Local recruitment agencies reported a surge in demand for taser robot service engineers. Said a spokesperson: "Yes, we have seen the demand for service engineers quadruple straight after the UPS module was introduced. Unfortunately, we have not yet been able to establish if this is the result of a module defect or something else, as of yet no engineer has returned our calls. As a matter of fact, they haven't cashed their paychecks either".
Spokespeople for the employer sited a "surge in demand" as the main reason for the vast intake of service engineers, as bulldozers loaded with large cardboard boxes drove by.
If I recall correctly it was Ron Kok, a Dutch entrepreneur, who came up with a *MUCH* more efficient production method to make them cheaper. He put the separate components inline and improved the sequence, thus taking away a lot of the media handling which caused quality issues. Quality went up, volume went up, price came down.
Did the guy get rich off it? No, because in those days he was naive and thus had it stolen and copied from right underneath his nose. He's fared better since, but he's the guy that's responsible for CDs being so dirt cheap (AFAIK, been a while since I heard this).
I know you're not serious, but my view is mildly biased by that fact that (a) I just happen to know a few that are actually worth the money (the 0.01% of the total volume) and (b) I occasionally consult as well 8-).
I know (and would normally agree), but there's a conflict between minimising the amount of services running on a platform and protection. A hosts file is more a passive way of hijacking the traffic although I ought to update it one day.
Were I to access a site I don't trust I'd use TOR, but from a Linux platform. This Windows box is in its last month anyway - it'll soon be Kubuntu + VMWare + a small install of XP to keep my mobile phones in sync until I have figured out how to do it without Windows:-).
Install a generator that can use contractors as fuel. Solves two problems at once:-)
It has as beneficial side effect that it also reduces the amount of people leaning on healthcare, so everyone wins.
The only challenge I can see is that you have to take into account the amount of alcohol these people consume. Any oven should be able to use the spontanous combustions that may occur. Maybe turning them into biofuel may be better.
I have a commercial website. If my ISP would pull such a stunt I'd drag them by their cojones into court for defacing my pages and putting my end users at risk.
Where I live I have to put up a separate page (like in Germany) where I identify my company for being responsible for the content. Adding ads to my web page over which I have no control means that they have asserted control over my pages, and I can no longer exercise my responsibility for content. What if they serve a virus? What if they decide that porn pays better?
Nope - it would be court or police (unauthorised computer use) immediately. No BS, no delay and no mercy.
Having said that, I did notice on one system that I rarely get 404s now. Any unknown domain makes me end up at GoDaddy. Now, I don't have anything against GoDaddy but I prefer a 404 over crap ads, so I wonder where this came from. No matter, I'm about to nuke and rebuild my XP build anyway - I would just like to know where it came from.
BTW, there's also http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html to suppress all the other crap whilst surfing normally. The failure messages are very instructive as you discover just who is handing your details off to advertisers..
I've looked at a number of online stores, and I actually liked the way allofmp3.com worked. So, MP3s that I can use of any of MY devices (read: treating the records like a book only that they don't go on loan) at a sensible price, and I'd buy. Just wished someone figured out that 20 secs of a quiet record throws you out before you have any idea..
Having said that, at the moment I don't pirate either because I think it's fundamentally wrong. I just don't buy any CDs anymore and the iTunes shop sees nothing of me either. I listen to the radio or go to some free locations and sponsor the artists directly (and the iPod is more busy with language courses than music these days).
With respect to a dislike of having my name inside any of the records I buy: I have no desire to have those RIAA morons after me and ruining my life just because someone else gets access to my collection. Unfortunately, I occasionally have to run Windows, so there's always the chance of infection.
And how long do you think it's going to take before that too gets falsified to protect the guilty? No thanks - I rather ensure I can prove I didn't go there in the first place.
Remember - with the RIAA you have to prove your innocence.
