The Amiga had 2 ram disks. RAM: was your standard ram disk. RAD: retained its contents after a reboot. Copy your OS to RAD:, reboot and it's running in only a few seconds.
It really came in handy in the early machines where you had a Workbench boot floppy, then another disk for the app you wanted to use.... makes me want to fire up the A3k.
HR exists for the company's benefit, not yours. I can't tell you the number of stories I've heard involving HR screwing something up that shouldn't have even been an issue.
I have to wonder if forcing the default to be non-admin might be worth trying with Longhorn. It will be uncomfortable for a while, but it would put the pressure on vendors. Just call it part of the upgrade. Many apps will either need an upgrade to run, or will be upgraded at some point after LH anyways.
I'd suggest following Apple's lead of prompting for a password, but I'm sure it would be faked/phished/etc quickly.
If a box is compromised, the only way to know you have removed everything is to wipe it and reinstall from clean media. It doesn't matter what platform.
Redundant everything is cheaper than people. People like to make money every week/biweekly. Redundant stuff usually needs money only when it is bought or replaced.
You're touching on something that scares me. With all the cables, some company comes up with a way to run a digital signal around to the speakers. One cable daisy chained, and the amp is in the speaker itself. Has the advantage of making things easier for the consumers, and closes that pesky analog hole (so they think anyways)
I'm wondering where I would physically put 14 speakers. It's hard enough to run a 5.1 setup with the proper layout, and still allow people to walk around. And, I'd seriously need to look at that multi-pair stuff used in pro audio runs.
IIRC, many schools buy computers though Dell. Many schools also use Macs as they're popular in education.
Typically purchasing agreements go to tender and the company who can provide a computer at the lowest price is chosen. (it's stupid considering you get what you pay for, but the idea is that as a public resource, you buy the cheapest assuming that a computer is a computer). It only applies when Purchasing is actually involved, as there are many other ways to buy things - I often had to buy things that were purchased so infrequently that there was no tender (or were complete garbage through the vendor).
Purchasing doesn't care that Dell and Mac are two different lines from different companies. Both are computers. Or, the contract is written in such a way that all computers come from the vendor, no exceptions.
It's a computer so you buy it from the computer vendor (Dell). Therefore, Mac computers are purchased through Dell. A different division from the one who makes computers (more along the lines of a store, but since Dell sells direct, they are the store), but still Dell.If they were buying vehicles, the tender would say "cargo van", not "Ford Econoline van". If GM won the next tender round, the new vans are still considered identical to the Fords.
The only thing that sounds weird is that Apple does direct sales (education direct sales have been around longer than the Apple online store). If they didn't, you would be buying Macs from the local Apple distributor.
The tender system sometimes works, but often doesn't. It took me 4 months to buy lightbulbs because school board purchasing kept sending my order for stage light lamps to the approved office supply "lightbulb" vendor. Never mind that the office supply place doesn't carry that lamp. Even when I explained it to them, they still sent it there. Another example is building renovations. Low-ball contracting won that tender, never has more than 4 people working (and one is a supervisor), and it's taken twice as long to do as they said.
Purchasing is one of those departments that doesn't work when it's centralized.
I'd expect it to sound good when the entire setup costs as much as a car. It's not uncommon for a McIntosh power amp to go for $10,000. And it's mono so you need two.
I understand as much as anyone that good speakers mean nothing without a decent power amp, but it's well out the reach of many.
I have a very early Denon CD player (DCD-1520). About the only thing that went wrong with it is that after a while, the CD tray didn't completely close. Mechanicals fail after a while. It was fixed a few years ago and it's been working fine since.
Compare to my DVD player which needed a replacement chip on the logic board, within 3 years.
My Denon receivers all work fine (When I upgrade, the old one works down the chain)
For my projects, I keep the source tapes as well as dumping the final project to DV tape. Any computer generated files and whatever fits also goes on DVD-R.
Since the video is compiled from multiple sources, has hours of tape, and takes weeks to edit, I try to keep as much as I can.
Since DV is digital, I can even keep multiple copies, in different locations. Doing that 10 years ago on linear suites meant generation loss. With proper timecode, damaged bits can be synced back together.
3 years ago, when I was a tech at a school, I could image an entire lab of 30 machines within 30 minutes.
1. Network multicast. I had enough boot disks to do a lab (all you need is to get to the ghost screen, tnen you can use the disk on another machine). Have the session auto-start when you reach the number of machines in the lab.
2. It's all in how you setup the image. The slowest part was booting up a machine one at a time and resetting the machine name. So, we added a script to the image to prompt and set it on first boot. Printers were all part of the image, and all I had to do was delete the ones in other rooms.
