR department once in a while. It won't be surprising when GTA4 turns out to be a watered down, half baked, piece of "wishes it was as good as GTA3" crap either. After all, now that the Rockstar suits are involved, it won't be good enough to stick to the proven formula. They'll have to add more features, and make sure they don't offend anybody.
That's another way of saying cable rate increases have been 100% higher than for other goods and services in the economy.
They didn't make it sound bad enough. Especially since the cost of telecommunications services has actually gone down over that period.
Let's see... How about this part:
The rest of it is pretty bad too though.
You see, intelligent people realize that to solve a problem, you start by understanding the cause of the problem. This, instead of your proposal of "not bitching" and, apparently, just pulling "solutions" out of our ass. You probably don't even realize the irony of your hypothetical question, considering you're doing exactly the thing you claim to be against. Of course, even if you did realize it, you'd still be a troll, whether that was your intention or not.
If only...
And while they're at it, they should bring back home-ec. It would solve a large portion of our health care "crisis".
But it won't happen. It won't happen because education is politicized. Teaching civics might mean that the school is imposing political beliefs of one direction or the other on kids; just like those other classes had inconvenient political implications.
It probably wouldn't matter anyway though... It's politically infeasible to actually fail a kid in many localities, so teaching civics would far from imply that our graduates had actually learned anything.
Congratulations on reading this entire thread before posting your response.
I don't know what "the" problem is, but you, sir, are certainly part of some problem.
A lot of people can answer that question in a way any given individual would find appropriate, but that doesn't mean they are qualified to be President. I can think of many cases where I may choose to vote for somebody who answers that question incorrectly, because they answer more of the task-specific questions appropriately than the other candidate.
I wish people would look at the big picture, and stop trying to boil the candidates down to 15 words or less.
It would be interesting (I'm not necessarily saying it would be a good idea, but it would be interesting) to see what would happen if the VP spot went to the #2 candidate in the election. Not only would it provide contrast in the administration in most cases, but it would probably get other candidates from outside the two major parties some additional clout.
I don't think your Obama/Clinton idea would ever work. Clinton wants the power and the office too much to ever agree to that, and Obama wouldn't have enough clout as VP under Clinton to push his agenda. As much as they agree on some issues, I think they are polar opposites when it comes to why they want to be President.
So as a candidate, which would you rather be labeled as: an idiot, or a heathen? Keep in mind that the country is divided almost 50/50, and to get elected you need at least a few people from the other side to vote for you. Where's the positive label that could come out of this?
The candidates are only accountable to the voters beyond the very minimal rules specified in the constitution.
Why aren't they obligated to answer a set of questions? Simple; it's because people are willing to vote for them without them answering a set of questions. Worse, the media will punish them for answering some questions by picking the worst bits and playing them on a 24 hour loop. We actually reward our candidates for shutting up about all but the most divisive (based on belief, not fact) or irrelevant (the Supreme Court isn't going to change their mind, no matter who gets appointed) issues.
Think of this from a politician's perspective. This type of debate could really hurt them if they answer poorly, but it probably wouldn't help them at all with the vast majority of the population if they did well. So why would they agree to participate?
There are all sorts of great ideas for debates (including an actual debate instead of the charade debates we have now), that will never happen for the same reason. People, and the media, aren't willing to hold candidates accountable for refusing to hold a real debate, so it doesn't happen.
That won't even get us to start using fission again, and we already know how to do that sufficiently well to more than supplant our oil and coal consumption...
Energy research will be stuck with the cripplingly impractical until environmental activists drop their lifestyle agendas.
Yep... You'll be sleeping with the fishes one way or another... ;)
Well, you could off yourself. That would be a start.
I'm outside of Boston. I have a business Fios 20/5 to my house right now. It's only $79/month, which is only $20 more than I was paying for 7/768k Cable with Comcast before. The cable only dreamed it could hit the advertised 7Mbit down, had crappy upstream, and was down at least 15 minutes out of every 24 hours and whenever it was raining. The Fios has been like a rock for two years. It didn't even go down when they replaced the telephone poles on my street.
VNC & X sessions to work over the line are *fast* thanks to the 5mbit upstream, plus I have statics, so I pay half my bill by hosting a few small websites on my server. As an added bonus, business Verizon lines don't use PPPoE, so ping times in online games are always really low. Connected to WoW, for example, I average about 100ms.
Not only can you get 35mbit for a little more, but they also have a 50mbit option.
Ok, so you don't like baseball. To each their own. But can you honestly say with a straight face that there isn't enough NFL coverage on TV? You can probably find NFL commentary on at least one channel at any given moment during the football season, and if you don't get the NFL network, you can probably still have about a 50/50 chance of finding some during the offseason too.
Not only that, but compared to Football, Baseball is actually a fun game to go see live. Football, you go to the game, and then go home to watch the replays after to find out what actually happened. Baseball, on the other hand, is actually better in person than on the couch.