My experience is that you only plan so much. I rewired a Victorian house from the ground up, and the country it was in doesn't "do" ducting so I had to come up with my own flame retardant solution. It had wooden floors, and I went underneath each one to prep a duct run and re-lay every single pipe in the house (heating etc), with a small service panel worked into the flooring where required (the trick is to make it all inconspicuous - I hate tech in view other than in my workroom).
You have no idea what an advantage it is to be able to rip open the central riser and drop a cable because you decided that you want to add {whatever} to your technology. Speaker cables, new sat dish, the works, all no problem.
Oh, and if you decide to build a tech room, use open slot industrial ducting on the wall and under any desk. I have bars of it on every work desk, which means I can just take the covers off, run a new cable and close it all up. Super tidy, little hassle, no trip hazards, just make sure you route mains separately.
Last but not least - think of servicing needs. The best design allows someone else to take over, so keeping plans up to date is worth the investment (but don't go nuts - have a life:-). I numbered cables at each end with where the other end would go, and network devices had a location code (i.e. switches with multiple ports). That saves a lot of time if you do have a breakage or decide to change your mind. I never had one, but the links between data room and switches were all laid double just in case (cable was cheaper than my time:-).
Good luck. It's actually quite fun to be able to make a place really your own.
I'm puzzled by your response. Maybe I didn't make myself clear, or you didn't read what I said in full.
I'm on the woman's side. MySpace screwed up by labelling someone an offender (of whatever type) without due process. It wasn't just taking her page down, it was the fact that they made a statement with the reasons for doing so which was at best unsupported by evidence, at worst appears plain vanilla defamation.
So I'm all for this woman going public, I'm saying that MySpace suits should have used the one collective braincell they appear to share and talked to this woman about their concerns before they acted.
There is a reason why judge, jury and executors were separated once the Wild West closed shop. Mayby MySpace needs a very costly reminder of those reasons. Accusing someone of ANY crime is not something that should be done lightly, because it will ALWAYS damage the target's life. It's about ethics, not about just acting on borderline legality.
All IMHO, of course, and IANAL and any other applicable TLA..
You're forgetting that, in the process, they're labelling someone unjustly without a shred of due process or even the legal statue to do so.
More importantly, if this had been a private notification it would have been a simple dispute, but it's gone public and this woman's life is likely to be affected by it. They should be sued to smithereens for ever having dreamt up the idea and - more importantly- then relying on it absolutely,
Frankly, this is such a violation of rights that they ought to be put on an 'extraordinary rendition' flight to Singapore and be given a public flogging. IMHO this may impart executive clues like nothing else ever will...
I have been making that point on YouTube. This was someone using the community to sponsor his hobby (if not deliberately than subconsciously), which is why I didn't contribute - when you're working with limited funds the last thing you should contribute is shortsightedness.
Also look at what else could have been done for that money: developing drivers, getting a batch of OLPCs and donate them - every time you donate one you can get coverage for both OLPC and Linux.
No, instead they did about the worst thing possible - they gave MS a golden marketing opportunity. How often do you think will this "Linux crash" feature in MS presentations?
WORSE, THROUGH THEM, THE LINUX COMMUNITY PAID FOR THAT STERLING BIT OF MICROSOFT MARKETING.
The last is IMHO unforgivable. Remind me to take the name of those guys down so I can keep anything intelligent away from them. They'll be working for MS next.
Under the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 you are entitled to a copy of the information collected on you.
This means that for a MAXIMUM sum of £10 (funny how you never get a refund from it) you can ask them to trawl through the tapes to provide you with the bits where you star.
Consider:
(1) They have to find you in hours of footage (2) They will have to duplicate that data (3) They may have to blank out everyone else in the vicinity to avoid violating their privacy
Imaging this request being filed by 40 or 50 people. However, IANAL, and there's one question I haven't seen answered: what privacy do you have if you walk on the street? I have no idea..
(1) it's a first in the entire product lifetime. Not bad going, consider it a sign that it's becoming mainstream that someone has bothered at all, and it's lab only. How many IN THE WILD infections have we had for Word and Excel so far?
