No, I didnt. See #7. From wiki: "Prime95 is the name of the Microsoft Windows-based software application written by George Woltman that is used by GIMPS, a distributed computing project dedicated to finding new Mersenne prime numbers. As of September 2009[ref], 13 new Mersenne prime numbers have been found by the network of participants, and, on average, a new Mersenne prime is discovered approximately every year. The Linux-based version is called MPrime."
It's more that he did 400+ installs, clearly considers himself an "expert" yet is completely incompetent as a technician. I don't mean to be purposely insulting, but it is the truth. He has a problem installing Windows, and instead of first verifying the integrity of his hardware (using any of a wide variety of tools available for that express purpose) or he buys a new motherboard. When that doesn't fix it, he replaces everything else and buys a new power supply. When there is nothing else left, he finally thinks to replace the CPU, which all along has been an unsupported (by definition) engineering sample CPU. If he had been doing this for a 3rd party, it would have been many times cheaper for them to throw it into the trash and buy a new one then follow his diagnostic method. At no point does he use his knowledge of how a computer works, how Windows works, and specifically how 32-bit and 64-bit Windows differ, to assist his diagnosis. For comparison, Heres how I would have approached the same situation: 1. Check the setup logs for info. Perform some quick googling for known problems with this chipset and this processor in 64-bit mode. 2. Try a DVD based installation (this saves you time, you can rule out a problem with your thumb drive and a problem with your systems USB booting support at the same time) 3. Disconnect all peripherals. Anything not absolutely needed for the install goes. If you have multiple sticks of ram all but one goes too. BIOS settings are set to the most stable possible and to spec for components. (in a custom built machine, this is often NOT the mobo defaults). Disable any onboard sound/lan/usb etc. 4. Try install again 5. Run Memtest 6. Verify CPU is supported by the motherboard, check for BIOS updates that may contain microcode updates for that CPU (at this time if I had the knowledge the CPU was an engineering sample, I would already consider it highly suspect) 7. Test the system for stability by load testing it under 32-bit windows/pe/linux. I like the tool Prime95 for this, there are many others. Although it worked fine in 32-bit Windows before, that is no guarantee that it was in fact perfectly stable. Working from a known good slate with minimal variables is important. 8. Test the system by installing a 64-bit OS other then Windows, or booting to a boot disc that is 64-bit. (Is there a distro that makes a good boot disk that uses a 64-bit kernel? I've never needed one before now but I would be interested if anyone has suggestions. If it is possible to make a 64-bit PE disk, I would probably try that too.) 9. If the 64-bit linux works without issue, I would probably proceed to start looking for obscure windows compatibility related causes. Presumably the 64-bit linux would have had stability problems also in this case, I would have to assume the problem lies in the cpu or motherboard, or the combination of the two. If I knew the CPU was an engineering sample, I would replace it first. Otherwise, I would contact Intel, the chipset maker (generally Intel for Dual Cores) and the motherboard makers tech support to see if they knew of similar issues. Tech support often has access to beta firmwares or by request only hotfixes they don't publish. If they had no solutions, I would replace motherboard or CPU, whichever is cheapest, one followed by the other.
This list is pretty long, because it is a fairly obscure problem (99% of similar problems would be found by #1-6) , but it would be faster and cheaper then throwing hardware at it (and does not rely on having a large stockpile of spare components to swap out with, or waiting on shipping or trips to the store), If you went to a mechanic because your car was making a noise, and he solved it by replacing every component one by one until you had a new car, you'd hardly call him a master mechanic. The same thing here. He throws hardware at a pc problem the way a complete amateur would. Our industry is FULL of self-proclaimed experts, who know little but claim to know everything. I
By the way, that article title was bullshit, it was about a 3rd party product that integrates with Microsoft's own WSUS server (used to distribute and control patching of Microsoft software) and uses it's api to distribute third party patches. It costs money, a decent amount of money. MS is not taking on the task of distributing 3rd party patches. You can read my comment on that story if you want to learn more about Secunia's product, I beta tested it. It's bad enough the editors do their best to pass on ignorance and misinformation, please don't help them.
I was part of the beta test. CSI 3.0 is a vulnerability scanner similar to their PSI software for home users. The difference being it remotely scans hosts over the network. It compares applications it finds on the pcs to a database, and lets you know if anyone of them have security updates available, existing unpatched security flaws, or are end of lifed/discontinued. The results include links to download the appropriate patches when available. The 4.0 version adds integration with WSUS A little used feature of WSUS is the ability to package non-Microsoft software for it, use a cert to sign it, and push it out to clients (assuming they have the cert you used to sign it added ot the local cert store. The hassle involved has made it seldom, if ever used, because there are easier ways to push out updates.
What they have done is create software that automates creating and signing the cert, distributing it to clients, signing the packages they have pre-made for you in their database, and adding them to the WSUS server. You can run a scan on your network, find out what software is actually out there in the wild (if you have ever had to wrangle a team of developers or designers that actually need the ability to install things on their own authority you can realize how useful that would be) and add packages to WSUS. you can then use WSUS to deploy them just like a Windows update. It actually is pretty slick, of course it all depends on their ability to provide a large and well tested database of patches.
I didn't have the time or resources during the short beta period to do a real test deployment, but what I saw seemed to work well. Of course the headline is completely wrong, MS has nothing to do with this, it is a vendor using a published api to extend their product. I have repeatedly contacted Secunia to obtain pricing info, but have NEVER received a reply. It is a pity because I like PSI quite a bit, and could probably have gotten a reasonable price approved.
I'm sure the best and brightest in your field will be knocking down your door when you develop a reputation for suing your own employees with frivolous lawsuits. No court is going to hold a non-technical employee liable for getting an infection, especially if they didn't intentionally break established IT policy you made them agree to and trained them on. If they did break policy, you can probably fire them without worrying to much about wrongful termination suits, although it might vary from state to state. Getting damages is just a pipe dream though, employees are not responsible for damage from accidents, generally even if they were negligent.
