MS would lockin not just users using their standard tricks, but actually lockin their subscription money. Especially with enterprises, their main market, they'd get budgeted in perpetuity, a massive entitlement that would require executive action (thereby happen less often) to cancel, rather than have to do something every time an upgrade decision comes up.
They already do this. And for the child poster who pointed at MSDN, no, that's not it. It's called Software Assurance. You subscribe to SA for a period of years (usually 4) and you pay an set annual fee for those years. During those years, you are entitled to all upgrades and enhancements that are released for any version of any software that is licensed under SA. Of course, most people took a pass on it when it came out, so they did a serious revamp of it recently to include bonuses like included support and education vouchers, etc. Now it's actually a pretty sweet deal.
Because computer expertise isn't the job of many of these people? Possibly because they possess invaluable field-specific expertise that outweighs their computer deficiencies?
I work at a hospital, and I used to get that excuse from nurses, patient techs, and even the occasional nurse manager. They would frequently say "But we're not computer people!" My response was the following:
"What would you say if someone told you that they weren't a stethoscope person, a PCA pump person, a respirator person, or a defibrilator person? Would you laugh at them? Of course, because those aren't types of people, those are tools that are used to do a specific job, in this case nursing. Computers are also a tool that is used to do a job. If you were a nurse and didn't know how to use a stethoscope (or any of those other tools) you probably wouldn't be very good at your job. Guess what? Computers are also a tool that are used in your job. They're used for electronic documentation at this hospital, and every other hospital in the county. With the current trends in healthcare they are only going to become more prevalent in the industry, and eventually even the small rural hospitals will use them extensively. You may not like them, but if you want to continue to be a nurse then you're going to have to learn how to use them."
The same could be said for just about any other profession in the world. Now if the person possesses such valuable, field-specific expertise that not only outweighs their computer deficiencies but also removes the need for them to know how to use the basic tools of the business, then maybe they should hire them an assistant to handle the computer for them.
It's the job of IT to secure the network. If doing something would harm you, then it's your job to make sure that they can't do it. If you think the "lusers" are too stupid to understand "opening attachments is bad", then block them at the firewall. If you don't think the users will understand that macros can carry a virus, disable macros when you install Word. There's no reason to force users to do IT work that they don't want to learn.
As cute as that answer may be, it's just not feasible in the majority of environments. Sure, I can lock things down so that it's extremely secure and that users have almost zero opportunity of doing something that causes a security breach. Of course, then the user can't do many of the things that they think that they should be able to do, like change their desktop wallpaper or screensaver, email around jokes, videos, and pictures of kittens, or surf web sites with dancing hamsters. Which isn't a problem for me, because our IT policy clearly states that IT resources are allowed to be used solely for business purposes. But then they start complaining to their managers, who start complaining up the chain of command, and eventually it comes down that what IT is doing is "bad for morale," and we're forced to open things back up again. And of course in the meantime, the IT department has fallen even further in the estimation of the general populace and an "us against them" attitude has set it.
The chief problem that I see (with this particular issue) is that people say that they want IT security, and that they want their systems to be bulletproof and just work, and run with 5 nines uptime. But when it comes to actually doing what needs to be done to make that happen they aren't willing to give up control of "their personal computer", or spending the money for full fault tolerance and redundancy. It sounds great in theory, and the goals are hard to disagree with, but the average business person has so little IT knowledge that they honestly don't know what's involved.
Well yeah, that's all very true but if in his heart he wants to make The Hobbit, then it has to be a decision from the heart, based on creative urges and not money. So whether he's getting screwed or not, if he truly wants this then he has to say "yeah, OK I might get screwed one more time but at least I'll be able to go Back Again*".
It's never that simple. He has a business to run too (which makes movies), and that means that to a certain extent he is responsible (professionally speaking) for the people who work for him. That makes this a business decision, and if you start making business decisions from the heart then you're probably going to lose your business. A business decision to do something can't be taken simply because it is in your heart to do so, no matter how badly you want it. It also has to make business sense. From what PJ has said, he seems to think that it doesn't make business sense to sign up with New Line for the next movie until they have resolved their dispute over the previous three movies. I can't say that I disagree with that, as much as I would like to see him do "The Hobbit".
From some of the rumblings elsewhere in this thread it sounds like there's still more to this than a simple case of "either make it for New Line or don't make it at all".
and so on. Man, when did./ become such a hotbed of communist propaganda. People want to make money. Lots and lots of money. Shock and horror.
I wondered what was at the core of the dispute. Basically what he's saying is that his contract guaranteed him a percentage of the revenues generated by the films and the film merchandising. Then New Line sold the merchandising rights to another division of their company for a flat fee which was substantially lower than what they were actually worth. Then Jackson's percentage of the merchandising was paid from that single low-ball sale, rather than a percentage of overall merchandising sales. That way New Line/Time Warner could still make massive profits from the merchandising (which is often more profitable than the movie itself) and not have to share those with Jackson. It's just a corporate shell game.
I'm not sure if that's legal, but it's certainly dirty. All Jackson wants is to have a judge rule on whether or not what they did was legal, and he wants that ruling before he's willing to sign another contract with them. That makes perfect sense to me. I would want legal clarification too, because if it was legal then that a significant part of the wording of that next contract is going to need to be changed to address this. For example, I would want the next contract to stipulate that the merchandising rights couldn't be sold to another company or division unless they were subject to open bidding by external companies as well.
I'm not sure how trying to negotiate a fair contract and getting it enforced qualifies as communist propaganda.
But it seems to me that the better thing to do would be to settle a lawsuit just to make a film, when clearly everybody's hearts *are* in it. In other words, even if PJ is owed another $50M, would it not be better for him to settle, go ahead and make The Hobbit, and earn another $250M from that - wouldn't everybody be happier?
Probably not. I mean, if he wants to make the film then he could certainly tie the film to the lawsuit, make the next film, and then get whatever they pay him for it as well as get some sort of settlement from the lawsuit. But there's no guarantee that the settlement for the lawsuit in that case would necessarily be what he is legally entitled to. And there's no guarantee that he wouldn't be in the same boat over "creative accounting" for the next two movies.
It's kind of like saying that he believes that he was entitled to $325 million from the original three movies, but only got $250 million. Then he filed a suit to get the other $75 million sorted out. So the studio comes back to him and says that rather than sort out that $75 million, they want him to make another movie and they'll tie that movie to some sort of out of court settlement of his lawsuit. Say he would be entitled to $100 million for making "The Hobbit", and they tell him that they'll pay him $125 million to make it and settle his other suit. Sure, he gets more money on the next movie than he normally would, but he's still been shorted to the tune of $50 million dollars. That's hardly fair. In Jackson's mind, his contract is probably solid enough that he could make the bulk of what they would offer him for "The Hobbit" if New Line just paid what they already "owe" him contractually. And then there's the whole issue of how the accounting for "The Hobbit" is done on top of that.