3. Something else that helped was turning off IE's "Allow download" setting. It got in the way of intranet stuff, so we ultimately added to the trusted zone (which did not have the restriction). That cut the weekly reimage the labs down to once a term.
4. If your students are mounting home directories from a central location, run a search for anything over 1MB, or multiple scans of.exe,.zip,.mp3, etc. Our policy was that computers were for school related purposes only, so if you had anything that wasn't allowed this search usually found it. Account locked, and you had to explain yourself. I usually unlocked immediately, but some students faced a 24 hour lockout.
I'll second that as a former tech for a secondary school. Half the students at my school fit the demographic for a hacker (14-18 year old male), and teachers really didn't understand what that meant.
I had teachers login on student machines or allow students to login on staff machines (allowing keystroke loggers), teachers who couldn't remember passwords (so much for my 30 day change/3 attempt lockout policy), etc. Even with the head of IT explaining things at a staff meeting, it didn't help much.
Some of the techs didn't help either. I refused to do an admin login unless it was just imaged with a clean image. If I didn't want to reimage, I had several accounts that looked like student logins. I rotated admin access and passwords on those daily. Other techs logged in directly.
One student lost computer access for the year due to abuse and a history of problems. Administration re-instated it, however I'm not sure they completely knew the situation. I'm sure there was pressure from the parents too.
I was stuck with W98 though. If they had gone with 2K I could have recommended group policies to IT (which would have ignored them though)
Doesn't seem to be stopping anyone though. Tiger has many of the dropped Longhorn features, it was released well before Longhorn, and 10.5 may even make it out before Longhorn.
OSS tends not to run to marketing deadlines anyways. It's done when it's done. There are a few exceptions (openbsd's twice a year update), but those prove it's possible to work to a deadline and still keep it secure.
I'm noticing a new form of link spam/social engineering/etc. I maintain a government site, which has links to a variety of other sites. Every so often I get a message which asks me to add a link to something entirely unrelated. Two of them were:
"I noticed you link to site.something.ca. That site doesn't exist anymore. Please update your link to othersite.com". Yes, the link was dead, but I checked out the new site and it was a search engine associated with spyware.
"Don't delete this! This is a real person writing to the address you give on your site. You link to (government safety site. Please also link to us at othersite.com. We offer a full line of safety products". That one made it to the spam folder too. If you try to tell me it isn't spam, it is. I didn't even have to look at the site to realize that this is a commercial site selling things. We're a government site (ie: non-commercial) linking to a government safety service. The final nail though was that it was sent to info@oursite.com. Our contact info lists our email address as an offical government address (something@...gc.ca).
I think it's time to assign a +10 score to anything coming in on info@.
Unknown Devices is your friend. It tells you exactly what's in the box so you can track down the right drivers.
Another tool (I've forgotten the name) will put together a bundle of all the driver files so that I can archive the drivers, reinstall windows and put the drivers back.
Of the $350/hour, I can tell you that you're not keeping much. That's assuming that you can do nothing but ram installs all day. On-site work is more expensive because at minimum, I have to cover the travel costs, and there's a lot of downtime between clients. If you bring your computer to a store, the tech can spend 5 minutes on ram and move on.
As I explain to my clients, I charge a standard professional rate because you're not hiring me, you're contracting my company. My company has numerous monthly expenses: cell phone (300-500 minutes), travel (car lease, insurance, ga$ - my work is on site), marketing expenses, various tools and software, inventory, insurance, bandwidth, etc. There are a number of things I do during the day which don't make me any money at all - traffic, inventory runs, invoicing/admin, finding work, and quoting for example. If you want to cover all those expenses yourself, I'd be happy to be hired for less. Yes, any expenses are write-offs, but I still need to pay for them. I only receive money for doing client work, and that income needs to cover all of my expenses, and I still need to make money at the end of the day to pay myself.
I have been stuck with 4 hours of driving, an extra hour to pick up a specialty part, for 2 hours of actual client work. I have to absorb those extra 5 hours somewhere. If my expenses rise (gas prices will kill us!), I may not be in a position to raise my rates accordingly, so I'm taking the hit.
Not to mention that as the owner of a small business, I'm typically working 50-60 hours a week. In many startups, owners typically recieive under the minimum hourly wage if you do the math. Expenses are paid out first, I get what's left over.
WiMP is still available for MacOS X. However, it's junk. It doesn't work as well as the windows version (that's saying a lot!), and it has issues under 10.4. Opening certain wmp files once will cause WMP to continously crash each time it's launched (the app, not the file - even with good files). Sometimes it starts working again by itself. Sometimes it needs to be reinstalled. And sometimes nothing will fix it.