Please, enlighten me why sharepoint costs $50,000? I have several customers who run it on a single server, that also has other duties (unless you have a very large number of users, sharepoint server uses little resources). You will need licensing of Office and Windows for every employee, but the majority of offices in the real world already have that. At the end of the day, sharepoint is just a web server, it does not need anything special from the hardware. So lets say 2 redundant servers, about 2.5k each. Licenses for server 2008, iirc around $700 each. If they are a Windows shop already (and if not, then sharepoint is a bad idea_ they already have CALs and office licenses for all their users, so that's not an issue. Lets say $1k for some sort of backup solution. So before labor, and there's a ton of competition in the sharepoint world so labor is fairly cheap, we are at what, $7400 in "dedicated hardware and licenses" for a solution that could probably serve a few thousand users quite well depending on the nature of how they use it. I'm assuming of course the actual documents are stored on a separate file server/SAN hardware already. Seeing how his whole division has no real IT staff, I doubt they even have that many users.
There's a lot of things not to like about Sharepoint, it's a proprietary solution with the usual problems proprietary solutions have. But it integrates quite well with Office and is easy enough to use and customize the secretary can figure it out. To be honest, I would probably not recommend Sharepoint for his situation simply because when amateurs try to maintain a Sharepoint installation things tend to go horribly wrong, mostly because the patches and upgrades can be a bit of a clusterfuck if you don't carefully follow the steps to prepare for them. Where you came up with $50,000, especially without even knowing the number of end users, is a mystery to me.
What the market is offering will always be the lowest they can pay and still get workers. If they had no workers at the wage they offered, they would raise the price they offered, or invest in automation to replace a bunch of extremely low wage low skill jobs with a few better paying high skill jobs. Saying people in America "won't" do the work is ridiculous. They aren't offering a price that makes it worthwhile to an American. It's not as if Mexicans magically have more tolerance for difficult work, it's the fact that the wage they get away with offering is so low that an American living in America could never hope to support a family on it. Somehow agriculture and construction still happens in developed countries without access to the mythical super-human super-cheap Mexican migrant. In many cases, the American may be legally prohibited from even trying to get these jobs, because the wage is below what he is legally allowed to work for.
If I built a hospital, and offered jobs for doctors at $10/hour, would I have any takers? Of course not, $10 hour would not cover the expenses and risks of being a doctor, not to mention a lifetime of work at $10/hour would never pay off the cost of medical school. Does that mean Americans are unwilling to become doctors? Should we import anyone from 3rd world countries that claims to be a doctor and is willing to work for $10?
I'm not against immigration, indeed I strongly believe our entire system should be ripped out and replaced with a simpler system that results in guaranteed citizenship after a few years (immigrants who can't vote are not as invested in the future and prosperity of our country, and can easily be intimidated by the threat of deportation). When people immigrate here, especially people with advanced education and skills, and want to stay here and build a family and life here, we are the stronger and better for it. Constantly importing the cheapest labor the world has to offer, and sending them back as soon as the job is done, is a race to the bottom.
If Mexicans want to lobby for changes in American politics, they should probably lobby for an end to the misguided "war on drugs" of which they are a major casualty. Because American politicians refuse to admit they made a mistake, they have created a massive source of revenue to feed criminal organizations and corruption in Mexico. That is hurting more Mexicans, and causing more damage to the Mexican economy (presumably Mexico does not want to be Americas source for migrant farm workers at slave wages forever) then our immigration policy ever could.
Welcome to economics 101: Opportunity cost. Right now, investing in congressmen gives obscenely high returns, with little risk. Even when the bubble you paid them off to create bursts, they bail you out in a way that makes you even more money. Investing in this might be guaranteed to return a sizable profit at the end of 8 years it takes to build , and the 10+ years of operation it takes just to pay off it's construction. But that's 18 years you could have been making money hand over fist, and have even more money to invest. And assuming you do build that plant, and pay off the costs, and start seeing a profit? The people who invested in congressmen are going to use them to help themselves to a sizable percentage of your profits. After all, it's easy to paint your company as an evil environment destroying mega-corp making billions in revenue on the backs of the working man, and pass taxes that will end up as wealth redistribution to the politically connected.
It's not enough to make profit, to attract large scale investment you must make MORE profit then the other available opportunities, or people who invest in you are throwing away money. Seeing as it is fair to expect people with $1 bil in capital to invest to do some research before investing, why would they invest in something that will make modest returns many years from now (assuming the plant gets finished on time, underbudget, and the EPA doesn't kill it completely halfway through) they could make massive returns right now with 0 risk?
By the government policy of failing upward, he is not only the right guy, he is the only guy! Noone else has failed on a scale to prove they really have what it takes to fail at this and still come out smelling like roses.
Apple has a long history of failure when it comes to power adapters. The first run of iBooks had these terrible round adapters wheer the plug fit in the middle.and the cable to the wall came off at a right angle. The insulation on the cable was translucent. As you used it, the cable would break inside the insulation right after the strain relief. The result would be it would spark and burn inside the insulation as you used it. It was quite a sight. Out of an order of about 50 of them for the teachers at my school, 20 of them were completely broken, and another 20 only working intermittently, after a year. Apple denied the problem even existed, and charged something like $75 for replacement adapters (even though the cable alone was bad, they would only sell whole adapters. After some time they admitted the problem existed, and offered to replace them, but would not refund the money spent on purchasing 20+ replacement adapters before they finally admitted their mistake.
The 20th anniversary Mac was a collectors item, meant to be an exclusive item for execs and the well to do. Unfortunately it blew chunks and they couldn't give them away. To own one was supposed to be a status symbol, but what it conveyed was "I'm a tool and don't know shit about computers". Especially as their price plummeted in desperation. A collectors item should be rare and hard to find, they were being sold for a pittance in the back of mac magazines with the refurb g3's and performa systems. Ask a mac collector what piece in their collection they are proudest of, it will probably be some rare revision of a mac classic, not the 20th anniversary edition. It failed as a computer, it failed as a collectors item, it failed as a product. it belongs on the list. If they had made 500 of them they probably would have done ok (although never made back their R+D cost).
