I warned her that VZ has a public relations problem but she was too clueless to understand.
Perhaps she was too jaded from hearing customers complain that Verizon has a PR problem.
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company."
From what I've heard (and what I experienced from having their service in the second half of 2000), this is nothing new for Verizon. They're only interested in the money-making aspects of the telecom business, and drag their feet on everything else. The setup of this aggressive new spam filter was probably one of those "money-making" items, since it means far less spam traffic and decreased accusations of hosting spam bots. Of course, when customers start complaining that they can't send email to specific addresses, they have to deal with Verizon's understaffed, undercapable customer service departments, who will most likely be faced with fierce opposition from the suits in opposing the "grand money-saving, liability-reducing spam filter".
Also, keep in mind that when Verizon acquired MCI, they acquired UUNet, a tier-1 ISP with some serious spam problems of their own. I wouldn't be surprised if taking on UUNet's elephant-on-their-back was part of the rationale behind the new spam filtering policies.
We already live in a country where law enforcement personnel become conditioned into packs of jackbooted thugs. Now, with laws being passed that define a greater percent of the population as criminal, those thugs will have even more cannon fodder, and more money squeezed out of the innocent as well as the truly guilty.
One line from a National Geographic article on Tiananmen Square comes to mind (paraphrasing because I can't find the text): "For every one person executed... thousands were scared into silence." Fear. This is the goal of the Bush administration, and effectively of every government that ever existed and ever will exist. They assume that respect for the law is dead, so their goal now is to govern on fear alone.
Sounds reminiscent of the bad old mainframe days, when companies were hopelessly married to a particular platform for what seemed like eternity. Now that there are more standardized server systems and less proprietary mainframes, it looks like SaaS is the next "proprietary mainframe".
Maybe I'm a bit biased against this since I perceive the reduction by companies of IT staff as a direct threat, but like it's been said before elsewhere in this comments section, SaaS works better for some setups and worse for others. Either way, it's vital to have a way to cut loose and go to a better vendor, though the ability to do that is exactly what these companies do NOT want to enable, since it means less income (through lock-in).
We've already seen from the United Arab Emirates docks fiasco that almost NOTHING is inspected as it is imported from other countries. FWIH out of the 6 ports affected, only 1 had an apparatus for detecting radioactive material. But that would require a lot more inspection personnel, and probably an astronomical import duty on all products imported. The United States would become a nation of lawyers, bureaucrats, service technicians, and import inspectors. If the import duty / tax / whatever was high enough, it would choke off imports to the point that it might be more effective to make products and components in the United States again. Though this would be an artificial economic wall.
It's crazy enough to sound like it might work, and it seems to look better than the quagmire that we're in. Then again, with the energy crunch and peak oil, the whole plan might come crashing down when we're all burning wood and coal for energy because there's no more petroleum-based fuels to use to go drill/mine for crude oil, natural gas, and uranium.
...and laptops with random pre-Cardbus PCMCIA Ethernet cards are old...
Or betteryet, laptops without onboard ethernet adapters are old. Remember the bad old days, when you HAD to buy a PCMCIA ethernet card? When you had to decide between the pop-out jack that would break under stress, or the dongle that could be lost OR broken under stress? Ah yes, the bad old days. They weren't even that long ago.
I've done a bit of installing on some Sparc machines over the past year, so I know a little bit about running near-modern *nix on older hardware. My first foray into it was when I picked up a Sparcstation 5 for free. It has a 110 MHz CPU, 256 MB of RAM, and an 8-bit framebuffer. The first OS that I fully installed on it was Debian Woody for Sparc. The first installation had GNOME; it ran, but not really in a speedy fashion. I later switched back to lighter-weight environments like fluxbox or XFCE. When I picked up the Ultra 2 (2 x 300 MHz UltraSparc, 640 MB of RAM, 24-bit Creator3D framebuffer), it ran quite a bit better in Debian Woody / GNOME, thanks to the faster processors and larger memory space. Still nowhere near P3 level performance, but to be fair, this was a workstation built in 1996, and was the fastest thing in its day. When Solaris 10 came out in the free RTU license for multiprocessor machines, I installed that. Java Desktop loads up a bit slowly, so I usually log in with CDE, but the other aspects of the Ultra 2 are great for a 10-year-old computer. It can even burn 8X CD-Rs without stuttering. Your average PC back in 1996 probably wouldn't be able to sustain the throughput for 6x, let alone 8x. Once the Ultra 2 became the primary user of the 13W3 monitor due to its 24-bit framebuffer, I relegated the Sparcstation 5 to headless duty, using Debian Woody, then Sarge, and currently NetBSD 3.0.