It makes perfect sense to me that if you think that someone screwed you on a business deal, that you wouldn't sign a new deal with them until you got the previous situation resolved. Otherwise you're just asking to be screwed again. That's just common sense.
Do you seek permission from the customers before putting this software on ?
I know on average it will probably help. But 'on average' and 'probably' are not good enough as-and-when Spybot makes a medical imaging machine behave in a way other than designed, for example.
Don't be ridiculous. Anyone who is using a "medical imaging machine" isn't going to hire out to a small shop for IT support. They're going to be part of a hospital or other facility that has their own IT support. And most likely there will be a special department dedicated specifically to support of the medical imaging systems. I know this because supporting PACS systems is been part of what I do for a living.
Though Han Solo belongs to Lucasfilm, Harison Ford's face still belongs to him.
If a reasonable person were to view the CGI character and identify it as Harrison Ford, and the filmmaker had not secured prior permission from Ford for the use of his likeness, then Ford would have grounds for a right-of-publicity action against the filmmakers.,br>
True. But I seem to recall seeing some interviews with the cast of the original Star Wars movies where they mentioned that they had signed away likeness rights in their movie contracts. I specifically recall Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher commenting on how weird it was to see their faces on action figures and lunch boxes and such. So they may have that angle covered already.
Microsoft (from what I've heard from my desktop folks at work) do have a patch for Windows 2000 - it's just not exactly published yet.
Let's just say the company I work for doesn't have more than 1% WinXP....
Yes, the word is that there is a "patch" for Windows 2000. But since Windows 2000 is out of mainstream support Microsoft is only making it available to companies that have purchased extended support agreements for their Windows 2000 systems. Yes, it probably is part of Microsoft's strategy to push customers into upgrading to Windows XP/2003/Vista/Longhorn. Yes, Microsoft will undoubtedly take some heat for it, but they are also freely providing documentation on how to manually resolve the issue and script the fix, and that should be more than sufficient for any admin worth the half the title to be able to fix it.
But let's be honest here, we all know (or should know) that if you are running a Microsoft OS that is two or more generations old then there are going to be some issues. If you are still running Windows 2000 in your environment (and my company is, so I speak from experience), then this is undoubtedly not the first issue that you've run into that required a work around, nor will it be the last. Fixing them is part of what we get paid to do. Eventually there will be a point where it becomes more cost-effective to upgrade, and that's what we'll do.
There are also some GPL things that may work. Can't think of them right off hand. If these are *nux desktops/servers, you have plenty of time to write a perl/bash/python to accomplish the task. Some other slashdot user is going to have to give you advice for a windows environment at this stage of the game you are in.
Hi, I'm "some other Slashdot user," and my advice for the Windows environment is the same as for Linux. Well...almost. If you are running Windows XP on the desktop or 2003 on the server (or later) then Microsoft already has released a patch that should have been part of your regular patch cycle. If not, it's time to dig out WSUS (it's free from Microsoft) or whatever patch management system that you are using to manage your 7000 servers. If you truly have 7000 servers and no patch management system in place, then you are not only screwed, but you are stupid as well.
Now, for anything that is Windows 2000 or older, you will have to manually patch the system, and without the benefit of a patch from Microsoft. No problem. Just hit their Technet article about the issue here and read up on what it entails. Basically, you manually patch one machine of each OS type, export the relevant registry keys, and then import them on the rest of the machines of the matching OS type. Or you can script the install. The referenced site even provides the batch files necessary, but if you want to get fancy you could script it with VBS, Perl, or Javascript (assuming that all of the machines to be patched have WSH installed). You could spend a couple days perfecting the technique and then let the patching script run until it is finished. It shouldn't take too long.
And as far as I'm aware, none of the DST patches (or registry fixes) requires a reboot to complete. All it does is change the date that the DST shift occurs.
Even though Microsoft may be within their rights to not support a 6 year old OS, it would be a good idea for them to roll out a patch for an annoyance like the DST change. It would be a sign of good will to past and hopefully future customers, and it just plain looks bad for unofficial sources to be offering patches for Windows. Even if the OS has gone past end of life, the Windows brand is Microsoft's bread and butter. They really can't just sit back and let anyone offer up patches for it. Besides, these aren't blue haired grandmas running Windows 2K. Some of these people/companies might just buy something if you treat them right.
The funny thing is that they have already very nearly provided a patch. They have a freely downloadable tool called TXEDIT that will allow you to manually make the change to your system. Problem solved. If you have multiple computers to update, they provide instructions for exporting the relevant registry keys which can then be imported into the other systems. If you have a lot of PCs to upgrade they have provide scripts that will automatically apply the update to all of the systems within a domain. What more could you want from them?
You can't infer any correlation between CO2 and temperature with the limited dataset provided above. From general knowledge we know that electromagnetic (and thermal) fields fall off with an inverse-square of distance, so we can assume that Mars would be receiving less heat input from the sun than Earth, and Venus more.
Right, but we're not talking about the effect of atmospheric CO2 on temperatures in general, we are talking about the effect of atmospheric CO2 on temperatures on Earth. Distance to the sun and atmospheric pressure obviously play a key role in differences between planets, but they are largely static values here on Earth and so they are largely irrelevant.
All we know for certain is that the global average temperature is increasing, but we don't actually know for 100% certain what's causing it. CO2 is just the most-likely suspect at the moment.
That may be true, but if we wait until we're 100% certain of anything before taking action, we may never take action. If we do ever become 100% certain as to what is causing the warming who is to say that we won't have already crossed the tipping point where the intervention of mankind won't make a difference? At a certain point you have to stop sitting on the fence and say "Though it isn't 100% proven, I am convinced so lets start making changes." The scientific community has long since reached that consensus. The bureaucrats are still stalling it though (on behalf of their CO2 producing constituencies), and the sad state of science education in the US is allowing them to get away with it.
If you look at what the major sources of atmospheric CO2 are, nearly every one of them has other negative impacts on our environment or health. If we're not willing to clean them up to reduce global warming, we should at least be willing to clean them up for the sake of good health.
The results from computer models show that it just isn't true. The effect of global warming will be larger than any effect from the disruption of the warm water current.
Possibly, but since I haven't seen the models and you haven't provided a link to them, I'm leery of such claims at best. The heat tends to be concentrated at or close to the equator, and the northern part of Europe relies pretty heavily on those currents to keep them warmer in winter. They may not see a mini ice age, but they may well end up with two seasons: Winter and almost winter. At least until the flow of ocean currents returns to normal.
That point, like numerous others in Gore's film, is incorrect. In attempts to reproduce the study Gore mentions, less than 2% explicitly endorse the " consensus view". This website lists the 1,117 documents and abstracts Oreskes (Gore's source) claims to have analyzed in her paper. You can see for yourself that there is not a scientific consensus, at least in the ISI databses.