I also work for an IT contractor, although fairly small so I can go smack the sales guys on the head a few doors over as needed. I go for option B/E all the time. In my view, IT is kind of like a a bottomless pit you throw money into. You can throw more and more, but there is ALWAYS something else you can do. There's always an extra backup system you can add, an extra redundancy, an user experience you can improve, etc. But businesses have finite IT budgets, and all the slick sales guys in the world won't change that. So seeing as how there's a practically infinite opportunities to spend IT money in an organization that will have tangible benefits, I don't see the point in letting the sales guys get away with wasting their money. If I feel its a waste, I tell them that, and point out 2 or 3 things to them and the sales guys that should be higher priority. In my experience, the sales guys in IT are some of the most easily influenced by other salesmen I've ever met. A vendor comes through, gives a demonstration of their network appliance or software package of the week, tells them how all their customers will be knocking down the door to give them their money to buy it, and uses every tired old pitch technique in the book. The same techniques the sales guys use on their customers every day. And they buy it hook, line, and sinker. They go out and tell all their customers they have to have X, even when they themselves don't really understand what it does, but the vendors salesman told them so. Someone needs to inject some reality into the situation, or you wind up with a customer that has spent their entire budget on the latest buzzwords and their basic IT infrastructure is a disaster. Whether we spent their IT money on buzzwords, or we spent their IT money on things they needed, we still got their money. But one way leads to the customer saying at the end of the year "We spent $x on IT with you guys, and we still have tons of problems! Our PC's crash, our network is slow, our backups don't work, wtf?" and the other way leads to building a long term relationship with the customer that will keep them as our customer.
Uncontrolled greed is the enemy of IT contracting in my mind. We are all in business to make money, but wanting to make money and being blinded by greed are very different. If every time you went to the doctor, he tried to sell you some new wonder drug you can only get from him, the first you might be inclined to believe him, after all he is the doctor, he knows more about medicine then you do. So you would buy it, and the doctor would make extra money. But when the medicine didn't make you feel better, and everytime you went back he wanted to sell you a new, different wonder drug, that THIS time would solve all your problems, pretty quickly you would find a new doctor. Next thing you know, the practice that doctor has built up over a decade is gone. The same thing for IT. Most of our customers don't know what they have, they don't understand it, they don't know what they need. They rely on us to tell them. But if we tell them lies, we will make a lot of money in the short term, but eventually they will get tired of shoveling money at us and seeing no results.
Besides, is helping some sleazebag salesman make an extra $1000 in commission (that he would not share with you even if he saw you laying half dead in the gutter) worth your professional ethics?
I tried to process an eOpen license last week. When the VLSC site finally was up, I went to add the license to our account, only to be completely unable to find an option to do so. Finally I gave up in frustration, and called their tech support line. I was on hold for 2.5 hours, and when they finally answered, was told they "forgot" that functionality when they did the "upgrade" to the VLSC from the old eOpen site. Luckily I already have the media and such, and can go ahead and build the server and put the product key in later, but it is a pain in the ass.
The old eOpen site was pretty terrible, I have to give MS credit for making something worse.
The presumption of innocence IS THE CORRECT ATTITUDE. Humans have an illogical tendency to jump to conclusions, presume guilt, and go on witch hunts. Presuming innocence until proven guilty by facts is the best way to stop that irrational behavior and protect the innocent. Someone who like child porn and intentionally seeks it out (and is therefore believed to be directly or indirectly a danger to children, the whole reasoning behind child porn being illegal in the first place) is not going to download one video, delete it, and never download it again. Everything about the circumstances points to his story being correct, Limewire is famous for misnamed files, and its not the first time I've heard of there being kiddie porn on it. He did not have a collection, nor did he have it even saved, it was clearly deleted. There is no evidence he distributed it, sought it, or wanted it. If there is more to this case the FBI needs to reveal it, of course they won't have to because they have used the fact the legal system is rigged in their favor in this kind of case to scare him into a plea bargain.
I know someone who is happily married, with 2 children. Their family has a very difficult time finding a place to live. The reason? When the Father was 18, he had consensual sex with his future wife, who was 16. Her family found out and pressed statutory rape charges. As a result, he is on the sex offender list, which is especially ironic because the "punishment" now hurts the supposed victim, and her children. The state has done far more harm to her then he ever did.
The police have no interest in justice. Every time you see a policemen, do not think he is there to protect you, or seek justice. His sole purpose is to be a crony to a politician, whether that politician is the DA, or the Mayor, or the governor, or the President. His job is to implicate as many people as possible in as many violations of the law as possible, to be used against them at his masters discretion. Every politician wants to look tough on crime, especially on pedophiles, and keep the population certain that HE is the one standing between their children and the groping hands of molesters. So the police are encouraged to round up as many people who can be labeled pedophiles as possible, and make sure the public is constantly reminded they are walking amongst them.
Just look at this article. The FBI tells people if you download child porn accidentally, call the authorities immediately. Presumably so they can offer you a plea "bargain" like this guy for turning yourself in, and only give you 3.5 years, plus 10 years parole, and a lifetime of discrimination on the sex offenders list. It is the exact opposite of what any competent lawyer would tell you to do, which is never admit to anything, never talk to the police, never allow them in your house, car, or computer without a warrant.
If you wanted to block outside dns, why would you blacklist instead of whitelist? Any decent firewall should be able to block DNS requests leaving the network except from the local dns server.
NASA can not afford accidents, not because of the sanctity of human life or any nonsense like that, but because it will kill NASA and probably manned spaceflight in this country in general. Colombia very nearly killed the shuttle program entirely, before a successor was even on the drawing board. People are willing to accept that being an astronaut is dangerous, but a lot of people look up to them, and when a bunch of them explode in a ball of fire over Texas in an entirely preventable accident, the PR impact is catastrophic. Even privately funded spaceflight will get shut down (in this country at least) if it has too many high profile accidents. Even if in reality the cost in lives is minuscule compared to what we lose daily in car accidents or lung cancer from smoking, a few big accidents in a row and the politicians will see "stopping the reckles endangerment of human lives" as a way to score some cheap votes. If human beings were rational and logical, you'd have a point, but we aren't, and too many astronaut funerals on TV will inevitably cause a kneejerk reaction.
I deal with malware quite a bit. The most common infection source I have seen lately has been unpatched adobe reader, java, or flash plugins. That and people who click those "Your computer has registry error" banners and install whatever it asks them too. WSUS makes keeping all the systems on a network updated with Windows updates very simple, but unless you have a tightly controlled environment keeping all the plug-ins and such updated automatically is much more difficult. Home users can use the excellent Secunia PSI for free to make sure they are keeping on top of updates, as it scans all the programs and warns you if any are out of date.
