It definitely is a luxury system (and probably not within the OP's budget), but it has some refinements that really make a difference:
1. When you have multiple units, the entire network acts as a single, seamless system. You can play different music on each unit, or a tie group of units into a "zone" that plays the same music (with centrally controlled volume level), with the music perfectly in sync between units (this is technically quite difficult to do). I'm not aware of any other system that does this... 2. The Sonos units form a wireless mesh network, so you don't have to have perfect wireless coverage everywhere you put a unit, as long as each unit is within range of another. This is very helpful in the large houses of the people who can afford these things. One unit does need to be hardwired. 3. The remote is very well done. Having an iPhone remote is great if everyone in the house carries one, but that's rarely the case. 4. It plays very well with NASs. It can read your iTunes playlists, and because there's no local storage it's one less music repository to sync and maintain. 5. Sound quality is very good. They handle lossless formats, and the internal amps are decent.
Anyway, it's a fantastic system if you've got the money to burn.
Gottman does actual, scientific research on marriages. He provides "evidence-based" advice, and it's vastly different than your average self-help book. I learned about him from my father, a marriage and family therapist... my wife and I haven't had any really serious trouble in the 14 years we've been married, and I credit Gottman's books with a big part of that.
One of the counter-intuitive things Gottman says is that contrary to most advice books, "good communication" isn't necessary for a happy marriage. If a husband and wife don't respect each other, "good communication" will just enable them to communicate their disdain more effectively. And he found plenty of happy couples who had terrible communication by regular self-help standards. It's fascinating stuff.
I take it you aren't very well-versed in the scripture. The Narnia books go *waaaay* past overtones... they are full allegories, using the bible as the source material for the major themes, stories and characters.
Just to pick the most blatant example, Aslan's self-sacrifice and rebirth in _The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe_ *is* the death and resurrection of Christ. Just as Christ is beaten, humiliated and forced to wear a crown of thorns, Aslan is taunted, shaved, and abused prior to his. Christ is an innocent, a sinless man willingly sacrificed for the sins of others, just as Aslan is sacrificed for Edmund's misdeeds. The breaking of the stone table is the tearing of the curtains in the temple. For Christians, Christ's death is the event that marks the end of the "laws" of the old testament and a fundamental change in the relationship between humans and God, just as Aslan's death results in the end of the "old laws". And so forth.
This is just one example of many... the bible is the "DNA" of the entire Narnia series. This was C.S. Lewis' explicit intent... he was writing stories for children that communicated the "truth" of the bible to them in an engaging, highly-accessible way. If you look at his other writings... "Mere Christianity" and "The Screwtape Letters" for example... you'll see that it is entirely appropriate to describe him as a "Christian" author.
In normal use, it appears to have had a keyspace of about 48 bits, which is not easy to attack now with a modest distributed effort, but way out of the reach of WWII technology.
However, a variant of the machine used for communication between the US President and British PM had an effective keyspace of 95+ bits, which (if you have access to some known plaintext) can be reduced to 86 bits, which although shorter than key lengths in common use today is still out of reach.
Did you read the article? The entire point is that, done well, IT has considerably more value than a toilet / plumbing / utilities... it doesn't "just work" and stay out of the way -- rather it produces substantial competitive and other business benefits. The best thing a toilet can do is not screw up, while great IT can make a huge difference in a business.
What's Amazon? It's the Sears catalog business, but with great IT. FedEx came out of nowhere to challenge UPS in the 80's and one of the reasons was package tracking (an IT investment). Citibank's big break came when it deployed (then proprietary) ATMs in NYC and quickly doubled their business. The list goes on...
It makes me ask: What kind of administrator is using automatic updates on their machines anyway?
In the small business world where companies don't have full-time IT, automatic updates are ubiquitous. Frankly, the risk of an unpatched machine is a whole lot higher than the risk of a bad update from Microsoft. Manually managing patches for a large base of small customers just isn't possible for a small biz consultant (like me).
Having said that, I haven't seen the behavior mentioned in the article... it appears only to impact WSUS users. The main issue I've seen is that Outlook 2007 continuously prompts users to install Desktop Search, without explaining what it really is.