Right now the Sparcstation series is a bit long in the tooth for graphical use beyond an ultra-light window manager like XFCE, but they were small form factor before there was a mainstream market for it. Companies like Sun and SGI made small workstations with fast processors and great throughput (and high margins and prices!).
This is most definitely a conspiracy and it is news. Here's a hint. It is illegal to use a monopoly to gain an advantage in other markets or to build barriers to entry to those markets. MS has partnered to do just that, implementing software restrictions to provide some parties with a market advantage using their monopoly on desktop OSs.
Well, then it's time to write to your congressman to see if he can do anything about it. Too bad that he or she almost certainly accepted soft money from Microsoft in the past eight years.
What the events of the last 5-10 years have taught us (or at least taught me) is that the more you have turned on, the more attack surface area the system has and therefore the more vulnerable it is.
It took Mike Nash 5-10 years to learn common sense? Sheesh, I picked up on this when I first looked at the Services list in NT. "What are all these things? Why do I need them? Why not shut some of them down? Why are there dependencies on this service that force me to keep it running despite the fact that I'll never use 99% of its functionality?"
First, a point of clarification. I assume in this case, you are talking about the Rights Management Services (RMS) client that is now integrated into Windows Vista and not the DRM technology that is used to protect media content...
Evasion'd. Regarding the decoy acronym, I only recognize two definitions for it: Root Mean Square and Richard M. Stallman.
From a platform point of view, decoupling IE would break a lot of things. There are many applications that depend on IE for rendering HTML and for accessing the Internet. Think about email applications, Internet-aware clients like the AOL Explorer or even Microsoft Money that use IE to render HTML in the application. Not only would this break a lot of applications, but it would also put a huge burden on developers who would now have to write their own HTML rendering capability.
Unacceptable. During the antitrust hearings in the Judge Penfield Jackson era, didn't someone demonstrate completely removing IE from Windows 98? Admittedly 9x is dead and NT server has advanced two generations since then, but still, why does my NT server have to have IE on it? Why does it have to have Portable Media Serial Number Service? Why does it have to have DCOM if I'm not going to use it? DirectX? ClearType?
It all comes back to my first paragraph, about "reducing the surface area", a.k.a. the "bottom-up" apporach to building a server. It's fiendishly difficult with what Microsoft provides. Then again, they're not pushing for that market at all, but still, Nash is making it sound like bottom-up is what they care about when there are obviously indications of the opposite situation elsewhere in the company's portfolio.
I saw a Dell commercial for some XPS computer. For years now, we've heard the familiar 4-marimba-note jingle at the end of every single Dell commercial, since they're Intel customer number 1. At the end of this commercial, though, was silence. I stared at the TV for a solid 10 minutes in surprise.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have the Apple commercial, claiming that Intel's chips have been going into dull PCs doing dull tasks for so long (perhaps "dull" is a pun on "Dell"?). I do own a 12" PowerBook, but I rolled my eyes at this, since it caters to Apple's lower customer tier (the ones who buy an Apple as a fashion statement; I bought mine since it's the most usable user-end *nix environment currently, and because I've used OS X before and liked it).
Intel's roadmap looks like progress in the works, though on the server side it'll take at least 8 months to catch up to AMD on the memory controller bandwidth alone.
Considering Wolf Camera has a D50 kit for $699 (I saw the commercial the other day), there isn't much of an excuse even if you shoot photos only a few times a month.