Having just seen the movie yesterday, I thought that I would point out a couple things while they are fresh in my mind. Firstly, the film didn't claim that all "however many" of the peer reviewed scientific articles on global warming said that global warming was man made, or explicitly endorsed the "consensus view" of anthropogenic climate change. The claim in the film was that zero of those reviewed articles were in doubt of the causes for global warming. You see, the study was in response to the claim of "isn't there some debate about whether global warming is real or what causes it?" The study that Gore cited demonstrated that there wasn't any scientific debate on the subject in peer-reviewed scientific journals (zero articles doubting the cause of global warming), and that the only articles that were published in doubt of the cause of global warming were in mainstream media articles (53% of articles doubting the cause of global warming). Think about it though, you're debating whether or not articles have been written debating the "consensus view." Why do you think that they call it a consensus?
More to the point, even without the study about who is publishing articles doubting global warming, if you look at all of the studies regarding the earth's temperature, it very clearly is getting warmer on a global scale. That simple fact can't be argued. If you look at the data it becomes obvious that the degree to which the earth is warming is far in excess of what has previously been seen in any cyclical warming, and that the largest uptick in warming has been in the past 50-75 years. All of this is well established fact.
Now the anti-global warming people claim that there is doubt as to whether or not mankind is responsible for the increase in warming. This is what we know about it.
1. We know that the higher the level of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere, the less heat can radiate into space. That's why they call them greenhouse gasses.
2. The less heat that radiates into space, the warmer it gets here on earth.
3. The level of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere has been steadily increasing in recent years.
4. The average temperature of the earth has been steadily increasing in recent years.
5. The average temperature of the earth has increased in roughly the same pattern as the level of greenhouse gasses, and in fact the increases on both sides match the predictions of environmental scientists who have studied the phenomenon and have tied the two processes together.
Now inevitably someone will say here that correlation != causalaity, because they always say that on Slashdot. But that isn't really a valid argument in this debate, because there is a scientifically well documented principle here (the greenhouse effect) that very clearly demonstrates a cause and effect relationship between greenhouse gasses and increased temperatures. So I guess my question is this: what is in debate? What isn't understood? When you actually sit down and look at the numbers, it is painfully obvious what is going on. Arguing about the methodology that Oreskes used in her study of how many scientific articles disputed the causes of global warming is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
it's gonna come to the point where iceskating, icehockey, skiing, snowboarding and all
the other arctic activities will become an expensive synthetic exotic rarity
not only that you'll have to tell your children and grandchildren stories about
simple things like snow, ice, winter,
From what I understand that's not exactly true. Once most of the ice in Greenland melts, it will cool down the north atlantic enough that it will disrupt the flow of warm water from the equator that normally keeps northern Europe warmer, and then Europe will likely have some sort of mini ice age to contend with.
I never claimed that pornography was the same as sex. I referred to the sex industry, which pornography (or at least it's commercials aspects) are certainly a part. One would assume that if one wanted to set up a.XXX TLD that they would want it used not only for sites that provide pornographic images, but sites that provide other sexually related materials (aka, shops selling sex toys, sex manuals, erotic writing, adverts for escorts or strip clubs, etc).
Regarding the rest of your post, it's probably a wasted effort trying to talk sense (especially about sex and human nature) so someone who cites "god" in their post, but...
You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act--that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or bit of bacon, would you not think that in the country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?
In most societies, food is far more common, mundane, and freely available than sex (or strip teases). Furthermore, the drive for sex (or procreation if you're one of those "sex is only for procreation" types) is far, far stronger than simple hunger. Especially when you are being adequately fed. But if you've ever seen an episode of the TV show Survivor (I know, reality TV is probably not the best example) after several weeks of island life they usually have a competition where the contestants can win tasty, western style meals like pizza, burgers, etc instead of having to forage for bugs or eating the meat of captured rats (or whatever else they can manage to dig up). And wouldn't you know it, when they lift the cover of the dishes so that the contestants can see the meals every last one of them is going "oooh", "aaah", and smacking their lips in anticipation. Even the great prude C.S. Lewis himself would behave that way if he hadn't eaten for a week.
The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body.
Actually, the biological purpose of sex is sexual gratification. A common biological result of sex is children, but only someone pushing an agenda would claim it is the purpose. I don't know about you, but when I'm having sex the last thing that I'm usually thinking is "I hope that this produces children", and I have yet to meet anyone (with the exception of a couple of friends who had trouble conceiving after 2 years of trying) who ever claimed that such thoughts went through their mind. Even after sexual release we typically aren't concerned about conception. After having sex is someone more likely to ask "do you think that you're pregnant", or "was it good for you"?
Furthermore, the biological purpose of eating isn't to repair the body but to replenish the bodies energy stores. If someone is in perfect health they still eat even though their body is not in need of repair.
Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is quite true most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.
There's two reasons for that. Firstly, there is a finite limit to how much we can oblige our appetite for food. Eventually you will get full. If you keep eating you
My HP notebook, bought about 15 months ago not only came with restore disks, but a plain Windows XP SP2 disk and disks for WinDVD and Sonic's CD recording software.
I don't know about SONY, but in my experience, HP are more generous than most in terms if disks included with their PCs.
It depends on what you're buying. For years the HP and Compaq consumer PCs and laptops have had only the restore partitions. As recently as three years ago (about the time that they started dropping the Compaq name for business lines) the Compaq branded business line PCs and laptops had restore CDs that restored the factory image, but no OS and software CDs. Then after they switched to the HP name on their business lines they started shipping a Windows install CD with an additional software and drivers CD. Now, within the past 6 months or so they have done away with that on the business lines (at least on the desktops) and gone back to a restore partition that requires you to burn restore discs yourself. On the bright side, now they come with DVD burners so it only takes a couple of discs.
As far as I can tell, they're exactly like the tobacco industry in this repect. Sure, they play the law-abiding game, but so does the tobacco industry. Some tobacco companies have even run campains to persuade kids to not smoke. To them it's the cost of doing business. Of course, both of them will do as little as possible to stop minors from getting hooked on their content.
That's not even close to accurate. With tobacco the industry has to actually get someone hooked (aka, addicted) to their product by exposing them to it repeatedly until their brain craves it. But when it comes to the sex industry we are already pre-wired to crave it. Sex is simply a necessary part of life, much as eating or sleeping is a part of life.
The tobacco industry has to actually create a false perception of need to get you to try tobacco, then create the addictive need for their product (via nicotine). The sex industry simply takes advantage of what already exists in human instinct.
The tobacco industry is slowing killing their customers (along with many innocent bystanders) and must work hard to constantly get new customers. The sex industry doesn't kill their customers, and if anything they probably spur a certain amount of human reproduction which results in more customers for them down the line.
The tobacco industry has a parasitic relationship with people, while the sex industry has a more symbiotic relationship. The tobacco industry is far more insidious and evil than the sex industry could ever possibly dream of being.
The porn industry is not a stupid and corrupt as it might appear. They don't want little kids staring at this anymore then parents do. They are not the tobacco industry. They want to protect their interests which means not showing it to kids which is against the law.