This is late and so will probably be buried, but just in case the original poster reads all of the comments...
1. As many have mentioned, put the computer in a public area.
2. Blocking is hard. Monitoring is easy, if you're willing to invest the time in reviewing the results (you should be). There are numerous ways to hack this together, but if you want an "off-the-shelf" system to recommend, SpectorSoft's stuff works well. It is host based. The nice thing about monitoring software of this kind is that, while the kid might be able to disable it, you can tell that it's been disabled. I don't view this as spying, since the kids know it's happening.
3. Consider that they may have Internet access at friend's houses. That's why it's really important to know the parents of your kid's friends, and be willing to ask potentially awkward questions about the level of supervision when they are visiting, both in general and specifically related to TV / movies, games, computer and Internet access.
I'd suggest you learn a little about child development before applying liberatarianism to children. Although I suppose it's debatable what a "successful" child is, it's pretty generally accepted that children need well-defined boundaries of all sorts. While such boundaries would seem "authoritarian" or "orwellian" when applied to adults, the fact is that children's brains are not yet mature, and their capabilities and needs are extremely different than adults. That doesn't mean they don't deserve our respect, but treating them as if they are little adults capable of making good decisions about complex issues is really doing them a disservice.
I'm kinda curious what lesson you think a parent might get from re-reading Ender's Game... as awesome as it is, it's FICTION.
Using your own key with Mozy works fine *if* you take the option to save the binary key file (I've had to do this in a real recovery situation), but I've never successfully been able to re-enter a key as text.
In general their restore process blows, but I still recommend them because once you figure it out the first time it's not too bad. My clients will be calling me if they actually need to get something back...
What's interesting to me is that neither of these papers mentions the issue of pre-installation handling. The good folks over at Storage Review seem to be of the opinion that the shocks and bumps that happen to a drive between the factory and the final installation are the most significant factor in drive reliability (much more than brand, for example).
The google paper talks a bit about certain drive "vintages" being problemmatic, but I wonder if they buy drives in large lots, and perhaps some lots might have been handled roughly during shipping. If they could trace back each hard drive to the original order, perhaps they could look to see if there's a correlation between failure and shipping lot.
IANAL, but I believe Texas is an "employment at will" state. This means that there is very little regulation of the employer / employee legal relationship outside of a contract / employment agreement. This means that an employer can terminate without cause and no notice, and an employee can leave without notice, without any negative *legal* ramifications.
However, that doesn't mean they can't sue you... this will force you to spend money on legal representation and make your life a little miserable even if the suit is ruled to be baseless. If it is and you've got a halfway decent lawyer, you might be able to get it dismissed with prejudice and your legal fees covered.
So why are they suing? Clearly they are burning any bridges with you, and aren't expecting to try to get you back. Unless you are independently wealthy, it's unlikely even if they succeeded that they would be able to collect enough in damages to make this worthwhile. This leaves two explanations I can think of: petty revenge, or to intimidate the rest of the employees. I'm betting on a combination of both, with a heavy dose of intimidation.
So... what's the answer? Can you point to any specific resources I can use to buy CFLs that look good? Retail stores frequently have poor selection, but online stores with a lot of choices seem to be geared towards institutional buyers and don't provide much consumer-friendly info.
I have been buying CFLs for a long time, but am frequently disappointed by the light quality / color, and thus keep incandescents in a lot of places where it's nice to have warm / cozy light.
Of course Windows machines need support- usually lots more than linux systems. But the problem is that as a consultant, even if I'm a UNIX God and can support my clients with Linux well, if I get sick / go on vacation / stop working with them, they're hosed... they're going to have a very hard time finding a consultant that can help them. If I set them up with a Windows system, I can give them half a dozen names of competant consultants in the area without thinking very hard.
Don't get me wrong... there are a lot of Linux consultants, but most of them tend to do long-term contract-type consulting, rather than "Geek Patrol"-type small business work.
Recovery media is always at listed as an option when you purchase the machine (or at least on all of the machines I've recommended to folks).
If you didn't select that option, you can call and beg their sales folks, but I seem to remember something about Microsoft limiting the amount of time OEMs are allowed to sell you install media after purchase.