I have a few excuses:
- The Nikon D50 and Canon 350D don't have separate shutter and aperture control dials (i.e.: you have to hold down a modifier key to adjust the other parameter). Sure, you can avoid having to do this by staying in S/Tv or A/Av mode (Nikon/Canon), but what about exposure compensation? In the 35mm film field, the Nikon N80 and Canon Elan 7N have two separate control dials. On my Canon Elan 7NE I can adjust both aperture and shutter speed in manual, exposure compensation and the non-auto parameter in Av/Tv, and exposure compensation and program shift in Program. The N80 and Elan 7N bodies go for around $300 to $350. Step up to the N100 or EOS 3, and you get even more precise parameter adjustment (from 1/2 stop to 1/3 stop IIRC)
- No depth-of-focus preview button in the lower-priced digital SLR bodies. Depth of focus lets you see the focused and unfocused zones of the picture before you take it. On a decent 35mm body (N80/Elan 7 and up), there's a button that will stop down the aperture to its set value so you can look through the viewfinder and see where the defocused zones start. The best bodies will have one button dedicated to the function. On cheaper bodies, it's either not there, or buried under some strange option. On my Elan 7NE, depth-of-focus is on a button down and to the left of the lens, so the photographer's left thumb can hit it at any time. This is where it is on my older manual Canon AE-1, so it's familiar to me. Nikon puts it to the right of the lens, so the photographer's right finger can press it.
Bottom line, you have to pay for professional-esque functions. Your average "semipro" film SLR body goes for $350 to $400, while the equivalent in the DSLR market is in the $1500 to $2000 range (Canon EOS 20D, Nikon D100, etc.). Of course you have to be serious enough to want those features.
Nikon's the company that held onto its lens mount for all these years, and Canon seemed to be the more prominent one in the digital field (or at least more prominently marketing in the northeast US, with all the Digital Rebel commercials, and all the press/sports photogs with a Canon EOS 1D and some kind of big L-Glass lens). I would've expected Canon to throw in the towel on film camera production, but Nikon? The company that was (perhaps up to this point) still manufacturing the FM3A manual camera as new?
Yes, digital is faster, and the wave of the future, etc., etc., but there are some areas where film cameras still have an edge. In particular, range of sensitivity: you can load ISO 50 slide film, or ISO 1600 negative film (but of course it's a bit grainier as you go up in ISO). Battery life is much better, especially if it's a manual-drive camera; IMO there's nothing more annoying than your camera dying after its eighth picture of the day. And each frame uses a brand new area of film, instead of the same CCD sensor over and over again. Once a pixel goes out, it's either time to live with that dead pixel, or an expensive shipment to get it serviced.
This is a bit of a disappointment, since one of the big two players is deciding to bow out. There's still Canon, Pentax, Leica (at their price, you're better off getting a medium format kit), among others. Olympus backed out of film a while ago. There's still plenty of film being manufactured (though there seems to be rumors of Kodak stopping production soon; I use Fuji, so I don't mind that much), and there's still decent 35mm film scanners that cost less than a digital SLR body alone. And of course there's the search for a decent and inexpensive E-6 film lab in the US (E-6 is the slide film process; the drugstores and chain camera stores almost always handle only C-41, which is negative film).
My favorite has to be shooting with Velvia slide film. My friends all say "Slides? Didn't those go out in the 70's?" Then I show them the 4000 dpi scan that I took of the slide, and the 20 x 30 print made from the slide. Yes, digital could do it too, but the body alone would've been above $1300; I'd rather spend that on a lens.
Nextel phones have a "speakerphone" button on the outside of the case. But of course, guess who your mobile phone service provider must be.
My i530 also says "Take call from (person)" when I open it. I think there's an option where you can disable auto-answering when you open the hinge. My personal phone is a candy bar Nokia 6015i, which is a bit more battered, but has a more intuitive UI than the Motorola.
In Win2K it doesn't make automatic backups, aside from the "Last Known Good", which rarely works when you want it to. A while ago my Win2K machine was frequently BSODing on shutdown (it was a BAD_POOL_CALLER BSOD, and it was the NVidia Forceware driver's fault; the BSOD had happened right after the GUI came up before, but later on it happened more often right after shutdown). I had become so sick of having to re-enter my CPU bus speed because I was shutting down after the BSOD that once I shut down just before the computer had reset from the BSOD. The next time I booted up, it said that C:\WINNT\System32\Config\system was corrupt. That's the main registry file. "Last Known Good" is a backup saved in "system.alt"; that was corrupted too. I had to restore from a copy of the registry that was saved from right after the textmode part of the Win2K install, which had been performed about 20 months ago. I could thankfully boot again, but I had to install drivers and applications all over again, and I couldn't use a few key Microsoft programs, especially Windows Update. I've since upgraded to a much faster machine, and given it XP Pro.