This part is true, but there are a number of ways that a porn site operator can achieve this with the.COM or CC TLDs, namely by rating your site appropriately. The problem is, most people are so techno-retarded that they don't realize that there are ratings controls built into their web browser that will allow them to block a significant part of not only porn, but drug, gambling, and violence-related sites. Barring that, you can still buy software to do the filtering. But again, most parents would rather push the responsibility for filtering their kids' Internet access onto someone else.
Now, in an ideal world, all of the porn site operators will also register their site in the.XXX TLD and then change their.COM or CC domain names to simply redirect to the.XXX site, thereby giving you one-stop blocking. The reality is, not everybody will do so. Because of the international and decentralized nature of the Internet, many site operators will ignore.XXX altogether. In some areas you'll probably have parents lobbying ISPs to block all access to.XXX in order to "protect the children", rather than parents taking responsibility for it themselves (same as today). So if you are a porn site operator and you stand a substantial chance of reducing your paying audience by moving from.COM to.XXX, then why would you? And then of course there is the thorny issue of things that aren't blatant porn, but can be construed as sexual. Where is that allowed to live? What about sites like Yahoo and YouTube that have the majority of their content that is not objectionable, but has a small percentage of their content that is adult in nature? Do they have to split their sites? If not, then you can't filter those by just blocking the.XXX.
Say I get some malware after visiting one of the sites. A repersentative from.XXX will review and then take away the domain name if they do not stop.
You obviously have no idea how domain registration works. What you do with the domain is your business. Why the domain registrar should have anything to do with investigating claims of malware and suspending the name is beyond me. In reality, these days the vast majority of malware is delivered either by email, by worm, by ads (which primarily come from.COM sites), or by people installing software that they shouldn't install. Trying to tie any of that to a TLD is absolutely ridiculous.
I'd say make them pay $1000 dollars for the domain name. With yearly fees. People will pay it if there is money, and the consumer will pay for fast downloads and good security.
The further that I get into your post the more obvious it becomes that you really don't understand how the Internet works. The TLD that you use to register a domain name has nothing to do with download speed or good security. And about the only way that you could make a.XXX TLD an even bigger failure than it is already destined to be is by charging people 100 times the going rate of a domain name for a.XXX domain name (i.e., $1000). Think about it for a second, if you already have a.COM or CC name you have very little incentive to also register a.XXX name to go with it, especially if that.XXX name is likely to have a narrower appeal than the.COM name. But if you have to pay a fortune to get it, there's no way you're going to waste the money on registering for a.XXX.
With regard to credit card offers, you can tell the US credit rating companies that you don't want any more credit card offers. There's a phone number you can phone, and they ask you, "Do you mean stop sending credit card offers for 5 years, or permanently?"
Agreed. I did the same thing last year when I was doing my annual check of my credit reports, and I haven't gotten a credit card offer in the mail since. My wife, on the other hand, refused to do so. So she gets literally dozens of credit card offers every week, sometimes more than one from the same company, and at least two of the companies that regularly solicit her still send her solicitations even though she already has credit cards through them. If credit card companies would just stop sending out unsolicited applictions, they could probably afford to give everybody a 2% cut on their interest rates!
telling us why episodic content is great and start showing us. Yes, I know about all the advantages, but maybe we should start talking about overcoming the hefty drawbacks rather than pretending they don't exist.
This isn't intended as a flame, but it seems apparent from your post that you think that there are some fairly large drawbacks to episodic gaming, though you didn't actually mention what they were (any more than the developers did). Having a discussion is more than saying "I don't see a future in it, there are drawbacks."
...and I was suprised that he tried all of the steps that he listed, and never tried the one step that was virtually guaranteed to work. All he had to do was the following:
1. Install the Windows OS on the original hard drive. 2. Install the Promise TX2300 RAID card and hard disks onto that system and make sure that the OS recognizes it and loads drivers. 3. Set up his mirrored array. 4. Use Ghost, TrueImage, or some other imaging software (Acronis has a free 15-day trial) to clone the original OS drive onto the mirrored array, resizing the destination partitions in the process. 5. Remove the old disk and boot the system.
I have done this several times using various array controllers on various hardware, including he TX2300 on a pair of HP desktops. It's not only easy, it works every time.
Are they aware that the call logs are one of the few objective measures of productivity for your department?
If not, make them aware. Charts hanging on the wall will reinforce that a bit in the beginning.
Especially if those charts have lines showing the number of tickets/calls that each member of the team fielded, broken down by team member. When the big fat zero is hanging on the wall staring them in the eyes, and they know that anybody walking by can see it, they will start documenting.
We had a similar situation at a hospital where I worked. The surgeons are responsible for dictating/filing case notes after every procedure, then reviewing the transcribed notes and signing off on them. We had a problem with surgeons not completing the paperwork in a timely fashion, so the head of medical records put up a "wall of shame" in the physicians locker room, dictation areas, and OR lounge that listed the worst offenders by name, number of delinquent cases, and the age of the oldest delinquent case. Once they knew that their peers were seeing their name on the "wall of shame" (or worse yet, the Chief Medical Officer saw them) they fell right into line.
I hate filling out tickets and documenting cases, even with the relatively few number that you hit at tier 3 support levels. Everybody hates doing it, but the simple truth is that it justifies headcount to the beancounters. Most non-IT people have a very limited perception of what it is that IT people actually do to begin with, but without seeing documentation for the things that you DO do they'll think that you guys just sit around a play games all day or something.
I have tried to make the process as easy as possible for our team members. Our ticketing system monitors an email address and automatically creates tickets for requests that are emailed in. It also sorts replies to ticket notes via ticket number and adds them to the case notes automatically. So if we get our users to submit the request via email, and we use the helpdesk ticketing system to reply to their cases, then our tickets are automatically documented. All you have to worry about now are the relatively few tickets that come in by phone.
Well, the SCO FUD lawsuits are finally running out of steam, and since Microsoft doesn't have any other bright ideas for slowing down Linux, they're trying the same tactic. It didn't work for SCO, and it probably won't work for Microsoft either. But I doubt very seriously that shutting down Linux is the goal, at least not as much as getting Linux distributors and customers to cough up cash.
Never had a problem. Of course, I use Firefox, a NAT, and don't visit porn sites or use P2P, which pretty much cuts my attack vectors to zero. Haven't had any AdWare in, hmm, 4 years or so either. I have AdAware installed on my computer but haven't bothered running it in about 2 years since it never picks up anything.
You ought to try it just to see what it picks up. My Windows XP SP2 machine is kept fully patched, I use Firefox, sit behind a NAT/Firewall, then have a software firewall running on the PC itself, plus antivirus and anti-spyware software. But on a scan this weekend it still discovered a keylogger. Most likely it was something that my wife brought in via an email from one of her friends or something, but it just goes to show you that you can never be too careful.