The other option is to find a friend with a Dell of similar vintage and copy their disk. The recovery disks are pretty portable between Dell machines.
I know, it's unbelievable... but I'm talking about consultants to really small businesses (30 seats). These are not server-centric sites... typically they have a single server, if any.
This space is *completely* owned by Windows. In the past three years in my business, I've seen two total customers that had any Linux at all, and in one case it was a software engineering firm that was using Linux for a CVS server (not a typical small business).
Despite being individually small, there are a HUGE number of these businesses, and a lot of consultants serving them. There's no reason for these folks to have ever learned Linux, and few (if any) opportunities to use it professionally.
There's a big chicken and egg problem here. It's not just the lack of Linux-skilled consultants either... it's the lack of small business applications. There are a bajillion little industry-specific apps that require a windows machine to run as a server: accounting programs, billing software, inventory / sales tracking, that sort of thing.
So deploying a Linux server can get me in trouble when the client calls 6 months later wanting to install this great client / server app they learned about at their annual glass blower / pet sitter / car detailer convention. They won't understand when I tell them that it won't run on their shiny new server.
I'm talking specifically about companies too small to have dedicated IT support. In most cases, yes, they are too computer illiterate.
But there's a big difference between "less maintenance" and "no maintenance". Even if they are able to use something like webmin to add new user accounts and such when needed, at some point they'll need additional support: a disk may fail, they may exceed the capacity of the system in some way, they may relocate... In any of these cases they'll need someone with more than a cursory knowledge of Linux to help out.
Then they get bitten by the near utter lack of UNIX skills among small business consultants.
I have been bitten by every single problem mentioned in that article. Bad OEM "revogery disks" and MS licensing restrictions that prevent one from using an alternative install disks are one of the biggest single problems facing those of us that support very small businesses professionally. Say what you want about Dell... at least they include real windows install disks.
However, I have to question the judgement of the author. First of all, what kind of consultant deploys branch offices "weekly" and didn't know about these problems in advance? Anyone with much experience would know about (a) how difficult it is to move windows from one storage subsystem to another, (b) that HP uses bad recovery disks, and (c) that RAID installs require a floppy.
In addition, I question the use of Linux in this situation... perhaps it was his only way out of a bad recommendation to a client, but the problem is that there are *very* few Linux-savv consultants servicing businesses this size. For this reason alone I don't deploy Linux solutions... I can't find subcontractors who can back me up when I'm on vacation or sick, and should I stop working with a client, I don't want to leave them high and dry. Most consultants I know replace Linux servers with windows because they simply can't support it.
Finally, there's a much better way to do what he's trying to do: a NAS appliance. If all you need is some shared storage, printer sharing and the occasional backup, one of the many small business NAS devices out there (Infrant, Snap / Adaptec, Buffalo, etc...) will do so with greater reliability and less complexity than a PC-based server.
This hasn't been my experience as a small business and home IT consultant. Users are very brand loyal, and while they don't necessarily like everything about Microsoft, they recognize it as "what everbody uses". They're not going to switch to some unknown thing they've never heard of without a strong, compelling reason.
The problem is that "free" (either as in beer or freedom) isn't a compelling reason for many people. The prices charged by MS, while monopolistically high (especially for Office), aren't unafforadable. People are generally happy to pay for "the genuine article" rather even if there's a free, similar alternative... "you get what you pay for" is a really basic gut instinct (which is true in most cases), and with free products they always wonder what has been sacrificed, and that it's a "cheap knock-off".
Firefox has been an easier sell because it has that compelling reason: you won't get infected (again) with spyware. They're also ready to distrust MS when it comes to security, thanks to wide media coverage and security industry advertising. But there's not nearly as much disenchantment with MS Office...
For standard def TV, the compression is unnnoticeable... we switched from DirecTV, and it was a huge quality improvement.
On the other hand, some of the high-def channels do have very noticeable compression. I see it particularly when watching NOVA -- there are glaring blocky compression artifacts in complex, fast moving scenes (espcially scientific visualization graphics). However, this is not widespread- I haven't noticed it during major network prime-time viewing, nor with sporting events. So I'm guessing their throttling the bandwidth on the local PBS station (or get a very compressed feed from them).