The Register had a letters section with people citing numerous errors. Among one of them was a former Data General product manager who wrote in his blog about the "howling factual errors" in the Wikipedia entry for the AViiON server line.
Among the errors is the origin of the OS that the servers ran, a System V variant called DG/UX. From the cited incorrect version (22 July 2005):
The first systems in the series were released in the summer of 1989, followed by a series of speed-bumped versions over the next few years. All of these systems ran a version of System V Unix written for them by Santa Cruz Operation, known as DG/UX, to which they added NUMA support.
The machines ran a System V Unix variant known as DG/UX, largely developed at the company's Research Triangle Park facility. DG/UX had previously run on the company's family of MV/Eclipse 32-bit minicomputers (the successors to Nova and the 16-bit Eclipse minis) but only in a very secondary role to the MV/Eclispse mainstay AOS/VS and AOS/VS II operating systems.
Night and day. And there was more (quote from the Register letters article):
"It's also interesting to observe in the main Data General article how many "futzing around" edits there are. A link polished here, a comma there, etc. Yet this article as a whole is incredibly poorly organized with no real narrative flow. And what storyline exists is wrong in significant ways; it's not even internally consistent," he writes.
"The whole lock-in or no lock-in paragraph is 75% nonsense (it seems to imply that DG went to Unix because it couldn't afford to develop a SQL database? Yet, further down the article correctly notes that DG HAD a SQL database already.) The AViiON section mixes timeframes and contains multiple out-and-out errors, etc. (I suspect that the first couple of sections source their information largely from Soul of A New Machine and seem fairly accurate and cogent, but then it falls apart.) But that would all take work and expertise to fix."
One quote springs to mind:
"If you entrench yourself behind strong fortifications, you compel the enemy seek a solution elsewhere." -- Karl von Clausewitz
Now that the haughty quote has been delivered, I have the attorney's attention. Aside from everybody writing down their login password somewhere and subverting your agressive security, there's probably some other vulnerability in your network that could prove to make a daily password rotation useless.
And it's very stressful for people to change their passwords every day, especially if you're using advanced rules (mandating at least X of the 4 character categories, minimum length, not the same as previously used, etc.). My suggestion is to have everybody install apg so they don't have to waste 30 minutes every day thinking of a password that your Novell eDirectory will allow for usage. Biweekly or weekly is more than frequent enough. Daily is insane.
Yes, and through the Windows Registry, you can disable autoplay on the CD-ROM drives. I forget what the address to this is, but you can disable it with Microsoft's very own PowerToys, as well as a number of other third-party utilities.
I personally always disable autoplay; it's an avenue for malware, and anybody can open the AUTORUN.INF file on the root directory of the CD and see what program would have been started, and then make a decision on whether that program is appropriate to be executed.
Brooks Brothers does have keychain fobs, but they're these strange woven strips of fabric looped around a keyring. The fabric strips have no solid state storage ICs, and no USB connector or Bluetooth transceiver. Strange.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps she was too jaded from hearing customers complain that Verizon has a PR problem.
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company."
From what I've heard (and what I experienced from having their service in the second half of 2000), this is nothing new for Verizon. They're only interested in the money-making aspects of the telecom business, and drag their feet on everything else. The setup of this aggressive new spam filter was probably one of those "money-making" items, since it means far less spam traffic and decreased accusations of hosting spam bots. Of course, when customers start complaining that they can't send email to specific addresses, they have to deal with Verizon's understaffed, undercapable customer service departments, who will most likely be faced with fierce opposition from the suits in opposing the "grand money-saving, liability-reducing spam filter".
Also, keep in mind that when Verizon acquired MCI, they acquired UUNet, a tier-1 ISP with some serious spam problems of their own. I wouldn't be surprised if taking on UUNet's elephant-on-their-back was part of the rationale behind the new spam filtering policies.
Or, to summarize in one word: Fear.
We already live in a country where law enforcement personnel become conditioned into packs of jackbooted thugs. Now, with laws being passed that define a greater percent of the population as criminal, those thugs will have even more cannon fodder, and more money squeezed out of the innocent as well as the truly guilty.