Slashdot Mirror
MS would lockin not just users using their standard tricks, but actually lockin their subscription money. Especially with enterprises, their main market, they'd get budgeted in perpetuity, a massive entitlement that would require executive action (thereby happen less often) to cancel, rather than have to do something every time an upgrade decision comes up.
They already do this. And for the child poster who pointed at MSDN, no, that's not it. It's called Software Assurance. You subscribe to SA for a period of years (usually 4) and you pay an set annual fee for those years. During those years, you are entitled to all upgrades and enhancements that are released for any version of any software that is licensed under SA. Of course, most people took a pass on it when it came out, so they did a serious revamp of it recently to include bonuses like included support and education vouchers, etc. Now it's actually a pretty sweet deal.
Because computer expertise isn't the job of many of these people? Possibly because they possess invaluable field-specific expertise that outweighs their computer deficiencies?
I work at a hospital, and I used to get that excuse from nurses, patient techs, and even the occasional nurse manager. They would frequently say "But we're not computer people!" My response was the following:
"What would you say if someone told you that they weren't a stethoscope person, a PCA pump person, a respirator person, or a defibrilator person? Would you laugh at them? Of course, because those aren't types of people, those are tools that are used to do a specific job, in this case nursing. Computers are also a tool that is used to do a job. If you were a nurse and didn't know how to use a stethoscope (or any of those other tools) you probably wouldn't be very good at your job. Guess what? Computers are also a tool that are used in your job. They're used for electronic documentation at this hospital, and every other hospital in the county. With the current trends in healthcare they are only going to become more prevalent in the industry, and eventually even the small rural hospitals will use them extensively. You may not like them, but if you want to continue to be a nurse then you're going to have to learn how to use them."
The same could be said for just about any other profession in the world. Now if the person possesses such valuable, field-specific expertise that not only outweighs their computer deficiencies but also removes the need for them to know how to use the basic tools of the business, then maybe they should hire them an assistant to handle the computer for them.
It's the job of IT to secure the network. If doing something would harm you, then it's your job to make sure that they can't do it. If you think the "lusers" are too stupid to understand "opening attachments is bad", then block them at the firewall. If you don't think the users will understand that macros can carry a virus, disable macros when you install Word. There's no reason to force users to do IT work that they don't want to learn.
As cute as that answer may be, it's just not feasible in the majority of environments. Sure, I can lock things down so that it's extremely secure and that users have almost zero opportunity of doing something that causes a security breach. Of course, then the user can't do many of the things that they think that they should be able to do, like change their desktop wallpaper or screensaver, email around jokes, videos, and pictures of kittens, or surf web sites with dancing hamsters. Which isn't a problem for me, because our IT policy clearly states that IT resources are allowed to be used solely for business purposes. But then they start complaining to their managers, who start complaining up the chain of command, and eventually it comes down that what IT is doing is "bad for morale," and we're forced to open things back up again. And of course in the meantime, the IT department has fallen even further in the estimation of the general populace and an "us against them" attitude has set it.
The chief problem that I see (with this particular issue) is that people say that they want IT security, and that they want their systems to be bulletproof and just work, and run with 5 nines uptime. But when it comes to actually doing what needs to be done to make that happen they aren't willing to give up control of "their personal computer", or spending the money for full fault tolerance and redundancy. It sounds great in theory, and the goals are hard to disagree with, but the average business person has so little IT knowledge that they honestly don't know what's involved.
Well yeah, that's all very true but if in his heart he wants to make The Hobbit, then it has to be a decision from the heart, based on creative urges and not money. So whether he's getting screwed or not, if he truly wants this then he has to say "yeah, OK I might get screwed one more time but at least I'll be able to go Back Again*".
It's never that simple. He has a business to run too (which makes movies), and that means that to a certain extent he is responsible (professionally speaking) for the people who work for him. That makes this a business decision, and if you start making business decisions from the heart then you're probably going to lose your business. A business decision to do something can't be taken simply because it is in your heart to do so, no matter how badly you want it. It also has to make business sense. From what PJ has said, he seems to think that it doesn't make business sense to sign up with New Line for the next movie until they have resolved their dispute over the previous three movies. I can't say that I disagree with that, as much as I would like to see him do "The Hobbit".
From some of the rumblings elsewhere in this thread it sounds like there's still more to this than a simple case of "either make it for New Line or don't make it at all".
and so on. Man, when did ./ become such a hotbed of communist propaganda. People want to make money. Lots and lots of money. Shock and horror.
I wondered what was at the core of the dispute. Basically what he's saying is that his contract guaranteed him a percentage of the revenues generated by the films and the film merchandising. Then New Line sold the merchandising rights to another division of their company for a flat fee which was substantially lower than what they were actually worth. Then Jackson's percentage of the merchandising was paid from that single low-ball sale, rather than a percentage of overall merchandising sales. That way New Line/Time Warner could still make massive profits from the merchandising (which is often more profitable than the movie itself) and not have to share those with Jackson. It's just a corporate shell game.
I'm not sure if that's legal, but it's certainly dirty. All Jackson wants is to have a judge rule on whether or not what they did was legal, and he wants that ruling before he's willing to sign another contract with them. That makes perfect sense to me. I would want legal clarification too, because if it was legal then that a significant part of the wording of that next contract is going to need to be changed to address this. For example, I would want the next contract to stipulate that the merchandising rights couldn't be sold to another company or division unless they were subject to open bidding by external companies as well.
I'm not sure how trying to negotiate a fair contract and getting it enforced qualifies as communist propaganda.
But it seems to me that the better thing to do would be to settle a lawsuit just to make a film, when clearly everybody's hearts *are* in it. In other words, even if PJ is owed another $50M, would it not be better for him to settle, go ahead and make The Hobbit, and earn another $250M from that - wouldn't everybody be happier?
Probably not. I mean, if he wants to make the film then he could certainly tie the film to the lawsuit, make the next film, and then get whatever they pay him for it as well as get some sort of settlement from the lawsuit. But there's no guarantee that the settlement for the lawsuit in that case would necessarily be what he is legally entitled to. And there's no guarantee that he wouldn't be in the same boat over "creative accounting" for the next two movies.
It's kind of like saying that he believes that he was entitled to $325 million from the original three movies, but only got $250 million. Then he filed a suit to get the other $75 million sorted out. So the studio comes back to him and says that rather than sort out that $75 million, they want him to make another movie and they'll tie that movie to some sort of out of court settlement of his lawsuit. Say he would be entitled to $100 million for making "The Hobbit", and they tell him that they'll pay him $125 million to make it and settle his other suit. Sure, he gets more money on the next movie than he normally would, but he's still been shorted to the tune of $50 million dollars. That's hardly fair. In Jackson's mind, his contract is probably solid enough that he could make the bulk of what they would offer him for "The Hobbit" if New Line just paid what they already "owe" him contractually. And then there's the whole issue of how the accounting for "The Hobbit" is done on top of that.