Grant Barrett wrote a couple of articles a few years ago with excellent advice about getting into this business. I heeded a lot of it, and am now doing a business like this full time. It's not for everyone, but I tracked down the original articles on another blog... Grant has moved on, and his old website doesn't exist anymore:
This service is paired with the Amazon S3 storage service, which has a high-bandwidth connection to the servers. Data transfer between EC2 and S3 is free.
The issue with most desktop software firewalls that attempt to control outbound connections is that they have no idea in advance what constitutes a valid program and what doesn't. So they ask the user, who in most cases is unable to answer the question. The only information typically provided is the executable name, and in many cases it's a generic one (like svchost.exe) that leaves even an experienced user without the ability to make an informed decision.
The problem is that this trains users to ignore the prompts and habitually click "allow" or "deny" (usually because they find out the hard way that stuff breaks when they click "deny"). The result is far worse than if there were no attempts to control outbound access, because most of these firewalls (Zonealarm in particular) use similar techniques for *inbound* traffic too... they will prompt the user when a program opens a listening port, and if they hit "allow" will enable global inbound traffic to that port, creating a hole that otherwise wouldn't have been there.
This happens regularly in practice- I've seen it over and over again with my small business consulting clients. Although technically an outbound software firewall with program control could be a good last-ditch effort to block malware that has managed to get installed and running, on a practical basis they cause more problems than they solve.
You know, it's always entertaining when people like you presume to offer me security advice. I know you mean well, but really... chances are I've been doing the IP security thing a LOT longer than you have.
Go read some of my other comments in that thread. My technique would most likely catch any such "private back door". The main risk is that the black hat is using a truly novel rootkit stealthing technique that hasn't been disclosed publicly... but word of those tends to spread pretty quickly, so that risk is pretty small.
Slashdot Mirror
It definitely is a luxury system (and probably not within the OP's budget), but it has some refinements that really make a difference:
1. When you have multiple units, the entire network acts as a single, seamless system. You can play different music on each unit, or a tie group of units into a "zone" that plays the same music (with centrally controlled volume level), with the music perfectly in sync between units (this is technically quite difficult to do). I'm not aware of any other system that does this...
2. The Sonos units form a wireless mesh network, so you don't have to have perfect wireless coverage everywhere you put a unit, as long as each unit is within range of another. This is very helpful in the large houses of the people who can afford these things. One unit does need to be hardwired.
3. The remote is very well done. Having an iPhone remote is great if everyone in the house carries one, but that's rarely the case.
4. It plays very well with NASs. It can read your iTunes playlists, and because there's no local storage it's one less music repository to sync and maintain.
5. Sound quality is very good. They handle lossless formats, and the internal amps are decent.
Anyway, it's a fantastic system if you've got the money to burn.
Gottman does actual, scientific research on marriages. He provides "evidence-based" advice, and it's vastly different than your average self-help book. I learned about him from my father, a marriage and family therapist... my wife and I haven't had any really serious trouble in the 14 years we've been married, and I credit Gottman's books with a big part of that.
One of the counter-intuitive things Gottman says is that contrary to most advice books, "good communication" isn't necessary for a happy marriage. If a husband and wife don't respect each other, "good communication" will just enable them to communicate their disdain more effectively. And he found plenty of happy couples who had terrible communication by regular self-help standards. It's fascinating stuff.
I take it you aren't very well-versed in the scripture. The Narnia books go *waaaay* past overtones... they are full allegories, using the bible as the source material for the major themes, stories and characters.
Just to pick the most blatant example, Aslan's self-sacrifice and rebirth in _The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe_ *is* the death and resurrection of Christ. Just as Christ is beaten, humiliated and forced to wear a crown of thorns, Aslan is taunted, shaved, and abused prior to his. Christ is an innocent, a sinless man willingly sacrificed for the sins of others, just as Aslan is sacrificed for Edmund's misdeeds. The breaking of the stone table is the tearing of the curtains in the temple. For Christians, Christ's death is the event that marks the end of the "laws" of the old testament and a fundamental change in the relationship between humans and God, just as Aslan's death results in the end of the "old laws". And so forth.