I've heard the issue has to do with notebooks and is not a problem on desktops. If that is true, then it takes effort. WiMP shouldn't care what hardware it's running on as it should be abstrated at the OS level. (it's the OS that has the video drivers!)
I've been saying it for years. Split MS into 2 parts:
- Marketing - Everything else
I'm serious. The marketing department runs MS. Not technology, not the developers who actually make it work and not even Bill. Marketing is what drives the forced upgrades with new features while encouraging sloppy coding and poor security (neither are attractive from a marketing perspective). Coding to a deadline is a marketing thing.
The free distros can get it right and write secure code without a large marketing dept behind them, so why is MS so sloppy with all the additional resources they have? Reminds me a of a quote (which I'm sure was from Bill): "Computer manufacturers have been trying for years to make computers easier to use. The most effective method they have found is to put an 'Even easier to use' sticker on the box".
If you really want to hurt MS, and give others without the same resources a chance, spin off marketing.
Or, since microsoft only makes money selling Windows and Office, and uses those funds to push everything else: spin off Windows and Office. That's where the abuse comes from, so take it away.
It depends on your printer. While many have extremely expensive consumables, not all do. My epson 600, which dates back to the mid-90's, has extremely cheap cartridges, Epson ones are about $20 and third party ones are as cheap as $10. Of course, it only works with light volume.
One other issue with going from cheap inkjet to workgroup laser is that people generally don't like to walk to the network printer when there was one on their desk before.
I have an out of warranty powerbook with a seized hinge. It should be a $60 or so part to replace. But, it's considered part of the "display module" which means replacing a $1000 LCD, which is working fine. Even on ebay, it's an expensive repair. Doing it yourself means potential damage to the LCD as the whole thing is glued.
Hinges fail. I don't know why Apple designed the LCD in the way they did.
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The Amiga had 2 ram disks. RAM: was your standard ram disk. RAD: retained its contents after a reboot. Copy your OS to RAD:, reboot and it's running in only a few seconds.
... makes me want to fire up the A3k.
It really came in handy in the early machines where you had a Workbench boot floppy, then another disk for the app you wanted to use.
It's no different from the Minstral (sp?) phase in the early-90's. Remember the hard to read writing-ish font that appeared everywhere?
HR exists for the company's benefit, not yours. I can't tell you the number of stories I've heard involving HR screwing something up that shouldn't have even been an issue.
I have to wonder if forcing the default to be non-admin might be worth trying with Longhorn. It will be uncomfortable for a while, but it would put the pressure on vendors. Just call it part of the upgrade. Many apps will either need an upgrade to run, or will be upgraded at some point after LH anyways.
I'd suggest following Apple's lead of prompting for a password, but I'm sure it would be faked/phished/etc quickly.
If a box is compromised, the only way to know you have removed everything is to wipe it and reinstall from clean media. It doesn't matter what platform.
Redundant everything is cheaper than people. People like to make money every week/biweekly. Redundant stuff usually needs money only when it is bought or replaced.
My XP box runs really well. Of course, it's usually off and I use a Mac instead. :)
You're touching on something that scares me. With all the cables, some company comes up with a way to run a digital signal around to the speakers. One cable daisy chained, and the amp is in the speaker itself. Has the advantage of making things easier for the consumers, and closes that pesky analog hole (so they think anyways)
I'm wondering where I would physically put 14 speakers. It's hard enough to run a 5.1 setup with the proper layout, and still allow people to walk around. And, I'd seriously need to look at that multi-pair stuff used in pro audio runs.
Or, something like a Treo which has enough power to run a software SIP client.
I work with a company that's just rolling out that service. VOIP over wireless when it's there, GSM when it isn't. Same phone number.
IIRC, many schools buy computers though Dell. Many schools also use Macs as they're popular in education.
Typically purchasing agreements go to tender and the company who can provide a computer at the lowest price is chosen. (it's stupid considering you get what you pay for, but the idea is that as a public resource, you buy the cheapest assuming that a computer is a computer). It only applies when Purchasing is actually involved, as there are many other ways to buy things - I often had to buy things that were purchased so infrequently that there was no tender (or were complete garbage through the vendor).
Purchasing doesn't care that Dell and Mac are two different lines from different companies. Both are computers. Or, the contract is written in such a way that all computers come from the vendor, no exceptions.