Miami was hit by Hurricane Andrew(a Cat 5), it caused a lot of damage in Homestead and some other areas but nothing really on the scale of Katrina. We are pretty used to hurricanes in Florida, and most Floridians know to take precautions, including getting the fuck out of dodge when they call your area an evacuation area. South Florida is general at sea level, not below it, and we have extensive drainage systems. Florida has extremely strict building codes to make buildings that are much more likely to survive a hurricane. The last hurricane to hit South Florida did relatively minor damage, although power was out for about a week in most places (this was due to Florida Power and Lighting's horrendous maintenance policies they had enacted since they realized the state would bail them out of any hurricane damage losses, so they stopped doing the maintenance that would prevent most of the damage). We also don't have as big a poverty problem as New Orleans does, so FEMA will actually come help us. For those of us used to living through hurricanes, Katrina was something on a whole different level. In South Florida, if you make it through the night and the storm passes, you know you are going to be ok. Katrina dragged on for weeks.
I think the city of New Orleans, and the state of Louisiana need to share in the responsibility. If your city is one broken levee away from disaster, you would think you would perform independent audits of your levee infrastructure. If the army core of engineers wont fix it, the feds wont fix it, the state won't fix it, then it is up to the people of that city on whose lives depend on it, to cough up the money however they can to fix it. They managed to build a football stadium, they can get a hold of funds to audit and repair levees. They also lacked adequate planning and preparation for shelters, evacuation transportation, and relief supplies. These are all simple things that we do here in South Florida that the government should have been doing in New Orleans, and the people need to take them to task for that. A hurricane in the gulf is not an extraordinary event, that can't be planned for. It is not an alien invasion or godzilla attack. If you are on the east coast, especially the gulf region, it is never a question of if a hurricane is going to hit you, but when. On the local news media here (where a lot of attention is paid to hurricanes for obvious reasons) I remember it generally came up about once a season when a hurricane was predicted to enter the gulf how bad it could be if it hit Lousiana. Apparently the local weather guy here has more sense then the entire New Orleans government?
I have firefox 3.5.5 on Win7, 10+ add-ons, and have left firefox open with 4-5 different windows, with 10+ tabs each, open for 4 days now. My memory usage is 80 megs. It sounds like either 1 particular add-on you use has nasty memory leaks, or the problem is more likely with flash or some other plug-in.
Just for kicks, if you don't need any of the fancy features, you can still use the old laserjet 4 drivers for brand new HP laserjet printers. Every large enterprise I've been in has standardized on them, they must be doing something right. Their consumer grade hardware is total shit though, a customer of ours decided to "save" some money by buying some printers from Best buy instead of the printers we recommended. They bought 2 HP printers, the drivers took 45 minutes to install out of the box.
After the first one, I tosssed the cds in the trash and downloaded the "plug in play" drivers from the hp site, they only took 15-20 minutes to install.
You can probably summarize this to: Don't buy anything Cisco thats not a Router, Switch, or Firewall (honestly the firewall is pretty iffy as well). Their other products seem designed to trade in on the name recognition their core business has created, but are generally sub par. I say this as someone who loves and defends Cisco's core networking gear. Would you buy a router from Microsoft, based on Windows? Of course not. Don't buy a server from Cisco (even if they call it a network appliance). Vendor lock-in is always a bad idea, Cisco lock-in is a world of pain. They will bleed you for money every chance they get, and not even realize they are doing it. Want to update to fix a crippling bug? Better have renewed your Smartnet. Want to enable a feature supported by your device? Better check to make sure your device is licensed for that. Oh, and you will need to buy client licenses for every piece of equipment that interacts with it, and a support agreement for those too.
The one positive side effect of the Cisco way is there is a ton of cheap older hardware out there to train on, Cisco makes reselling the equipment with support intact almost impossible so businesses don't want to touch it.
Authentication and dedicated servers are not mutually exclusive, every game I can think of since Quake 3 (and probably earlier) has authenticated the player against a master server before letting them join. While possible to run hacked servers, it generally requires everyone involved to have the hacked client, and they have always been few in number and full of hackers and such to make a guaranteed shitty player experience. This is about selling DLC, plain and simple. I know that this decision is going to cost them my sale for MW2 and Rage. I bought the first Modern Warfare and loved it and was already sold on the second one when they announced this nonsense. They've lost my sale, and it will probably be blamed on piracy and used as an excuse to shove more drm and more DLC down our throats. Speaking of DLC, it has also cost Bioware a sale of Dragon Age, I was actually credit card in hand ready to buy it when I found out about the 3 or 4 different "editions" with different amounts of content, and even the most expensive one still doesn't get you all the content, theres more DLC to buy. It's ridiculous! Why buy and navigate the DLC maze they have created when I can pirate and have all the content and all the DLC and all the pre-oder "rewards" without jumping through hoops?
Actually, I think the article is complete bullshit for precisely this reason. The "lost decade" wasn't MS twiddling their thumbs. That big gap between XP and Vista? 90% of that was MS working on security. When worms began running rampant MS realized it had a major problem. It takes a long time to go from a codebase completely unconcerned with security to reasonably secure. A lot of the growing pains with Vista can be attributed to MS trying to wean application developers off assuming they were a local admin all the time, even if there was no need. After xp was released, they spent a lot of time on tracking down and fixing holes, along with implementing new tech to mitigate existing holes. Hell when XP came out they didn't even have a way to update automatically. Prior to XP Sp1, security in Windows was practially non-existent, and taking remote control of a Windows machine was trivial. Now Windows is a hell of a lot more secure out of the box, and the tools exist to make it pretty damn secure overall. In my opinion this "lost decade" nonsense is simply MS paying the price for a previous decade of laziness. They didn't bother to learn the lessons of Unix and other OS's before them and build with security in mind from the beginning, and paid the price.
To me the transition from Gates to Balmer can be seen as a maturing of MS. Under Gates MS acted like a schoolyard bully. Petulant, overly aggressive, petty, and ultimately self defeating. That MS could not have survived in the enterprise world (aka the people who actually buy Windows licenses) in the long term. A constant upgrade treadmill with little attention paid to management or backwards compatibility. Deliberately sabotaging the competition, with no regard to how it will affect their customers or their long term health. Look at the Java debacle, MS acted like assholes and as a result, I still have to go install the JRE every time I install Windows, hosting java based apps on Windows is practically nonexistent (giving market share to Linux), and IE is the retarded step child of internet browsers due mainly to it's terrible javascript engine. how much money do you think MS pissed away defending antitrust suits here and in the EU? How much did they have to spend on bribing politicians (excuse me, "campaign donations") to get off as lightly as they did?
In my opinion, from a technical point of view, MS's products are better now then they have ever been. Which they desperately need because Linux is closing fast and it is increasingly difficult to justify their licensing costs.
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No, I didnt. See #7.