This is just one example of many... the bible is the "DNA" of the entire Narnia series. This was C.S. Lewis' explicit intent... he was writing stories for children that communicated the "truth" of the bible to them in an engaging, highly-accessible way. If you look at his other writings... "Mere Christianity" and "The Screwtape Letters" for example... you'll see that it is entirely appropriate to describe him as a "Christian" author.
-R
Here's a recent cryptanalysis of SIGABA:
http://www.sjsu.edu/mscs/research/projects/chan_wing-on.pdf
In normal use, it appears to have had a keyspace of about 48 bits, which is not easy to attack now with a modest distributed effort, but way out of the reach of WWII technology.
However, a variant of the machine used for communication between the US President and British PM had an effective keyspace of 95+ bits, which (if you have access to some known plaintext) can be reduced to 86 bits, which although shorter than key lengths in common use today is still out of reach.
Did you read the article? The entire point is that, done well, IT has considerably more value than a toilet / plumbing / utilities... it doesn't "just work" and stay out of the way -- rather it produces substantial competitive and other business benefits. The best thing a toilet can do is not screw up, while great IT can make a huge difference in a business.
What's Amazon? It's the Sears catalog business, but with great IT. FedEx came out of nowhere to challenge UPS in the 80's and one of the reasons was package tracking (an IT investment). Citibank's big break came when it deployed (then proprietary) ATMs in NYC and quickly doubled their business. The list goes on...
It makes me ask: What kind of administrator is using automatic updates on their machines anyway?
In the small business world where companies don't have full-time IT, automatic updates are ubiquitous. Frankly, the risk of an unpatched machine is a whole lot higher than the risk of a bad update from Microsoft. Manually managing patches for a large base of small customers just isn't possible for a small biz consultant (like me).
Having said that, I haven't seen the behavior mentioned in the article... it appears only to impact WSUS users. The main issue I've seen is that Outlook 2007 continuously prompts users to install Desktop Search, without explaining what it really is.
-R
This is late and so will probably be buried, but just in case the original poster reads all of the comments...
1. As many have mentioned, put the computer in a public area.
2. Blocking is hard. Monitoring is easy, if you're willing to invest the time in reviewing the results (you should be). There are numerous ways to hack this together, but if you want an "off-the-shelf" system to recommend, SpectorSoft's stuff works well. It is host based. The nice thing about monitoring software of this kind is that, while the kid might be able to disable it, you can tell that it's been disabled. I don't view this as spying, since the kids know it's happening.
3. Consider that they may have Internet access at friend's houses. That's why it's really important to know the parents of your kid's friends, and be willing to ask potentially awkward questions about the level of supervision when they are visiting, both in general and specifically related to TV / movies, games, computer and Internet access.
-R
I'd suggest you learn a little about child development before applying liberatarianism to children. Although I suppose it's debatable what a "successful" child is, it's pretty generally accepted that children need well-defined boundaries of all sorts. While such boundaries would seem "authoritarian" or "orwellian" when applied to adults, the fact is that children's brains are not yet mature, and their capabilities and needs are extremely different than adults. That doesn't mean they don't deserve our respect, but treating them as if they are little adults capable of making good decisions about complex issues is really doing them a disservice.
I'm kinda curious what lesson you think a parent might get from re-reading Ender's Game... as awesome as it is, it's FICTION.
-R
Using your own key with Mozy works fine *if* you take the option to save the binary key file (I've had to do this in a real recovery situation), but I've never successfully been able to re-enter a key as text.
In general their restore process blows, but I still recommend them because once you figure it out the first time it's not too bad. My clients will be calling me if they actually need to get something back...
-R
What's interesting to me is that neither of these papers mentions the issue of pre-installation handling. The good folks over at Storage Review seem to be of the opinion that the shocks and bumps that happen to a drive between the factory and the final installation are the most significant factor in drive reliability (much more than brand, for example).
The google paper talks a bit about certain drive "vintages" being problemmatic, but I wonder if they buy drives in large lots, and perhaps some lots might have been handled roughly during shipping. If they could trace back each hard drive to the original order, perhaps they could look to see if there's a correlation between failure and shipping lot.