(2) unlike MS Office, the macro data is clearly documented in the file format (and it's a separate section file in the OO ZIP archive) and you could thus choose to zap that part from a file or, less brutal, that you stand at least a chance of examining what is in it before passing it on to the desktop. Most importantly, you can do such examination without using OO at all. Hell, you could even be perverse and write an examiner in VB:-).
(3) OO isn't just competing on price. There are features in OO that have made me a fan quite a while back. Its word prediction, for instance, is a major efficiency improver if you have to often write documents with complicated or complex names or long terminology. The ability to push out PDF forms from a text document is excellent. The fact that it only has ONE macro language instead of one for each component (VBA for Word VBA for Excel). The fact that presentations export to Flash. The ability to still read Word documents that Word itself crashes on because it FUBARed on formatting (quite a common problem). Etc etc etc. You've not used it long enough IMHO, I'm personally actually getting to a point where Word just doesn't cut it for me anymore. It may look fancy, but it doesn't do the work as well.
(4) worthy of a separate point: an absolute USP IMHO is that OO's interface has not significantly changed over the years. It has always intrigued me that nobody spotted the apparent incongruity between the prevalent feeling that switching to a Linux desktop is too much relearning, yet throwing operators in the deep with a new OS UI AS WELL AS a new Office UI is somehow acceptable. Just imagine how much time could have been saved already if they'd been on OO and were thus not subject to relearning practically everything. That, and the lack for license management is something that impacts TCO downwards..
.. until I got landed with Windows Vista Business. I have a Sony VAIO SZ4XWN and it sucks to a degree that outsucks anything else MS has ever done. It is slow, even with the fancy graphics switched off. If it needs to beep it does so a full second later than the event (rather crap with Skype ringing), and then sounds like the resources aren't really available. Worse, if there are a series of beeps it queues them, giving each beep about 1/10th of the time it really needs, spaces with seconds of nothing.
Internet Exploder has never worked on this machine as regular user. No, really, NEVER, not even after a clean restore. The only way to run IE without utilisation going to 100% on both parts of the Intel Duo is to execute it as administrator which, frankly, defeats the point. Thank Godd for Firefox.
When it hibernates, the WiFi goes offline in a way that either makes it essential to restart the box or loses connectivity with any network with a hidden SSID. When it suspends, well, just forget recovery and reboot.
When it goes into pretending it's secure it does so by blanking the screen in a way that makes you expect a BSOD next (which it hasn't done yet, but the state suspend gets it into isn't that different). What the hell was wrong with an account with elevated privileges which you were discouraged to use? Couldn't that incessant nagging be much simpler used for reminding people to run as user unless they were doing admin level tasks? Why does every little gadget and fiddle in the OS insist on plastering warnings across the screen? I'm fed up with having to can all those bloody mesages. Cute the first time, damn, incredibly bloody irritating 5 mins later, but no escape route. This crap MUST be re-used Clippy code..
A lot of software I have I didn't bother installing. I've had so much trouble with code that got upset by the way this authorisation crap works or simply crashes that I stopped trying. Why bother - I'm not going to continue with this.
I could go on but I really haven't got the energy. XP was OK-ish but this box doesn't even have XP drivers so I'm going to back up the data to its recently repaired brother, the SZ1VGN which still runs XP, zap this box and build up a Kubuntu desktop instead. And inside that I may run a VM with XP, but I will never, ever, touch Vista again if I can possibly help it. I've been using Windows from even before Worries for Workgroups, and I think this is the first time MS has come close to producing another debacle like Windows Me. No, scratch that, it's worse because they were at least not pretending so much with Me.
As of tomorrow there will be a formal ban on the deployment of Vista in any of the business I have a responsibility for, because I'm not going to waste the rest of this year clearing problems we shouldn't have in the first place. If we have to go through this pain we may as well cut over to Kubuntu (KDE is enough like Windows to lessen the shock and they're already on OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird anyway).