It's a computer so you buy it from the computer vendor (Dell). Therefore, Mac computers are purchased through Dell. A different division from the one who makes computers (more along the lines of a store, but since Dell sells direct, they are the store), but still Dell.If they were buying vehicles, the tender would say "cargo van", not "Ford Econoline van". If GM won the next tender round, the new vans are still considered identical to the Fords.
The only thing that sounds weird is that Apple does direct sales (education direct sales have been around longer than the Apple online store). If they didn't, you would be buying Macs from the local Apple distributor.
The tender system sometimes works, but often doesn't. It took me 4 months to buy lightbulbs
because school board purchasing kept sending my order for stage light lamps to the approved office supply "lightbulb" vendor. Never mind that the office supply place doesn't carry that lamp. Even when I explained it to them, they still sent it there. Another example is building renovations. Low-ball contracting won that tender, never has more than 4 people working (and one is a supervisor), and it's taken twice as long to do as they said.
Purchasing is one of those departments that doesn't work when it's centralized.
I'd expect it to sound good when the entire setup costs as much as a car. It's not uncommon for a McIntosh power amp to go for $10,000. And it's mono so you need two.
I understand as much as anyone that good speakers mean nothing without a decent power amp, but it's well out the reach of many.
I have a very early Denon CD player (DCD-1520). About the only thing that went wrong with it is that after a while, the CD tray didn't completely close. Mechanicals fail after a while. It was fixed a few years ago and it's been working fine since.
Compare to my DVD player which needed a replacement chip on the logic board, within 3 years.
My Denon receivers all work fine (When I upgrade, the old one works down the chain)
Either Apple killed the clones, or the clone companies had nothing to sell. The clones didn't expand the Mac marketbase - they stole sales from Apple.
IIRC, the clone companies sold machines with the specs of Apple's high end machines, at the cost of Apple's low end machines.
For my projects, I keep the source tapes as well as dumping the final project to DV tape. Any computer generated files and whatever fits also goes on DVD-R.
Since the video is compiled from multiple sources, has hours of tape, and takes weeks to edit, I try to keep as much as I can.
Since DV is digital, I can even keep multiple copies, in different locations. Doing that 10 years ago on linear suites meant generation loss. With proper timecode, damaged bits can be synced back together.
3 years ago, when I was a tech at a school, I could image an entire lab of 30 machines within 30 minutes.
.exe, .zip, .mp3, etc. Our policy was that computers were for school related purposes only, so if you had anything that wasn't allowed this search usually found it. Account locked, and you had to explain yourself. I usually unlocked immediately, but some students faced a 24 hour lockout.
1. Network multicast. I had enough boot disks to do a lab (all you need is to get to the ghost screen, tnen you can use the disk on another machine). Have the session auto-start when you reach the number of machines in the lab.
2. It's all in how you setup the image. The slowest part was booting up a machine one at a time and resetting the machine name. So, we added a script to the image to prompt and set it on first boot. Printers were all part of the image, and all I had to do was delete the ones in other rooms.
3. Something else that helped was turning off IE's "Allow download" setting. It got in the way of intranet stuff, so we ultimately added to the trusted zone (which did not have the restriction). That cut the weekly reimage the labs down to once a term.
4. If your students are mounting home directories from a central location, run a search for anything over 1MB, or multiple scans of
I'll second that as a former tech for a secondary school. Half the students at my school fit the demographic for a hacker (14-18 year old male), and teachers really didn't understand what that meant.
I had teachers login on student machines or allow students to login on staff machines (allowing keystroke loggers), teachers who couldn't remember passwords (so much for my 30 day change/3 attempt lockout policy), etc. Even with the head of IT explaining things at a staff meeting, it didn't help much.
Some of the techs didn't help either. I refused to do an admin login unless it was just imaged with a clean image. If I didn't want to reimage, I had several accounts that looked like student logins. I rotated admin access and passwords on those daily. Other techs logged in directly.
One student lost computer access for the year due to abuse and a history of problems. Administration re-instated it, however I'm not sure they completely knew the situation. I'm sure there was pressure from the parents too.
I was stuck with W98 though. If they had gone with 2K I could have recommended group policies to IT (which would have ignored them though)
Doesn't seem to be stopping anyone though. Tiger has many of the dropped Longhorn features, it was released well before Longhorn, and 10.5 may even make it out before Longhorn.
OSS tends not to run to marketing deadlines anyways. It's done when it's done.
There are a few exceptions (openbsd's twice a year update), but those prove it's possible to work to a deadline and still keep it secure.
I'm noticing a new form of link spam/social engineering/etc. I maintain a government site, which has links to a variety of other sites. Every so often I get a message which asks me to add a link to something entirely unrelated. Two of them were:
"I noticed you link to site.something.ca. That site doesn't exist anymore. Please update your link to othersite.com". Yes, the link was dead, but I checked out the new site and it was a search engine associated with spyware.