-R
...it wants its "news" story back.
-R
IANAL, but I believe Texas is an "employment at will" state. This means that there is very little regulation of the employer / employee legal relationship outside of a contract / employment agreement. This means that an employer can terminate without cause and no notice, and an employee can leave without notice, without any negative *legal* ramifications.
However, that doesn't mean they can't sue you... this will force you to spend money on legal representation and make your life a little miserable even if the suit is ruled to be baseless. If it is and you've got a halfway decent lawyer, you might be able to get it dismissed with prejudice and your legal fees covered.
So why are they suing? Clearly they are burning any bridges with you, and aren't expecting to try to get you back. Unless you are independently wealthy, it's unlikely even if they succeeded that they would be able to collect enough in damages to make this worthwhile. This leaves two explanations I can think of: petty revenge, or to intimidate the rest of the employees. I'm betting on a combination of both, with a heavy dose of intimidation.
-R
So... what's the answer? Can you point to any specific resources I can use to buy CFLs that look good? Retail stores frequently have poor selection, but online stores with a lot of choices seem to be geared towards institutional buyers and don't provide much consumer-friendly info.
I have been buying CFLs for a long time, but am frequently disappointed by the light quality / color, and thus keep incandescents in a lot of places where it's nice to have warm / cozy light.
-R
Of course Windows machines need support- usually lots more than linux systems. But the problem is that as a consultant, even if I'm a UNIX God and can support my clients with Linux well, if I get sick / go on vacation / stop working with them, they're hosed... they're going to have a very hard time finding a consultant that can help them. If I set them up with a Windows system, I can give them half a dozen names of competant consultants in the area without thinking very hard.
Don't get me wrong... there are a lot of Linux consultants, but most of them tend to do long-term contract-type consulting, rather than "Geek Patrol"-type small business work.
-R
Recovery media is always at listed as an option when you purchase the machine (or at least on all of the machines I've recommended to folks).
If you didn't select that option, you can call and beg their sales folks, but I seem to remember something about Microsoft limiting the amount of time OEMs are allowed to sell you install media after purchase.
The other option is to find a friend with a Dell of similar vintage and copy their disk. The recovery disks are pretty portable between Dell machines.
-R
I know, it's unbelievable... but I'm talking about consultants to really small businesses (30 seats). These are not server-centric sites... typically they have a single server, if any.
This space is *completely* owned by Windows. In the past three years in my business, I've seen two total customers that had any Linux at all, and in one case it was a software engineering firm that was using Linux for a CVS server (not a typical small business).
Despite being individually small, there are a HUGE number of these businesses, and a lot of consultants serving them. There's no reason for these folks to have ever learned Linux, and few (if any) opportunities to use it professionally.
There's a big chicken and egg problem here. It's not just the lack of Linux-skilled consultants either... it's the lack of small business applications. There are a bajillion little industry-specific apps that require a windows machine to run as a server: accounting programs, billing software, inventory / sales tracking, that sort of thing.
So deploying a Linux server can get me in trouble when the client calls 6 months later wanting to install this great client / server app they learned about at their annual glass blower / pet sitter / car detailer convention. They won't understand when I tell them that it won't run on their shiny new server.
-R
I'm talking specifically about companies too small to have dedicated IT support. In most cases, yes, they are too computer illiterate.
But there's a big difference between "less maintenance" and "no maintenance". Even if they are able to use something like webmin to add new user accounts and such when needed, at some point they'll need additional support: a disk may fail, they may exceed the capacity of the system in some way, they may relocate... In any of these cases they'll need someone with more than a cursory knowledge of Linux to help out.
Then they get bitten by the near utter lack of UNIX skills among small business consultants.
-R
I have been bitten by every single problem mentioned in that article. Bad OEM "revogery disks" and MS licensing restrictions that prevent one from using an alternative install disks are one of the biggest single problems facing those of us that support very small businesses professionally. Say what you want about Dell... at least they include real windows install disks.
However, I have to question the judgement of the author. First of all, what kind of consultant deploys branch offices "weekly" and didn't know about these problems in advance? Anyone with much experience would know about (a) how difficult it is to move windows from one storage subsystem to another, (b) that HP uses bad recovery disks, and (c) that RAID installs require a floppy.