Vista Business sucks. It sucks on a galactic scale. It sucks to a degree that I'm no longer worried about global warming because Vista provides sufficient sucking force to turn this planet into a black hole.
.. it's a sod to rewire quickly after a disaster..
The reason most countries start overhead is because it's quicker and cheaper (and in places which flood regularly I can imagine it being safer as well). Aesthetics tend to come a lot later:-).
I got the NEC P3 at the time when everyone was still running around with the Motorola brick. It was quite funny to go and have a drink in the evening and watch dorks pulling the brick to show off, and then calmly pull the P3 out of my jacket pocket. Ah, soo subtle..
Even better, the P3 could be fitted with a diagnostics chip. I remember being at what was the last Access All Areas (hacker conf) in London and sitting next to a 12 year old kid who was scanning the vicinity with such a phone. The funny thing was that he appeared to occasionally join the conversations:-).
I had my own amusement. I bought a Samsonite briefcase with a 4 digit digital lock and had a few guys unsuccessfully trying to open it, despite spending the entire conference on it. They didn't stand a chance because of some simple misdirection. That briefcase had a 4 digit lock which had more than 10000 different combinations - it actually had 11106. You see, you didn't HAVE to use all the digits, so they spend two days entering every number from 0000 to 9999 whereas the actual combination was a single "0". I just pretended to press 4 buttons when I opened it:-).
Yes, those days were good fun.. Wasn't that the time the first flip phone was introduced, the Motorola StarTAC or something?
Slashdot Mirror
Local recruitment agencies reported a surge in demand for taser robot service engineers. Said a spokesperson: "Yes, we have seen the demand for service engineers quadruple straight after the UPS module was introduced. Unfortunately, we have not yet been able to establish if this is the result of a module defect or something else, as of yet no engineer has returned our calls. As a matter of fact, they haven't cashed their paychecks either".
Spokespeople for the employer sited a "surge in demand" as the main reason for the vast intake of service engineers, as bulldozers loaded with large cardboard boxes drove by.
No, not AFAIK (sorry, not really up on pron stars).
/is/ pretty hands-on, but (AFAIK) not in /that/ particular way :-).
The one I'm talking about
If I recall correctly it was Ron Kok, a Dutch entrepreneur, who came up with a *MUCH* more efficient production method to make them cheaper. He put the separate components inline and improved the sequence, thus taking away a lot of the media handling which caused quality issues. Quality went up, volume went up, price came down.
Did the guy get rich off it? No, because in those days he was naive and thus had it stolen and copied from right underneath his nose. He's fared better since, but he's the guy that's responsible for CDs being so dirt cheap (AFAIK, been a while since I heard this).
Bring on the popcorn, this could be fun to watch..
The irony is that I catually make more by being honest, Clients are happy to pay a premium for people they can trust!
I know you're not serious, but my view is mildly biased by that fact that (a) I just happen to know a few that are actually worth the money (the 0.01% of the total volume) and (b) I occasionally consult as well 8-).
I know (and would normally agree), but there's a conflict between minimising the amount of services running on a platform and protection. A hosts file is more a passive way of hijacking the traffic although I ought to update it one day.
:-).
Were I to access a site I don't trust I'd use TOR, but from a Linux platform. This Windows box is in its last month anyway - it'll soon be Kubuntu + VMWare + a small install of XP to keep my mobile phones in sync until I have figured out how to do it without Windows
Install a generator that can use contractors as fuel. Solves two problems at once :-)
:-)
It has as beneficial side effect that it also reduces the amount of people leaning on healthcare, so everyone wins.
The only challenge I can see is that you have to take into account the amount of alcohol these people consume. Any oven should be able to use the spontanous combustions that may occur. Maybe turning them into biofuel may be better.