From wiki:
"Prime95 is the name of the Microsoft Windows-based software application written by George Woltman that is used by GIMPS, a distributed computing project dedicated to finding new Mersenne prime numbers. As of September 2009[ref], 13 new Mersenne prime numbers have been found by the network of participants, and, on average, a new Mersenne prime is discovered approximately every year. The Linux-based version is called MPrime."
It's more that he did 400+ installs, clearly considers himself an "expert" yet is completely incompetent as a technician. I don't mean to be purposely insulting, but it is the truth. He has a problem installing Windows, and instead of first verifying the integrity of his hardware (using any of a wide variety of tools available for that express purpose) or he buys a new motherboard. When that doesn't fix it, he replaces everything else and buys a new power supply. When there is nothing else left, he finally thinks to replace the CPU, which all along has been an unsupported (by definition) engineering sample CPU. If he had been doing this for a 3rd party, it would have been many times cheaper for them to throw it into the trash and buy a new one then follow his diagnostic method. At no point does he use his knowledge of how a computer works, how Windows works, and specifically how 32-bit and 64-bit Windows differ, to assist his diagnosis. For comparison, Heres how I would have approached the same situation:
1. Check the setup logs for info. Perform some quick googling for known problems with this chipset and this processor in 64-bit mode.
2. Try a DVD based installation (this saves you time, you can rule out a problem with your thumb drive and a problem with your systems USB booting support at the same time)
3. Disconnect all peripherals. Anything not absolutely needed for the install goes. If you have multiple sticks of ram all but one goes too. BIOS settings are set to the most stable possible and to spec for components. (in a custom built machine, this is often NOT the mobo defaults). Disable any onboard sound/lan/usb etc.
4. Try install again
5. Run Memtest
6. Verify CPU is supported by the motherboard, check for BIOS updates that may contain microcode updates for that CPU (at this time if I had the knowledge the CPU was an engineering sample, I would already consider it highly suspect)
7. Test the system for stability by load testing it under 32-bit windows/pe/linux. I like the tool Prime95 for this, there are many others. Although it worked fine in 32-bit Windows before, that is no guarantee that it was in fact perfectly stable. Working from a known good slate with minimal variables is important.
8. Test the system by installing a 64-bit OS other then Windows, or booting to a boot disc that is 64-bit. (Is there a distro that makes a good boot disk that uses a 64-bit kernel? I've never needed one before now but I would be interested if anyone has suggestions. If it is possible to make a 64-bit PE disk, I would probably try that too.)
9. If the 64-bit linux works without issue, I would probably proceed to start looking for obscure windows compatibility related causes. Presumably the 64-bit linux would have had stability problems also in this case, I would have to assume the problem lies in the cpu or motherboard, or the combination of the two. If I knew the CPU was an engineering sample, I would replace it first. Otherwise, I would contact Intel, the chipset maker (generally Intel for Dual Cores) and the motherboard makers tech support to see if they knew of similar issues. Tech support often has access to beta firmwares or by request only hotfixes they don't publish. If they had no solutions, I would replace motherboard or CPU, whichever is cheapest, one followed by the other.
This list is pretty long, because it is a fairly obscure problem (99% of similar problems would be found by #1-6) , but it would be faster and cheaper then throwing hardware at it (and does not rely on having a large stockpile of spare components to swap out with, or waiting on shipping or trips to the store), If you went to a mechanic because your car was making a noise, and he solved it by replacing every component one by one until you had a new car, you'd hardly call him a master mechanic. The same thing here. He throws hardware at a pc problem the way a complete amateur would. Our industry is FULL of self-proclaimed experts, who know little but claim to know everything. I
By the way, that article title was bullshit, it was about a 3rd party product that integrates with Microsoft's own WSUS server (used to distribute and control patching of Microsoft software) and uses it's api to distribute third party patches. It costs money, a decent amount of money. MS is not taking on the task of distributing 3rd party patches. You can read my comment on that story if you want to learn more about Secunia's product, I beta tested it. It's bad enough the editors do their best to pass on ignorance and misinformation, please don't help them.
I was part of the beta test. CSI 3.0 is a vulnerability scanner similar to their PSI software for home users. The difference being it remotely scans hosts over the network. It compares applications it finds on the pcs to a database, and lets you know if anyone of them have security updates available, existing unpatched security flaws, or are end of lifed/discontinued. The results include links to download the appropriate patches when available. The 4.0 version adds integration with WSUS A little used feature of WSUS is the ability to package non-Microsoft software for it, use a cert to sign it, and push it out to clients (assuming they have the cert you used to sign it added ot the local cert store. The hassle involved has made it seldom, if ever used, because there are easier ways to push out updates.
What they have done is create software that automates creating and signing the cert, distributing it to clients, signing the packages they have pre-made for you in their database, and adding them to the WSUS server. You can run a scan on your network, find out what software is actually out there in the wild (if you have ever had to wrangle a team of developers or designers that actually need the ability to install things on their own authority you can realize how useful that would be) and add packages to WSUS. you can then use WSUS to deploy them just like a Windows update. It actually is pretty slick, of course it all depends on their ability to provide a large and well tested database of patches.
I didn't have the time or resources during the short beta period to do a real test deployment, but what I saw seemed to work well. Of course the headline is completely wrong, MS has nothing to do with this, it is a vendor using a published api to extend their product. I have repeatedly contacted Secunia to obtain pricing info, but have NEVER received a reply. It is a pity because I like PSI quite a bit, and could probably have gotten a reasonable price approved.
I'm sure the best and brightest in your field will be knocking down your door when you develop a reputation for suing your own employees with frivolous lawsuits. No court is going to hold a non-technical employee liable for getting an infection, especially if they didn't intentionally break established IT policy you made them agree to and trained them on. If they did break policy, you can probably fire them without worrying to much about wrongful termination suits, although it might vary from state to state. Getting damages is just a pipe dream though, employees are not responsible for damage from accidents, generally even if they were negligent.
Please, enlighten me why sharepoint costs $50,000? I have several customers who run it on a single server, that also has other duties (unless you have a very large number of users, sharepoint server uses little resources). You will need licensing of Office and Windows for every employee, but the majority of offices in the real world already have that. At the end of the day, sharepoint is just a web server, it does not need anything special from the hardware. So lets say 2 redundant servers, about 2.5k each. Licenses for server 2008, iirc around $700 each. If they are a Windows shop already (and if not, then sharepoint is a bad idea_ they already have CALs and office licenses for all their users, so that's not an issue. Lets say $1k for some sort of backup solution. So before labor, and there's a ton of competition in the sharepoint world so labor is fairly cheap, we are at what, $7400 in "dedicated hardware and licenses" for a solution that could probably serve a few thousand users quite well depending on the nature of how they use it. I'm assuming of course the actual documents are stored on a separate file server/SAN hardware already. Seeing how his whole division has no real IT staff, I doubt they even have that many users.