In addition, I question the use of Linux in this situation... perhaps it was his only way out of a bad recommendation to a client, but the problem is that there are *very* few Linux-savv consultants servicing businesses this size. For this reason alone I don't deploy Linux solutions... I can't find subcontractors who can back me up when I'm on vacation or sick, and should I stop working with a client, I don't want to leave them high and dry. Most consultants I know replace Linux servers with windows because they simply can't support it.
Finally, there's a much better way to do what he's trying to do: a NAS appliance. If all you need is some shared storage, printer sharing and the occasional backup, one of the many small business NAS devices out there (Infrant, Snap / Adaptec, Buffalo, etc...) will do so with greater reliability and less complexity than a PC-based server.
-R
Umm, pretty much everything that came from the attrition.org side is a joke. They were yanking this guy's chain.
-R
This hasn't been my experience as a small business and home IT consultant. Users are very brand loyal, and while they don't necessarily like everything about Microsoft, they recognize it as "what everbody uses". They're not going to switch to some unknown thing they've never heard of without a strong, compelling reason.
The problem is that "free" (either as in beer or freedom) isn't a compelling reason for many people. The prices charged by MS, while monopolistically high (especially for Office), aren't unafforadable. People are generally happy to pay for "the genuine article" rather even if there's a free, similar alternative... "you get what you pay for" is a really basic gut instinct (which is true in most cases), and with free products they always wonder what has been sacrificed, and that it's a "cheap knock-off".
Firefox has been an easier sell because it has that compelling reason: you won't get infected (again) with spyware. They're also ready to distrust MS when it comes to security, thanks to wide media coverage and security industry advertising. But there's not nearly as much disenchantment with MS Office...
-R
For standard def TV, the compression is unnnoticeable... we switched from DirecTV, and it was a huge quality improvement.
On the other hand, some of the high-def channels do have very noticeable compression. I see it particularly when watching NOVA -- there are glaring blocky compression artifacts in complex, fast moving scenes (espcially scientific visualization graphics). However, this is not widespread- I haven't noticed it during major network prime-time viewing, nor with sporting events. So I'm guessing their throttling the bandwidth on the local PBS station (or get a very compressed feed from them).
-R
Grant Barrett wrote a couple of articles a few years ago with excellent advice about getting into this business. I heeded a lot of it, and am now doing a business like this full time. It's not for everyone, but I tracked down the original articles on another blog... Grant has moved on, and his old website doesn't exist anymore:
l
http://www.koozie.org/2004/10/freelance_tech_.htm
-R
This service is paired with the Amazon S3 storage service, which has a high-bandwidth connection to the servers. Data transfer between EC2 and S3 is free.
-R
The issue with most desktop software firewalls that attempt to control outbound connections is that they have no idea in advance what constitutes a valid program and what doesn't. So they ask the user, who in most cases is unable to answer the question. The only information typically provided is the executable name, and in many cases it's a generic one (like svchost.exe) that leaves even an experienced user without the ability to make an informed decision.
The problem is that this trains users to ignore the prompts and habitually click "allow" or "deny" (usually because they find out the hard way that stuff breaks when they click "deny"). The result is far worse than if there were no attempts to control outbound access, because most of these firewalls (Zonealarm in particular) use similar techniques for *inbound* traffic too... they will prompt the user when a program opens a listening port, and if they hit "allow" will enable global inbound traffic to that port, creating a hole that otherwise wouldn't have been there.
This happens regularly in practice- I've seen it over and over again with my small business consulting clients. Although technically an outbound software firewall with program control could be a good last-ditch effort to block malware that has managed to get installed and running, on a practical basis they cause more problems than they solve.
-R
You know, it's always entertaining when people like you presume to offer me security advice. I know you mean well, but really... chances are I've been doing the IP security thing a LOT longer than you have.
Go read some of my other comments in that thread. My technique would most likely catch any such "private back door". The main risk is that the black hat is using a truly novel rootkit stealthing technique that hasn't been disclosed publicly... but word of those tends to spread pretty quickly, so that risk is pretty small.
-R