One line from a National Geographic article on Tiananmen Square comes to mind (paraphrasing because I can't find the text): "For every one person executed... thousands were scared into silence." Fear. This is the goal of the Bush administration, and effectively of every government that ever existed and ever will exist. They assume that respect for the law is dead, so their goal now is to govern on fear alone.
Sounds reminiscent of the bad old mainframe days, when companies were hopelessly married to a particular platform for what seemed like eternity. Now that there are more standardized server systems and less proprietary mainframes, it looks like SaaS is the next "proprietary mainframe".
Maybe I'm a bit biased against this since I perceive the reduction by companies of IT staff as a direct threat, but like it's been said before elsewhere in this comments section, SaaS works better for some setups and worse for others. Either way, it's vital to have a way to cut loose and go to a better vendor, though the ability to do that is exactly what these companies do NOT want to enable, since it means less income (through lock-in).
It's a trap!
First Carly Fiorna, and then Patricia Russo. Lucent has had some true witches at the helm over the past 10 years, haven't they?
All 10 of the top 10 best cars in Consumer Reports' 2006 Cars issue are Japanese-made.
Just today, US-based auto parts maker Dana filed for bankruptcy protection. This is a bombshell event, in addition to the ongoing malaise at GM and Ford. Billions of dollars in losses for the year ($1 billion of losses for GM in Q4'05 alone).
Just wait. There will be something to fill in this space soon.
We've already seen from the United Arab Emirates docks fiasco that almost NOTHING is inspected as it is imported from other countries. FWIH out of the 6 ports affected, only 1 had an apparatus for detecting radioactive material. But that would require a lot more inspection personnel, and probably an astronomical import duty on all products imported. The United States would become a nation of lawyers, bureaucrats, service technicians, and import inspectors. If the import duty / tax / whatever was high enough, it would choke off imports to the point that it might be more effective to make products and components in the United States again. Though this would be an artificial economic wall.
It's crazy enough to sound like it might work, and it seems to look better than the quagmire that we're in. Then again, with the energy crunch and peak oil, the whole plan might come crashing down when we're all burning wood and coal for energy because there's no more petroleum-based fuels to use to go drill/mine for crude oil, natural gas, and uranium.
Or betteryet, laptops without onboard ethernet adapters are old. Remember the bad old days, when you HAD to buy a PCMCIA ethernet card? When you had to decide between the pop-out jack that would break under stress, or the dongle that could be lost OR broken under stress? Ah yes, the bad old days. They weren't even that long ago.
I've done a bit of installing on some Sparc machines over the past year, so I know a little bit about running near-modern *nix on older hardware. My first foray into it was when I picked up a Sparcstation 5 for free. It has a 110 MHz CPU, 256 MB of RAM, and an 8-bit framebuffer. The first OS that I fully installed on it was Debian Woody for Sparc. The first installation had GNOME; it ran, but not really in a speedy fashion. I later switched back to lighter-weight environments like fluxbox or XFCE. When I picked up the Ultra 2 (2 x 300 MHz UltraSparc, 640 MB of RAM, 24-bit Creator3D framebuffer), it ran quite a bit better in Debian Woody / GNOME, thanks to the faster processors and larger memory space. Still nowhere near P3 level performance, but to be fair, this was a workstation built in 1996, and was the fastest thing in its day. When Solaris 10 came out in the free RTU license for multiprocessor machines, I installed that. Java Desktop loads up a bit slowly, so I usually log in with CDE, but the other aspects of the Ultra 2 are great for a 10-year-old computer. It can even burn 8X CD-Rs without stuttering. Your average PC back in 1996 probably wouldn't be able to sustain the throughput for 6x, let alone 8x. Once the Ultra 2 became the primary user of the 13W3 monitor due to its 24-bit framebuffer, I relegated the Sparcstation 5 to headless duty, using Debian Woody, then Sarge, and currently NetBSD 3.0.
Right now the Sparcstation series is a bit long in the tooth for graphical use beyond an ultra-light window manager like XFCE, but they were small form factor before there was a mainstream market for it. Companies like Sun and SGI made small workstations with fast processors and great throughput (and high margins and prices!).