"Don't delete this! This is a real person writing to the address you give on your site. You link to (government safety site. Please also link to us at othersite.com. We offer a full line of safety products". That one made it to the spam folder too. If you try to tell me it isn't spam, it is. I didn't even have to look at the site to realize that this is a commercial site selling things. We're a government site (ie: non-commercial) linking to a government safety service. The final nail though was that it was sent to info@oursite.com. Our contact info lists our email address as an offical government address (something@...gc.ca).
I think it's time to assign a +10 score to anything coming in on info@.
Unknown Devices is your friend. It tells you exactly what's in the box so you can track down the right drivers.
Another tool (I've forgotten the name) will put together a bundle of all the driver files so that I can archive the drivers, reinstall windows and put the drivers back.
Of the $350/hour, I can tell you that you're not keeping much. That's assuming that you can do nothing but ram installs all day. On-site work is more expensive because at minimum, I have to cover the travel costs, and there's a lot of downtime between clients. If you bring your computer to a store, the tech can spend 5 minutes on ram and move on.
As I explain to my clients, I charge a standard professional rate because you're not hiring me, you're contracting my company. My company has numerous monthly expenses: cell phone (300-500 minutes), travel (car lease, insurance, ga$ - my work is on site), marketing expenses, various tools and software, inventory, insurance, bandwidth, etc. There are a number of things I do during the day which don't make me any money at all - traffic, inventory runs, invoicing/admin, finding work, and quoting for example. If you want to cover all those expenses yourself, I'd be happy to be hired for less. Yes, any expenses are write-offs, but I still need to pay for them. I only receive money for doing client work, and that income needs to cover all of my expenses, and I still need to make money at the end of the day to pay myself.
I have been stuck with 4 hours of driving, an extra hour to pick up a specialty part, for 2 hours of actual client work. I have to absorb those extra 5 hours somewhere. If my expenses rise (gas prices will kill us!), I may not be in a position to raise my rates accordingly, so I'm taking the hit.
Not to mention that as the owner of a small business, I'm typically working 50-60 hours a week. In many startups, owners typically recieive under the minimum hourly wage if you do the math. Expenses are paid out first, I get what's left over.
WiMP is still available for MacOS X. However, it's junk. It doesn't work as well as the windows version (that's saying a lot!), and it has issues under 10.4. Opening certain wmp files once will cause WMP to continously crash each time it's launched (the app, not the file - even with good files). Sometimes it starts working again by itself. Sometimes it needs to be reinstalled. And sometimes nothing will fix it.
I've heard the issue has to do with notebooks and is not a problem on desktops. If that is true, then it takes effort. WiMP shouldn't care what hardware it's running on as it should be abstrated at the OS level. (it's the OS that has the video drivers!)
I've been saying it for years. Split MS into 2 parts:
- Marketing
- Everything else
I'm serious. The marketing department runs MS. Not technology, not the developers who actually make it work and not even Bill. Marketing is what drives the forced upgrades with new features while encouraging sloppy coding and poor security (neither are attractive from a marketing perspective). Coding to a deadline is a marketing thing.
The free distros can get it right and write secure code without a large marketing dept behind them, so why is MS so sloppy with all the additional resources they have? Reminds me a of a quote (which I'm sure was from Bill): "Computer manufacturers have been trying for years to make computers easier to use. The most effective method they have found is to put an 'Even easier to use' sticker on the box".
If you really want to hurt MS, and give others without the same resources a chance, spin off marketing.
Or, since microsoft only makes money selling Windows and Office, and uses those funds to push everything else: spin off Windows and Office. That's where the abuse comes from, so take it away.
It depends on your printer. While many have extremely expensive consumables, not all do. My epson 600, which dates back to the mid-90's, has extremely cheap cartridges, Epson ones are about $20 and third party ones are as cheap as $10.
Of course, it only works with light volume.
One other issue with going from cheap inkjet to workgroup laser is that people generally don't like to walk to the network printer when there was one on their desk before.
[Apple] passes the $$ to the shareholders.
Apple doesn't pay dividends to shareholders, so no.
I have an out of warranty powerbook with a seized hinge. It should be a $60 or so part to replace. But, it's considered part of the "display module" which means replacing a $1000 LCD, which is working fine. Even on ebay, it's an expensive repair. Doing it yourself means potential damage to the LCD as the whole thing is glued.
Hinges fail. I don't know why Apple designed the LCD in the way they did.