It makes perfect sense to me that if you think that someone screwed you on a business deal, that you wouldn't sign a new deal with them until you got the previous situation resolved. Otherwise you're just asking to be screwed again. That's just common sense.
Do you seek permission from the customers before putting this software on ? I know on average it will probably help. But 'on average' and 'probably' are not good enough as-and-when Spybot makes a medical imaging machine behave in a way other than designed, for example.
Don't be ridiculous. Anyone who is using a "medical imaging machine" isn't going to hire out to a small shop for IT support. They're going to be part of a hospital or other facility that has their own IT support. And most likely there will be a special department dedicated specifically to support of the medical imaging systems. I know this because supporting PACS systems is been part of what I do for a living.
Though Han Solo belongs to Lucasfilm, Harison Ford's face still belongs to him. If a reasonable person were to view the CGI character and identify it as Harrison Ford, and the filmmaker had not secured prior permission from Ford for the use of his likeness, then Ford would have grounds for a right-of-publicity action against the filmmakers.,br>
True. But I seem to recall seeing some interviews with the cast of the original Star Wars movies where they mentioned that they had signed away likeness rights in their movie contracts. I specifically recall Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher commenting on how weird it was to see their faces on action figures and lunch boxes and such. So they may have that angle covered already.
Microsoft (from what I've heard from my desktop folks at work) do have a patch for Windows 2000 - it's just not exactly published yet.
Let's just say the company I work for doesn't have more than 1% WinXP....
Yes, the word is that there is a "patch" for Windows 2000. But since Windows 2000 is out of mainstream support Microsoft is only making it available to companies that have purchased extended support agreements for their Windows 2000 systems. Yes, it probably is part of Microsoft's strategy to push customers into upgrading to Windows XP/2003/Vista/Longhorn. Yes, Microsoft will undoubtedly take some heat for it, but they are also freely providing documentation on how to manually resolve the issue and script the fix, and that should be more than sufficient for any admin worth the half the title to be able to fix it.
But let's be honest here, we all know (or should know) that if you are running a Microsoft OS that is two or more generations old then there are going to be some issues. If you are still running Windows 2000 in your environment (and my company is, so I speak from experience), then this is undoubtedly not the first issue that you've run into that required a work around, nor will it be the last. Fixing them is part of what we get paid to do. Eventually there will be a point where it becomes more cost-effective to upgrade, and that's what we'll do.
There are also some GPL things that may work. Can't think of them right off hand. If these are *nux desktops/servers, you have plenty of time to write a perl/bash/python to accomplish the task. Some other slashdot user is going to have to give you advice for a windows environment at this stage of the game you are in.
Hi, I'm "some other Slashdot user," and my advice for the Windows environment is the same as for Linux. Well...almost. If you are running Windows XP on the desktop or 2003 on the server (or later) then Microsoft already has released a patch that should have been part of your regular patch cycle. If not, it's time to dig out WSUS (it's free from Microsoft) or whatever patch management system that you are using to manage your 7000 servers. If you truly have 7000 servers and no patch management system in place, then you are not only screwed, but you are stupid as well.
Now, for anything that is Windows 2000 or older, you will have to manually patch the system, and without the benefit of a patch from Microsoft. No problem. Just hit their Technet article about the issue here and read up on what it entails. Basically, you manually patch one machine of each OS type, export the relevant registry keys, and then import them on the rest of the machines of the matching OS type. Or you can script the install. The referenced site even provides the batch files necessary, but if you want to get fancy you could script it with VBS, Perl, or Javascript (assuming that all of the machines to be patched have WSH installed). You could spend a couple days perfecting the technique and then let the patching script run until it is finished. It shouldn't take too long.
And as far as I'm aware, none of the DST patches (or registry fixes) requires a reboot to complete. All it does is change the date that the DST shift occurs.
Even though Microsoft may be within their rights to not support a 6 year old OS, it would be a good idea for them to roll out a patch for an annoyance like the DST change. It would be a sign of good will to past and hopefully future customers, and it just plain looks bad for unofficial sources to be offering patches for Windows. Even if the OS has gone past end of life, the Windows brand is Microsoft's bread and butter. They really can't just sit back and let anyone offer up patches for it. Besides, these aren't blue haired grandmas running Windows 2K. Some of these people/companies might just buy something if you treat them right.
The funny thing is that they have already very nearly provided a patch. They have a freely downloadable tool called TXEDIT that will allow you to manually make the change to your system. Problem solved. If you have multiple computers to update, they provide instructions for exporting the relevant registry keys which can then be imported into the other systems. If you have a lot of PCs to upgrade they have provide scripts that will automatically apply the update to all of the systems within a domain. What more could you want from them?
Full details are here.
You can't infer any correlation between CO2 and temperature with the limited dataset provided above. From general knowledge we know that electromagnetic (and thermal) fields fall off with an inverse-square of distance, so we can assume that Mars would be receiving less heat input from the sun than Earth, and Venus more.
Right, but we're not talking about the effect of atmospheric CO2 on temperatures in general, we are talking about the effect of atmospheric CO2 on temperatures on Earth. Distance to the sun and atmospheric pressure obviously play a key role in differences between planets, but they are largely static values here on Earth and so they are largely irrelevant.
All we know for certain is that the global average temperature is increasing, but we don't actually know for 100% certain what's causing it. CO2 is just the most-likely suspect at the moment.
That may be true, but if we wait until we're 100% certain of anything before taking action, we may never take action. If we do ever become 100% certain as to what is causing the warming who is to say that we won't have already crossed the tipping point where the intervention of mankind won't make a difference? At a certain point you have to stop sitting on the fence and say "Though it isn't 100% proven, I am convinced so lets start making changes." The scientific community has long since reached that consensus. The bureaucrats are still stalling it though (on behalf of their CO2 producing constituencies), and the sad state of science education in the US is allowing them to get away with it.
If you look at what the major sources of atmospheric CO2 are, nearly every one of them has other negative impacts on our environment or health. If we're not willing to clean them up to reduce global warming, we should at least be willing to clean them up for the sake of good health.
The results from computer models show that it just isn't true. The effect of global warming will be larger than any effect from the disruption of the warm water current.
Possibly, but since I haven't seen the models and you haven't provided a link to them, I'm leery of such claims at best. The heat tends to be concentrated at or close to the equator, and the northern part of Europe relies pretty heavily on those currents to keep them warmer in winter. They may not see a mini ice age, but they may well end up with two seasons: Winter and almost winter. At least until the flow of ocean currents returns to normal.
That point, like numerous others in Gore's film, is incorrect. In attempts to reproduce the study Gore mentions, less than 2% explicitly endorse the " consensus view". This website lists the 1,117 documents and abstracts Oreskes (Gore's source) claims to have analyzed in her paper. You can see for yourself that there is not a scientific consensus, at least in the ISI databses.