Sorry, heavy lunch
I have a commercial website. If my ISP would pull such a stunt I'd drag them by their cojones into court for defacing my pages and putting my end users at risk.
Where I live I have to put up a separate page (like in Germany) where I identify my company for being responsible for the content. Adding ads to my web page over which I have no control means that they have asserted control over my pages, and I can no longer exercise my responsibility for content. What if they serve a virus? What if they decide that porn pays better?
Nope - it would be court or police (unauthorised computer use) immediately. No BS, no delay and no mercy.
Having said that, I did notice on one system that I rarely get 404s now. Any unknown domain makes me end up at GoDaddy. Now, I don't have anything against GoDaddy but I prefer a 404 over crap ads, so I wonder where this came from. No matter, I'm about to nuke and rebuild my XP build anyway - I would just like to know where it came from.
BTW, there's also http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html to suppress all the other crap whilst surfing normally. The failure messages are very instructive as you discover just who is handing your details off to advertisers..
I've looked at a number of online stores, and I actually liked the way allofmp3.com worked. So, MP3s that I can use of any of MY devices (read: treating the records like a book only that they don't go on loan) at a sensible price, and I'd buy. Just wished someone figured out that 20 secs of a quiet record throws you out before you have any idea..
Having said that, at the moment I don't pirate either because I think it's fundamentally wrong. I just don't buy any CDs anymore and the iTunes shop sees nothing of me either. I listen to the radio or go to some free locations and sponsor the artists directly (and the iPod is more busy with language courses than music these days).
With respect to a dislike of having my name inside any of the records I buy: I have no desire to have those RIAA morons after me and ruining my life just because someone else gets access to my collection. Unfortunately, I occasionally have to run Windows, so there's always the chance of infection.
And how long do you think it's going to take before that too gets falsified to protect the guilty? No thanks - I rather ensure I can prove I didn't go there in the first place.
Remember - with the RIAA you have to prove your innocence.
You know, this is one of those few occasions where bold, +10 point capitalisation is the only appropriate font for communication.
Well done.
I guess the NSA will come after them with prior art :-)
Of course. That the problem with having a real life - distracts from Slashdot..
:-).
Or, while we start trading insult, you're likely to have a reading problem yourself in a post coital state
My experience is that you only plan so much. I rewired a Victorian house from the ground up, and the country it was in doesn't "do" ducting so I had to come up with my own flame retardant solution. It had wooden floors, and I went underneath each one to prep a duct run and re-lay every single pipe in the house (heating etc), with a small service panel worked into the flooring where required (the trick is to make it all inconspicuous - I hate tech in view other than in my workroom).
:-). I numbered cables at each end with where the other end would go, and network devices had a location code (i.e. switches with multiple ports). That saves a lot of time if you do have a breakage or decide to change your mind. I never had one, but the links between data room and switches were all laid double just in case (cable was cheaper than my time :-).
You have no idea what an advantage it is to be able to rip open the central riser and drop a cable because you decided that you want to add {whatever} to your technology. Speaker cables, new sat dish, the works, all no problem.
Oh, and if you decide to build a tech room, use open slot industrial ducting on the wall and under any desk. I have bars of it on every work desk, which means I can just take the covers off, run a new cable and close it all up. Super tidy, little hassle, no trip hazards, just make sure you route mains separately.
Last but not least - think of servicing needs. The best design allows someone else to take over, so keeping plans up to date is worth the investment (but don't go nuts - have a life
Good luck. It's actually quite fun to be able to make a place really your own.
I'm puzzled by your response. Maybe I didn't make myself clear, or you didn't read what I said in full.
I'm on the woman's side. MySpace screwed up by labelling someone an offender (of whatever type) without due process. It wasn't just taking her page down, it was the fact that they made a statement with the reasons for doing so which was at best unsupported by evidence, at worst appears plain vanilla defamation.
So I'm all for this woman going public, I'm saying that MySpace suits should have used the one collective braincell they appear to share and talked to this woman about their concerns before they acted.