There's a lot of things not to like about Sharepoint, it's a proprietary solution with the usual problems proprietary solutions have. But it integrates quite well with Office and is easy enough to use and customize the secretary can figure it out. To be honest, I would probably not recommend Sharepoint for his situation simply because when amateurs try to maintain a Sharepoint installation things tend to go horribly wrong, mostly because the patches and upgrades can be a bit of a clusterfuck if you don't carefully follow the steps to prepare for them. Where you came up with $50,000, especially without even knowing the number of end users, is a mystery to me.
What the market is offering will always be the lowest they can pay and still get workers. If they had no workers at the wage they offered, they would raise the price they offered, or invest in automation to replace a bunch of extremely low wage low skill jobs with a few better paying high skill jobs. Saying people in America "won't" do the work is ridiculous. They aren't offering a price that makes it worthwhile to an American. It's not as if Mexicans magically have more tolerance for difficult work, it's the fact that the wage they get away with offering is so low that an American living in America could never hope to support a family on it. Somehow agriculture and construction still happens in developed countries without access to the mythical super-human super-cheap Mexican migrant. In many cases, the American may be legally prohibited from even trying to get these jobs, because the wage is below what he is legally allowed to work for.
If I built a hospital, and offered jobs for doctors at $10/hour, would I have any takers? Of course not, $10 hour would not cover the expenses and risks of being a doctor, not to mention a lifetime of work at $10/hour would never pay off the cost of medical school. Does that mean Americans are unwilling to become doctors? Should we import anyone from 3rd world countries that claims to be a doctor and is willing to work for $10?
I'm not against immigration, indeed I strongly believe our entire system should be ripped out and replaced with a simpler system that results in guaranteed citizenship after a few years (immigrants who can't vote are not as invested in the future and prosperity of our country, and can easily be intimidated by the threat of deportation). When people immigrate here, especially people with advanced education and skills, and want to stay here and build a family and life here, we are the stronger and better for it. Constantly importing the cheapest labor the world has to offer, and sending them back as soon as the job is done, is a race to the bottom.
If Mexicans want to lobby for changes in American politics, they should probably lobby for an end to the misguided "war on drugs" of which they are a major casualty. Because American politicians refuse to admit they made a mistake, they have created a massive source of revenue to feed criminal organizations and corruption in Mexico. That is hurting more Mexicans, and causing more damage to the Mexican economy (presumably Mexico does not want to be Americas source for migrant farm workers at slave wages forever) then our immigration policy ever could.
Welcome to economics 101: Opportunity cost. Right now, investing in congressmen gives obscenely high returns, with little risk. Even when the bubble you paid them off to create bursts, they bail you out in a way that makes you even more money. Investing in this might be guaranteed to return a sizable profit at the end of 8 years it takes to build , and the 10+ years of operation it takes just to pay off it's construction. But that's 18 years you could have been making money hand over fist, and have even more money to invest. And assuming you do build that plant, and pay off the costs, and start seeing a profit? The people who invested in congressmen are going to use them to help themselves to a sizable percentage of your profits. After all, it's easy to paint your company as an evil environment destroying mega-corp making billions in revenue on the backs of the working man, and pass taxes that will end up as wealth redistribution to the politically connected.
It's not enough to make profit, to attract large scale investment you must make MORE profit then the other available opportunities, or people who invest in you are throwing away money. Seeing as it is fair to expect people with $1 bil in capital to invest to do some research before investing, why would they invest in something that will make modest returns many years from now (assuming the plant gets finished on time, underbudget, and the EPA doesn't kill it completely halfway through) they could make massive returns right now with 0 risk?
By the government policy of failing upward, he is not only the right guy, he is the only guy! Noone else has failed on a scale to prove they really have what it takes to fail at this and still come out smelling like roses.
Apple has a long history of failure when it comes to power adapters. The first run of iBooks had these terrible round adapters wheer the plug fit in the middle.and the cable to the wall came off at a right angle. The insulation on the cable was translucent. As you used it, the cable would break inside the insulation right after the strain relief. The result would be it would spark and burn inside the insulation as you used it. It was quite a sight. Out of an order of about 50 of them for the teachers at my school, 20 of them were completely broken, and another 20 only working intermittently, after a year. Apple denied the problem even existed, and charged something like $75 for replacement adapters (even though the cable alone was bad, they would only sell whole adapters. After some time they admitted the problem existed, and offered to replace them, but would not refund the money spent on purchasing 20+ replacement adapters before they finally admitted their mistake.
The 20th anniversary Mac was a collectors item, meant to be an exclusive item for execs and the well to do. Unfortunately it blew chunks and they couldn't give them away. To own one was supposed to be a status symbol, but what it conveyed was "I'm a tool and don't know shit about computers". Especially as their price plummeted in desperation. A collectors item should be rare and hard to find, they were being sold for a pittance in the back of mac magazines with the refurb g3's and performa systems. Ask a mac collector what piece in their collection they are proudest of, it will probably be some rare revision of a mac classic, not the 20th anniversary edition. It failed as a computer, it failed as a collectors item, it failed as a product. it belongs on the list. If they had made 500 of them they probably would have done ok (although never made back their R+D cost).
Exploit code or it didn't happen.