Having just seen the movie yesterday, I thought that I would point out a couple things while they are fresh in my mind. Firstly, the film didn't claim that all "however many" of the peer reviewed scientific articles on global warming said that global warming was man made, or explicitly endorsed the "consensus view" of anthropogenic climate change. The claim in the film was that zero of those reviewed articles were in doubt of the causes for global warming. You see, the study was in response to the claim of "isn't there some debate about whether global warming is real or what causes it?" The study that Gore cited demonstrated that there wasn't any scientific debate on the subject in peer-reviewed scientific journals (zero articles doubting the cause of global warming), and that the only articles that were published in doubt of the cause of global warming were in mainstream media articles (53% of articles doubting the cause of global warming). Think about it though, you're debating whether or not articles have been written debating the "consensus view." Why do you think that they call it a consensus?
More to the point, even without the study about who is publishing articles doubting global warming, if you look at all of the studies regarding the earth's temperature, it very clearly is getting warmer on a global scale. That simple fact can't be argued. If you look at the data it becomes obvious that the degree to which the earth is warming is far in excess of what has previously been seen in any cyclical warming, and that the largest uptick in warming has been in the past 50-75 years. All of this is well established fact.
Now the anti-global warming people claim that there is doubt as to whether or not mankind is responsible for the increase in warming. This is what we know about it.
1. We know that the higher the level of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere, the less heat can radiate into space. That's why they call them greenhouse gasses.
2. The less heat that radiates into space, the warmer it gets here on earth.
3. The level of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere has been steadily increasing in recent years.
4. The average temperature of the earth has been steadily increasing in recent years.
5. The average temperature of the earth has increased in roughly the same pattern as the level of greenhouse gasses, and in fact the increases on both sides match the predictions of environmental scientists who have studied the phenomenon and have tied the two processes together.
Now inevitably someone will say here that correlation != causalaity, because they always say that on Slashdot. But that isn't really a valid argument in this debate, because there is a scientifically well documented principle here (the greenhouse effect) that very clearly demonstrates a cause and effect relationship between greenhouse gasses and increased temperatures. So I guess my question is this: what is in debate? What isn't understood? When you actually sit down and look at the numbers, it is painfully obvious what is going on. Arguing about the methodology that Oreskes used in her study of how many scientific articles disputed the causes of global warming is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
it's gonna come to the point where iceskating, icehockey, skiing, snowboarding and all the other arctic activities will become an expensive synthetic exotic rarity not only that you'll have to tell your children and grandchildren stories about simple things like snow, ice, winter,
From what I understand that's not exactly true. Once most of the ice in Greenland melts, it will cool down the north atlantic enough that it will disrupt the flow of warm water from the equator that normally keeps northern Europe warmer, and then Europe will likely have some sort of mini ice age to contend with.
First, pornography is not the same thing as sex.
.XXX TLD that they would want it used not only for sites that provide pornographic images, but sites that provide other sexually related materials (aka, shops selling sex toys, sex manuals, erotic writing, adverts for escorts or strip clubs, etc).
I never claimed that pornography was the same as sex. I referred to the sex industry, which pornography (or at least it's commercials aspects) are certainly a part. One would assume that if one wanted to set up a
Regarding the rest of your post, it's probably a wasted effort trying to talk sense (especially about sex and human nature) so someone who cites "god" in their post, but...
You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act--that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or bit of bacon, would you not think that in the country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?
In most societies, food is far more common, mundane, and freely available than sex (or strip teases). Furthermore, the drive for sex (or procreation if you're one of those "sex is only for procreation" types) is far, far stronger than simple hunger. Especially when you are being adequately fed. But if you've ever seen an episode of the TV show Survivor (I know, reality TV is probably not the best example) after several weeks of island life they usually have a competition where the contestants can win tasty, western style meals like pizza, burgers, etc instead of having to forage for bugs or eating the meat of captured rats (or whatever else they can manage to dig up). And wouldn't you know it, when they lift the cover of the dishes so that the contestants can see the meals every last one of them is going "oooh", "aaah", and smacking their lips in anticipation. Even the great prude C.S. Lewis himself would behave that way if he hadn't eaten for a week.
The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body.
Actually, the biological purpose of sex is sexual gratification. A common biological result of sex is children, but only someone pushing an agenda would claim it is the purpose. I don't know about you, but when I'm having sex the last thing that I'm usually thinking is "I hope that this produces children", and I have yet to meet anyone (with the exception of a couple of friends who had trouble conceiving after 2 years of trying) who ever claimed that such thoughts went through their mind. Even after sexual release we typically aren't concerned about conception. After having sex is someone more likely to ask "do you think that you're pregnant", or "was it good for you"?
Furthermore, the biological purpose of eating isn't to repair the body but to replenish the bodies energy stores. If someone is in perfect health they still eat even though their body is not in need of repair.
Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is quite true most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.
There's two reasons for that. Firstly, there is a finite limit to how much we can oblige our appetite for food. Eventually you will get full. If you keep eating you
My HP notebook, bought about 15 months ago not only came with restore disks, but a plain Windows XP SP2 disk and disks for WinDVD and Sonic's CD recording software.
I don't know about SONY, but in my experience, HP are more generous than most in terms if disks included with their PCs.
It depends on what you're buying. For years the HP and Compaq consumer PCs and laptops have had only the restore partitions. As recently as three years ago (about the time that they started dropping the Compaq name for business lines) the Compaq branded business line PCs and laptops had restore CDs that restored the factory image, but no OS and software CDs. Then after they switched to the HP name on their business lines they started shipping a Windows install CD with an additional software and drivers CD. Now, within the past 6 months or so they have done away with that on the business lines (at least on the desktops) and gone back to a restore partition that requires you to burn restore discs yourself. On the bright side, now they come with DVD burners so it only takes a couple of discs.
As far as I can tell, they're exactly like the tobacco industry in this repect. Sure, they play the law-abiding game, but so does the tobacco industry. Some tobacco companies have even run campains to persuade kids to not smoke. To them it's the cost of doing business. Of course, both of them will do as little as possible to stop minors from getting hooked on their content.
That's not even close to accurate. With tobacco the industry has to actually get someone hooked (aka, addicted) to their product by exposing them to it repeatedly until their brain craves it. But when it comes to the sex industry we are already pre-wired to crave it. Sex is simply a necessary part of life, much as eating or sleeping is a part of life.
The tobacco industry has to actually create a false perception of need to get you to try tobacco, then create the addictive need for their product (via nicotine). The sex industry simply takes advantage of what already exists in human instinct.
The tobacco industry is slowing killing their customers (along with many innocent bystanders) and must work hard to constantly get new customers. The sex industry doesn't kill their customers, and if anything they probably spur a certain amount of human reproduction which results in more customers for them down the line.
The tobacco industry has a parasitic relationship with people, while the sex industry has a more symbiotic relationship. The tobacco industry is far more insidious and evil than the sex industry could ever possibly dream of being.
The porn industry is not a stupid and corrupt as it might appear. They don't want little kids staring at this anymore then parents do. They are not the tobacco industry. They want to protect their interests which means not showing it to kids which is against the law.