Well, then it's time to write to your congressman to see if he can do anything about it. Too bad that he or she almost certainly accepted soft money from Microsoft in the past eight years.
It took Mike Nash 5-10 years to learn common sense? Sheesh, I picked up on this when I first looked at the Services list in NT. "What are all these things? Why do I need them? Why not shut some of them down? Why are there dependencies on this service that force me to keep it running despite the fact that I'll never use 99% of its functionality?"
Evasion'd. Regarding the decoy acronym, I only recognize two definitions for it: Root Mean Square and Richard M. Stallman.
Unacceptable. During the antitrust hearings in the Judge Penfield Jackson era, didn't someone demonstrate completely removing IE from Windows 98? Admittedly 9x is dead and NT server has advanced two generations since then, but still, why does my NT server have to have IE on it? Why does it have to have Portable Media Serial Number Service? Why does it have to have DCOM if I'm not going to use it? DirectX? ClearType?
It all comes back to my first paragraph, about "reducing the surface area", a.k.a. the "bottom-up" apporach to building a server. It's fiendishly difficult with what Microsoft provides. Then again, they're not pushing for that market at all, but still, Nash is making it sound like bottom-up is what they care about when there are obviously indications of the opposite situation elsewhere in the company's portfolio.
I saw a Dell commercial for some XPS computer. For years now, we've heard the familiar 4-marimba-note jingle at the end of every single Dell commercial, since they're Intel customer number 1. At the end of this commercial, though, was silence. I stared at the TV for a solid 10 minutes in surprise.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have the Apple commercial, claiming that Intel's chips have been going into dull PCs doing dull tasks for so long (perhaps "dull" is a pun on "Dell"?). I do own a 12" PowerBook, but I rolled my eyes at this, since it caters to Apple's lower customer tier (the ones who buy an Apple as a fashion statement; I bought mine since it's the most usable user-end *nix environment currently, and because I've used OS X before and liked it).
Intel's roadmap looks like progress in the works, though on the server side it'll take at least 8 months to catch up to AMD on the memory controller bandwidth alone.
We'll see. Consider that it's coming from the software and hardware company legendary for their high prices.
yeah, kinda like the rumor that Carl Zeiss is making lenses for Nikon.
I have a few excuses:
- The Nikon D50 and Canon 350D don't have separate shutter and aperture control dials (i.e.: you have to hold down a modifier key to adjust the other parameter). Sure, you can avoid having to do this by staying in S/Tv or A/Av mode (Nikon/Canon), but what about exposure compensation? In the 35mm film field, the Nikon N80 and Canon Elan 7N have two separate control dials. On my Canon Elan 7NE I can adjust both aperture and shutter speed in manual, exposure compensation and the non-auto parameter in Av/Tv, and exposure compensation and program shift in Program. The N80 and Elan 7N bodies go for around $300 to $350. Step up to the N100 or EOS 3, and you get even more precise parameter adjustment (from 1/2 stop to 1/3 stop IIRC)
- No depth-of-focus preview button in the lower-priced digital SLR bodies. Depth of focus lets you see the focused and unfocused zones of the picture before you take it. On a decent 35mm body (N80/Elan 7 and up), there's a button that will stop down the aperture to its set value so you can look through the viewfinder and see where the defocused zones start. The best bodies will have one button dedicated to the function. On cheaper bodies, it's either not there, or buried under some strange option. On my Elan 7NE, depth-of-focus is on a button down and to the left of the lens, so the photographer's left thumb can hit it at any time. This is where it is on my older manual Canon AE-1, so it's familiar to me. Nikon puts it to the right of the lens, so the photographer's right finger can press it.
Bottom line, you have to pay for professional-esque functions. Your average "semipro" film SLR body goes for $350 to $400, while the equivalent in the DSLR market is in the $1500 to $2000 range (Canon EOS 20D, Nikon D100, etc.). Of course you have to be serious enough to want those features.
Nikon's the company that held onto its lens mount for all these years, and Canon seemed to be the more prominent one in the digital field (or at least more prominently marketing in the northeast US, with all the Digital Rebel commercials, and all the press/sports photogs with a Canon EOS 1D and some kind of big L-Glass lens). I would've expected Canon to throw in the towel on film camera production, but Nikon? The company that was (perhaps up to this point) still manufacturing the FM3A manual camera as new?