I also work for an IT contractor, although fairly small so I can go smack the sales guys on the head a few doors over as needed. I go for option B/E all the time. In my view, IT is kind of like a a bottomless pit you throw money into. You can throw more and more, but there is ALWAYS something else you can do. There's always an extra backup system you can add, an extra redundancy, an user experience you can improve, etc. But businesses have finite IT budgets, and all the slick sales guys in the world won't change that. So seeing as how there's a practically infinite opportunities to spend IT money in an organization that will have tangible benefits, I don't see the point in letting the sales guys get away with wasting their money. If I feel its a waste, I tell them that, and point out 2 or 3 things to them and the sales guys that should be higher priority. In my experience, the sales guys in IT are some of the most easily influenced by other salesmen I've ever met. A vendor comes through, gives a demonstration of their network appliance or software package of the week, tells them how all their customers will be knocking down the door to give them their money to buy it, and uses every tired old pitch technique in the book. The same techniques the sales guys use on their customers every day. And they buy it hook, line, and sinker. They go out and tell all their customers they have to have X, even when they themselves don't really understand what it does, but the vendors salesman told them so. Someone needs to inject some reality into the situation, or you wind up with a customer that has spent their entire budget on the latest buzzwords and their basic IT infrastructure is a disaster. Whether we spent their IT money on buzzwords, or we spent their IT money on things they needed, we still got their money. But one way leads to the customer saying at the end of the year "We spent $x on IT with you guys, and we still have tons of problems! Our PC's crash, our network is slow, our backups don't work, wtf?" and the other way leads to building a long term relationship with the customer that will keep them as our customer.
Uncontrolled greed is the enemy of IT contracting in my mind. We are all in business to make money, but wanting to make money and being blinded by greed are very different. If every time you went to the doctor, he tried to sell you some new wonder drug you can only get from him, the first you might be inclined to believe him, after all he is the doctor, he knows more about medicine then you do. So you would buy it, and the doctor would make extra money. But when the medicine didn't make you feel better, and everytime you went back he wanted to sell you a new, different wonder drug, that THIS time would solve all your problems, pretty quickly you would find a new doctor. Next thing you know, the practice that doctor has built up over a decade is gone. The same thing for IT. Most of our customers don't know what they have, they don't understand it, they don't know what they need. They rely on us to tell them. But if we tell them lies, we will make a lot of money in the short term, but eventually they will get tired of shoveling money at us and seeing no results.
Besides, is helping some sleazebag salesman make an extra $1000 in commission (that he would not share with you even if he saw you laying half dead in the gutter) worth your professional ethics?
I tried to process an eOpen license last week. When the VLSC site finally was up, I went to add the license to our account, only to be completely unable to find an option to do so. Finally I gave up in frustration, and called their tech support line. I was on hold for 2.5 hours, and when they finally answered, was told they "forgot" that functionality when they did the "upgrade" to the VLSC from the old eOpen site. Luckily I already have the media and such, and can go ahead and build the server and put the product key in later, but it is a pain in the ass.
The old eOpen site was pretty terrible, I have to give MS credit for making something worse.
The presumption of innocence IS THE CORRECT ATTITUDE. Humans have an illogical tendency to jump to conclusions, presume guilt, and go on witch hunts. Presuming innocence until proven guilty by facts is the best way to stop that irrational behavior and protect the innocent. Someone who like child porn and intentionally seeks it out (and is therefore believed to be directly or indirectly a danger to children, the whole reasoning behind child porn being illegal in the first place) is not going to download one video, delete it, and never download it again. Everything about the circumstances points to his story being correct, Limewire is famous for misnamed files, and its not the first time I've heard of there being kiddie porn on it. He did not have a collection, nor did he have it even saved, it was clearly deleted. There is no evidence he distributed it, sought it, or wanted it. If there is more to this case the FBI needs to reveal it, of course they won't have to because they have used the fact the legal system is rigged in their favor in this kind of case to scare him into a plea bargain.
I know someone who is happily married, with 2 children. Their family has a very difficult time finding a place to live. The reason? When the Father was 18, he had consensual sex with his future wife, who was 16. Her family found out and pressed statutory rape charges. As a result, he is on the sex offender list, which is especially ironic because the "punishment" now hurts the supposed victim, and her children. The state has done far more harm to her then he ever did.
The police have no interest in justice. Every time you see a policemen, do not think he is there to protect you, or seek justice. His sole purpose is to be a crony to a politician, whether that politician is the DA, or the Mayor, or the governor, or the President. His job is to implicate as many people as possible in as many violations of the law as possible, to be used against them at his masters discretion. Every politician wants to look tough on crime, especially on pedophiles, and keep the population certain that HE is the one standing between their children and the groping hands of molesters. So the police are encouraged to round up as many people who can be labeled pedophiles as possible, and make sure the public is constantly reminded they are walking amongst them.
Just look at this article. The FBI tells people if you download child porn accidentally, call the authorities immediately. Presumably so they can offer you a plea "bargain" like this guy for turning yourself in, and only give you 3.5 years, plus 10 years parole, and a lifetime of discrimination on the sex offenders list. It is the exact opposite of what any competent lawyer would tell you to do, which is never admit to anything, never talk to the police, never allow them in your house, car, or computer without a warrant.
If you wanted to block outside dns, why would you blacklist instead of whitelist? Any decent firewall should be able to block DNS requests leaving the network except from the local dns server.
NASA can not afford accidents, not because of the sanctity of human life or any nonsense like that, but because it will kill NASA and probably manned spaceflight in this country in general. Colombia very nearly killed the shuttle program entirely, before a successor was even on the drawing board. People are willing to accept that being an astronaut is dangerous, but a lot of people look up to them, and when a bunch of them explode in a ball of fire over Texas in an entirely preventable accident, the PR impact is catastrophic. Even privately funded spaceflight will get shut down (in this country at least) if it has too many high profile accidents. Even if in reality the cost in lives is minuscule compared to what we lose daily in car accidents or lung cancer from smoking, a few big accidents in a row and the politicians will see "stopping the reckles endangerment of human lives" as a way to score some cheap votes. If human beings were rational and logical, you'd have a point, but we aren't, and too many astronaut funerals on TV will inevitably cause a kneejerk reaction.
I deal with malware quite a bit. The most common infection source I have seen lately has been unpatched adobe reader, java, or flash plugins. That and people who click those "Your computer has registry error" banners and install whatever it asks them too. WSUS makes keeping all the systems on a network updated with Windows updates very simple, but unless you have a tightly controlled environment keeping all the plug-ins and such updated automatically is much more difficult. Home users can use the excellent Secunia PSI for free to make sure they are keeping on top of updates, as it scans all the programs and warns you if any are out of date.
Miami was hit by Hurricane Andrew(a Cat 5), it caused a lot of damage in Homestead and some other areas but nothing really on the scale of Katrina. We are pretty used to hurricanes in Florida, and most Floridians know to take precautions, including getting the fuck out of dodge when they call your area an evacuation area. South Florida is general at sea level, not below it, and we have extensive drainage systems. Florida has extremely strict building codes to make buildings that are much more likely to survive a hurricane. The last hurricane to hit South Florida did relatively minor damage, although power was out for about a week in most places (this was due to Florida Power and Lighting's horrendous maintenance policies they had enacted since they realized the state would bail them out of any hurricane damage losses, so they stopped doing the maintenance that would prevent most of the damage). We also don't have as big a poverty problem as New Orleans does, so FEMA will actually come help us. For those of us used to living through hurricanes, Katrina was something on a whole different level. In South Florida, if you make it through the night and the storm passes, you know you are going to be ok. Katrina dragged on for weeks.