There is a reason why judge, jury and executors were separated once the Wild West closed shop. Mayby MySpace needs a very costly reminder of those reasons. Accusing someone of ANY crime is not something that should be done lightly, because it will ALWAYS damage the target's life. It's about ethics, not about just acting on borderline legality.
All IMHO, of course, and IANAL and any other applicable TLA..
You're forgetting that, in the process, they're labelling someone unjustly without a shred of due process or even the legal statue to do so.
More importantly, if this had been a private notification it would have been a simple dispute, but it's gone public and this woman's life is likely to be affected by it. They should be sued to smithereens for ever having dreamt up the idea and - more importantly- then relying on it absolutely,
Frankly, this is such a violation of rights that they ought to be put on an 'extraordinary rendition' flight to Singapore and be given a public flogging. IMHO this may impart executive clues like nothing else ever will...
Also look at what else could have been done for that money: developing drivers, getting a batch of OLPCs and donate them - every time you donate one you can get coverage for both OLPC and Linux.
No, instead they did about the worst thing possible - they gave MS a golden marketing opportunity. How often do you think will this "Linux crash" feature in MS presentations?
WORSE, THROUGH THEM, THE LINUX COMMUNITY PAID FOR THAT STERLING BIT OF MICROSOFT MARKETING.
The last is IMHO unforgivable. Remind me to take the name of those guys down so I can keep anything intelligent away from them. They'll be working for MS next.
Under the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 you are entitled to a copy of the information collected on you.
This means that for a MAXIMUM sum of £10 (funny how you never get a refund from it) you can ask them to trawl through the tapes to provide you with the bits where you star.
Consider:
(1) They have to find you in hours of footage
(2) They will have to duplicate that data
(3) They may have to blank out everyone else in the vicinity to avoid violating their privacy
Imaging this request being filed by 40 or 50 people. However, IANAL, and there's one question I haven't seen answered: what privacy do you have if you walk on the street? I have no idea..
This is a nice confirmation that GPL 3 is definitely on the right track.
:-)
Always nice to hear Eben is getting it right
(1) it's a first in the entire product lifetime. Not bad going, consider it a sign that it's becoming mainstream that someone has bothered at all, and it's lab only. How many IN THE WILD infections have we had for Word and Excel so far?
:-).
(2) unlike MS Office, the macro data is clearly documented in the file format (and it's a separate section file in the OO ZIP archive) and you could thus choose to zap that part from a file or, less brutal, that you stand at least a chance of examining what is in it before passing it on to the desktop. Most importantly, you can do such examination without using OO at all. Hell, you could even be perverse and write an examiner in VB
(3) OO isn't just competing on price. There are features in OO that have made me a fan quite a while back. Its word prediction, for instance, is a major efficiency improver if you have to often write documents with complicated or complex names or long terminology. The ability to push out PDF forms from a text document is excellent. The fact that it only has ONE macro language instead of one for each component (VBA for Word VBA for Excel). The fact that presentations export to Flash. The ability to still read Word documents that Word itself crashes on because it FUBARed on formatting (quite a common problem). Etc etc etc. You've not used it long enough IMHO, I'm personally actually getting to a point where Word just doesn't cut it for me anymore. It may look fancy, but it doesn't do the work as well.
(4) worthy of a separate point: an absolute USP IMHO is that OO's interface has not significantly changed over the years. It has always intrigued me that nobody spotted the apparent incongruity between the prevalent feeling that switching to a Linux desktop is too much relearning, yet throwing operators in the deep with a new OS UI AS WELL AS a new Office UI is somehow acceptable. Just imagine how much time could have been saved already if they'd been on OO and were thus not subject to relearning practically everything. That, and the lack for license management is something that impacts TCO downwards..