Yes, digital is faster, and the wave of the future, etc., etc., but there are some areas where film cameras still have an edge. In particular, range of sensitivity: you can load ISO 50 slide film, or ISO 1600 negative film (but of course it's a bit grainier as you go up in ISO). Battery life is much better, especially if it's a manual-drive camera; IMO there's nothing more annoying than your camera dying after its eighth picture of the day. And each frame uses a brand new area of film, instead of the same CCD sensor over and over again. Once a pixel goes out, it's either time to live with that dead pixel, or an expensive shipment to get it serviced.
This is a bit of a disappointment, since one of the big two players is deciding to bow out. There's still Canon, Pentax, Leica (at their price, you're better off getting a medium format kit), among others. Olympus backed out of film a while ago. There's still plenty of film being manufactured (though there seems to be rumors of Kodak stopping production soon; I use Fuji, so I don't mind that much), and there's still decent 35mm film scanners that cost less than a digital SLR body alone. And of course there's the search for a decent and inexpensive E-6 film lab in the US (E-6 is the slide film process; the drugstores and chain camera stores almost always handle only C-41, which is negative film).
My favorite has to be shooting with Velvia slide film. My friends all say "Slides? Didn't those go out in the 70's?" Then I show them the 4000 dpi scan that I took of the slide, and the 20 x 30 print made from the slide. Yes, digital could do it too, but the body alone would've been above $1300; I'd rather spend that on a lens.
Solaris on Power.
Nextel phones have a "speakerphone" button on the outside of the case. But of course, guess who your mobile phone service provider must be.
My i530 also says "Take call from (person)" when I open it. I think there's an option where you can disable auto-answering when you open the hinge. My personal phone is a candy bar Nokia 6015i, which is a bit more battered, but has a more intuitive UI than the Motorola.
In Win2K it doesn't make automatic backups, aside from the "Last Known Good", which rarely works when you want it to. A while ago my Win2K machine was frequently BSODing on shutdown (it was a BAD_POOL_CALLER BSOD, and it was the NVidia Forceware driver's fault; the BSOD had happened right after the GUI came up before, but later on it happened more often right after shutdown). I had become so sick of having to re-enter my CPU bus speed because I was shutting down after the BSOD that once I shut down just before the computer had reset from the BSOD. The next time I booted up, it said that C:\WINNT\System32\Config\system was corrupt. That's the main registry file. "Last Known Good" is a backup saved in "system.alt"; that was corrupted too. I had to restore from a copy of the registry that was saved from right after the textmode part of the Win2K install, which had been performed about 20 months ago. I could thankfully boot again, but I had to install drivers and applications all over again, and I couldn't use a few key Microsoft programs, especially Windows Update. I've since upgraded to a much faster machine, and given it XP Pro.
It says "market share", not "free for all".
Among the errors is the origin of the OS that the servers ran, a System V variant called DG/UX. From the cited incorrect version (22 July 2005):
And in the current version:
Night and day. And there was more (quote from the Register letters article):
Now that the haughty quote has been delivered, I have the attorney's attention. Aside from everybody writing down their login password somewhere and subverting your agressive security, there's probably some other vulnerability in your network that could prove to make a daily password rotation useless.
And it's very stressful for people to change their passwords every day, especially if you're using advanced rules (mandating at least X of the 4 character categories, minimum length, not the same as previously used, etc.). My suggestion is to have everybody install apg so they don't have to waste 30 minutes every day thinking of a password that your Novell eDirectory will allow for usage. Biweekly or weekly is more than frequent enough. Daily is insane.
Yes, and through the Windows Registry, you can disable autoplay on the CD-ROM drives. I forget what the address to this is, but you can disable it with Microsoft's very own PowerToys, as well as a number of other third-party utilities.
I personally always disable autoplay; it's an avenue for malware, and anybody can open the AUTORUN.INF file on the root directory of the CD and see what program would have been started, and then make a decision on whether that program is appropriate to be executed.
Look who's talking. I didn't see you give a single reference to support your claims.
Brooks Brothers does have keychain fobs, but they're these strange woven strips of fabric looped around a keyring. The fabric strips have no solid state storage ICs, and no USB connector or Bluetooth transceiver. Strange.