I think the city of New Orleans, and the state of Louisiana need to share in the responsibility. If your city is one broken levee away from disaster, you would think you would perform independent audits of your levee infrastructure. If the army core of engineers wont fix it, the feds wont fix it, the state won't fix it, then it is up to the people of that city on whose lives depend on it, to cough up the money however they can to fix it. They managed to build a football stadium, they can get a hold of funds to audit and repair levees. They also lacked adequate planning and preparation for shelters, evacuation transportation, and relief supplies. These are all simple things that we do here in South Florida that the government should have been doing in New Orleans, and the people need to take them to task for that. A hurricane in the gulf is not an extraordinary event, that can't be planned for. It is not an alien invasion or godzilla attack. If you are on the east coast, especially the gulf region, it is never a question of if a hurricane is going to hit you, but when. On the local news media here (where a lot of attention is paid to hurricanes for obvious reasons) I remember it generally came up about once a season when a hurricane was predicted to enter the gulf how bad it could be if it hit Lousiana. Apparently the local weather guy here has more sense then the entire New Orleans government?
I have firefox 3.5.5 on Win7, 10+ add-ons, and have left firefox open with 4-5 different windows, with 10+ tabs each, open for 4 days now. My memory usage is 80 megs. It sounds like either 1 particular add-on you use has nasty memory leaks, or the problem is more likely with flash or some other plug-in.
Just for kicks, if you don't need any of the fancy features, you can still use the old laserjet 4 drivers for brand new HP laserjet printers. Every large enterprise I've been in has standardized on them, they must be doing something right. Their consumer grade hardware is total shit though, a customer of ours decided to "save" some money by buying some printers from Best buy instead of the printers we recommended. They bought 2 HP printers, the drivers took 45 minutes to install out of the box.
After the first one, I tosssed the cds in the trash and downloaded the "plug in play" drivers from the hp site, they only took 15-20 minutes to install.
You can probably summarize this to: Don't buy anything Cisco thats not a Router, Switch, or Firewall (honestly the firewall is pretty iffy as well). Their other products seem designed to trade in on the name recognition their core business has created, but are generally sub par. I say this as someone who loves and defends Cisco's core networking gear. Would you buy a router from Microsoft, based on Windows? Of course not. Don't buy a server from Cisco (even if they call it a network appliance). Vendor lock-in is always a bad idea, Cisco lock-in is a world of pain. They will bleed you for money every chance they get, and not even realize they are doing it. Want to update to fix a crippling bug? Better have renewed your Smartnet. Want to enable a feature supported by your device? Better check to make sure your device is licensed for that. Oh, and you will need to buy client licenses for every piece of equipment that interacts with it, and a support agreement for those too.
The one positive side effect of the Cisco way is there is a ton of cheap older hardware out there to train on, Cisco makes reselling the equipment with support intact almost impossible so businesses don't want to touch it.
Authentication and dedicated servers are not mutually exclusive, every game I can think of since Quake 3 (and probably earlier) has authenticated the player against a master server before letting them join. While possible to run hacked servers, it generally requires everyone involved to have the hacked client, and they have always been few in number and full of hackers and such to make a guaranteed shitty player experience. This is about selling DLC, plain and simple. I know that this decision is going to cost them my sale for MW2 and Rage. I bought the first Modern Warfare and loved it and was already sold on the second one when they announced this nonsense. They've lost my sale, and it will probably be blamed on piracy and used as an excuse to shove more drm and more DLC down our throats. Speaking of DLC, it has also cost Bioware a sale of Dragon Age, I was actually credit card in hand ready to buy it when I found out about the 3 or 4 different "editions" with different amounts of content, and even the most expensive one still doesn't get you all the content, theres more DLC to buy. It's ridiculous! Why buy and navigate the DLC maze they have created when I can pirate and have all the content and all the DLC and all the pre-oder "rewards" without jumping through hoops?
Actually, I think the article is complete bullshit for precisely this reason. The "lost decade" wasn't MS twiddling their thumbs. That big gap between XP and Vista? 90% of that was MS working on security. When worms began running rampant MS realized it had a major problem. It takes a long time to go from a codebase completely unconcerned with security to reasonably secure. A lot of the growing pains with Vista can be attributed to MS trying to wean application developers off assuming they were a local admin all the time, even if there was no need. After xp was released, they spent a lot of time on tracking down and fixing holes, along with implementing new tech to mitigate existing holes. Hell when XP came out they didn't even have a way to update automatically. Prior to XP Sp1, security in Windows was practially non-existent, and taking remote control of a Windows machine was trivial. Now Windows is a hell of a lot more secure out of the box, and the tools exist to make it pretty damn secure overall. In my opinion this "lost decade" nonsense is simply MS paying the price for a previous decade of laziness. They didn't bother to learn the lessons of Unix and other OS's before them and build with security in mind from the beginning, and paid the price.
To me the transition from Gates to Balmer can be seen as a maturing of MS. Under Gates MS acted like a schoolyard bully. Petulant, overly aggressive, petty, and ultimately self defeating. That MS could not have survived in the enterprise world (aka the people who actually buy Windows licenses) in the long term. A constant upgrade treadmill with little attention paid to management or backwards compatibility. Deliberately sabotaging the competition, with no regard to how it will affect their customers or their long term health. Look at the Java debacle, MS acted like assholes and as a result, I still have to go install the JRE every time I install Windows, hosting java based apps on Windows is practically nonexistent (giving market share to Linux), and IE is the retarded step child of internet browsers due mainly to it's terrible javascript engine. how much money do you think MS pissed away defending antitrust suits here and in the EU? How much did they have to spend on bribing politicians (excuse me, "campaign donations") to get off as lightly as they did?
In my opinion, from a technical point of view, MS's products are better now then they have ever been. Which they desperately need because Linux is closing fast and it is increasingly difficult to justify their licensing costs.
I'm sure all the small business owners in Washington feel super happy about it every time they pay the taxes MS get's a free pass on.