.. until I got landed with Windows Vista Business. I have a Sony VAIO SZ4XWN and it sucks to a degree that outsucks anything else MS has ever done. It is slow, even with the fancy graphics switched off. If it needs to beep it does so a full second later than the event (rather crap with Skype ringing), and then sounds like the resources aren't really available. Worse, if there are a series of beeps it queues them, giving each beep about 1/10th of the time it really needs, spaces with seconds of nothing.
Internet Exploder has never worked on this machine as regular user. No, really, NEVER, not even after a clean restore. The only way to run IE without utilisation going to 100% on both parts of the Intel Duo is to execute it as administrator which, frankly, defeats the point. Thank Godd for Firefox.
When it hibernates, the WiFi goes offline in a way that either makes it essential to restart the box or loses connectivity with any network with a hidden SSID. When it suspends, well, just forget recovery and reboot.
When it goes into pretending it's secure it does so by blanking the screen in a way that makes you expect a BSOD next (which it hasn't done yet, but the state suspend gets it into isn't that different). What the hell was wrong with an account with elevated privileges which you were discouraged to use? Couldn't that incessant nagging be much simpler used for reminding people to run as user unless they were doing admin level tasks? Why does every little gadget and fiddle in the OS insist on plastering warnings across the screen? I'm fed up with having to can all those bloody mesages. Cute the first time, damn, incredibly bloody irritating 5 mins later, but no escape route. This crap MUST be re-used Clippy code..
A lot of software I have I didn't bother installing. I've had so much trouble with code that got upset by the way this authorisation crap works or simply crashes that I stopped trying. Why bother - I'm not going to continue with this.
I could go on but I really haven't got the energy. XP was OK-ish but this box doesn't even have XP drivers so I'm going to back up the data to its recently repaired brother, the SZ1VGN which still runs XP, zap this box and build up a Kubuntu desktop instead. And inside that I may run a VM with XP, but I will never, ever, touch Vista again if I can possibly help it. I've been using Windows from even before Worries for Workgroups, and I think this is the first time MS has come close to producing another debacle like Windows Me. No, scratch that, it's worse because they were at least not pretending so much with Me.
As of tomorrow there will be a formal ban on the deployment of Vista in any of the business I have a responsibility for, because I'm not going to waste the rest of this year clearing problems we shouldn't have in the first place. If we have to go through this pain we may as well cut over to Kubuntu (KDE is enough like Windows to lessen the shock and they're already on OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird anyway).
Vista Business sucks. It sucks on a galactic scale. It sucks to a degree that I'm no longer worried about global warming because Vista provides sufficient sucking force to turn this planet into a black hole.
Did I mention it sucks?
OK, I'll shut up now :-)
.. it's a sod to rewire quickly after a disaster..
:-).
The reason most countries start overhead is because it's quicker and cheaper (and in places which flood regularly I can imagine it being safer as well). Aesthetics tend to come a lot later
I got the NEC P3 at the time when everyone was still running around with the Motorola brick. It was quite funny to go and have a drink in the evening and watch dorks pulling the brick to show off, and then calmly pull the P3 out of my jacket pocket. Ah, soo subtle..
:-).
:-).
Even better, the P3 could be fitted with a diagnostics chip. I remember being at what was the last Access All Areas (hacker conf) in London and sitting next to a 12 year old kid who was scanning the vicinity with such a phone. The funny thing was that he appeared to occasionally join the conversations
I had my own amusement. I bought a Samsonite briefcase with a 4 digit digital lock and had a few guys unsuccessfully trying to open it, despite spending the entire conference on it. They didn't stand a chance because of some simple misdirection. That briefcase had a 4 digit lock which had more than 10000 different combinations - it actually had 11106. You see, you didn't HAVE to use all the digits, so they spend two days entering every number from 0000 to 9999 whereas the actual combination was a single "0". I just pretended to press 4 buttons when I opened it
Yes, those days were good fun.. Wasn't that the time the first flip phone was introduced, the Motorola StarTAC or something?
Given that they're paid by taxpayers I guess that data should be public. Would stop abuse rather quickly..