.COM or CC TLDs, namely by rating your site appropriately. The problem is, most people are so techno-retarded that they don't realize that there are ratings controls built into their web browser that will allow them to block a significant part of not only porn, but drug, gambling, and violence-related sites. Barring that, you can still buy software to do the filtering. But again, most parents would rather push the responsibility for filtering their kids' Internet access onto someone else.
.XXX TLD and then change their .COM or CC domain names to simply redirect to the .XXX site, thereby giving you one-stop blocking. The reality is, not everybody will do so. Because of the international and decentralized nature of the Internet, many site operators will ignore .XXX altogether. In some areas you'll probably have parents lobbying ISPs to block all access to .XXX in order to "protect the children", rather than parents taking responsibility for it themselves (same as today). So if you are a porn site operator and you stand a substantial chance of reducing your paying audience by moving from .COM to .XXX, then why would you? And then of course there is the thorny issue of things that aren't blatant porn, but can be construed as sexual. Where is that allowed to live? What about sites like Yahoo and YouTube that have the majority of their content that is not objectionable, but has a small percentage of their content that is adult in nature? Do they have to split their sites? If not, then you can't filter those by just blocking the .XXX.
.XXX will review and then take away the domain name if they do not stop.
.COM sites), or by people installing software that they shouldn't install. Trying to tie any of that to a TLD is absolutely ridiculous.
.XXX TLD an even bigger failure than it is already destined to be is by charging people 100 times the going rate of a domain name for a .XXX domain name (i.e., $1000). Think about it for a second, if you already have a .COM or CC name you have very little incentive to also register a .XXX name to go with it, especially if that .XXX name is likely to have a narrower appeal than the .COM name. But if you have to pay a fortune to get it, there's no way you're going to waste the money on registering for a .XXX.
This part is true, but there are a number of ways that a porn site operator can achieve this with the
Now, in an ideal world, all of the porn site operators will also register their site in the
Say I get some malware after visiting one of the sites. A repersentative from
You obviously have no idea how domain registration works. What you do with the domain is your business. Why the domain registrar should have anything to do with investigating claims of malware and suspending the name is beyond me. In reality, these days the vast majority of malware is delivered either by email, by worm, by ads (which primarily come from
I'd say make them pay $1000 dollars for the domain name. With yearly fees. People will pay it if there is money, and the consumer will pay for fast downloads and good security.
The further that I get into your post the more obvious it becomes that you really don't understand how the Internet works. The TLD that you use to register a domain name has nothing to do with download speed or good security. And about the only way that you could make a
Not only that, there are a fair number of adu
With regard to credit card offers, you can tell the US credit rating companies that you don't want any more credit card offers. There's a phone number you can phone, and they ask you, "Do you mean stop sending credit card offers for 5 years, or permanently?"
Agreed. I did the same thing last year when I was doing my annual check of my credit reports, and I haven't gotten a credit card offer in the mail since. My wife, on the other hand, refused to do so. So she gets literally dozens of credit card offers every week, sometimes more than one from the same company, and at least two of the companies that regularly solicit her still send her solicitations even though she already has credit cards through them. If credit card companies would just stop sending out unsolicited applictions, they could probably afford to give everybody a 2% cut on their interest rates!
telling us why episodic content is great and start showing us. Yes, I know about all the advantages, but maybe we should start talking about overcoming the hefty drawbacks rather than pretending they don't exist.
This isn't intended as a flame, but it seems apparent from your post that you think that there are some fairly large drawbacks to episodic gaming, though you didn't actually mention what they were (any more than the developers did). Having a discussion is more than saying "I don't see a future in it, there are drawbacks."
...and I was suprised that he tried all of the steps that he listed, and never tried the one step that was virtually guaranteed to work. All he had to do was the following:
1. Install the Windows OS on the original hard drive.
2. Install the Promise TX2300 RAID card and hard disks onto that system and make sure that the OS recognizes it and loads drivers.
3. Set up his mirrored array.
4. Use Ghost, TrueImage, or some other imaging software (Acronis has a free 15-day trial) to clone the original OS drive onto the mirrored array, resizing the destination partitions in the process.
5. Remove the old disk and boot the system.
I have done this several times using various array controllers on various hardware, including he TX2300 on a pair of HP desktops. It's not only easy, it works every time.
Are they aware that the call logs are one of the few objective measures of productivity for your department?
If not, make them aware. Charts hanging on the wall will reinforce that a bit in the beginning.
Especially if those charts have lines showing the number of tickets/calls that each member of the team fielded, broken down by team member. When the big fat zero is hanging on the wall staring them in the eyes, and they know that anybody walking by can see it, they will start documenting.
We had a similar situation at a hospital where I worked. The surgeons are responsible for dictating/filing case notes after every procedure, then reviewing the transcribed notes and signing off on them. We had a problem with surgeons not completing the paperwork in a timely fashion, so the head of medical records put up a "wall of shame" in the physicians locker room, dictation areas, and OR lounge that listed the worst offenders by name, number of delinquent cases, and the age of the oldest delinquent case. Once they knew that their peers were seeing their name on the "wall of shame" (or worse yet, the Chief Medical Officer saw them) they fell right into line.
I hate filling out tickets and documenting cases, even with the relatively few number that you hit at tier 3 support levels. Everybody hates doing it, but the simple truth is that it justifies headcount to the beancounters. Most non-IT people have a very limited perception of what it is that IT people actually do to begin with, but without seeing documentation for the things that you DO do they'll think that you guys just sit around a play games all day or something.
I have tried to make the process as easy as possible for our team members. Our ticketing system monitors an email address and automatically creates tickets for requests that are emailed in. It also sorts replies to ticket notes via ticket number and adds them to the case notes automatically. So if we get our users to submit the request via email, and we use the helpdesk ticketing system to reply to their cases, then our tickets are automatically documented. All you have to worry about now are the relatively few tickets that come in by phone.
Well, the SCO FUD lawsuits are finally running out of steam, and since Microsoft doesn't have any other bright ideas for slowing down Linux, they're trying the same tactic. It didn't work for SCO, and it probably won't work for Microsoft either. But I doubt very seriously that shutting down Linux is the goal, at least not as much as getting Linux distributors and customers to cough up cash.
Never had a problem. Of course, I use Firefox, a NAT, and don't visit porn sites or use P2P, which pretty much cuts my attack vectors to zero. Haven't had any AdWare in, hmm, 4 years or so either. I have AdAware installed on my computer but haven't bothered running it in about 2 years since it never picks up anything.
You ought to try it just to see what it picks up. My Windows XP SP2 machine is kept fully patched, I use Firefox, sit behind a NAT/Firewall, then have a software firewall running on the PC itself, plus antivirus and anti-spyware software. But on a scan this weekend it still discovered a keylogger. Most likely it was something that my wife brought in via an email from one of her friends or something, but it just goes to show you that you can never be too careful.