The problem with this idea is that it assumes that TV broadcasting will always be done the way it is today with unused space between the channels. If "white space" equipment gets deployed it is going to create a massive problem for any attempts to change use of the existing TV spectrum. Any future users of this spectrum are going to have to work around the applications now running in what used to be the "white space".
If I understand correctly, part of what this device does is detect television signals and avoid spectrum that is actually being used. That is part of what is being tested. The idea is that these devices would be allowed to transmit over fairly large chunks of the spectrum, but that they would automatically detect what is actually being used for television and only transmit in the gaps between channels. That is why there's so much concern about these devices causing interference - nobody is sure how well this detection/avoidance mechanism is going to work.
If it does actually work like it is supposed to it won't matter if the white space between channels moves or vanishes - the device will stop using that chunk of spectrum and move to another. The only real problem you'd have is if you completely saturated the spectrum with television, which could happen. But in that case the devices would simply be unable to find any white space and would not be able to transmit - it wouldn't actually interfere with the television broadcast.
What do you pay for a subscription? $15 a month? Now figure out how much time you play WoW a week. 20 hours maybe if you're 'casual'. Now pretend you had a minimum wage job in those hours. You're probably paying $415 a month in opportunity cost.
I have a full time job, I work from 8:00 AM 'til 5:00 PM - when I don't wind up working late/weekends. Once I get home there's plenty of other things that need to be taken care of - bills to pay, pets to care for, minor home repairs, yardwork, errands to run, whatever. WoW is what I do around 10:00 or 11:00 when I finally run out of productive things to do.
My wife and I are both gamers. Before we discovered MMOGs we used to play console games and single-player computer games.
We usually play WoW for about two hours a day...which comes out to around 14 hours a week, more or less...or 56 hours a month.
Yes, I suppose I could get another job and spend those hours working. It'd probably be a "better" way to spend my time. Although I wouldn't be spending those hours with my wife... And I doubt if having another job would be terribly relaxing or enjoyable... But yes, you are correct, I am paying an opportunity cost.
For some reason video gaming seems to have some kind of stigma attached to it... Whenever I mention to friends/family that I'm a gamer I'll get odd looks - yet none of them have any problem with spending their evening reading a novel, watching TV, or at the movies. Personally, I see it as a very good deal - I'm paying $0.25/hour or less for my entertainment while they're paying $5/hour or more to go see a movie.
Once I hit 70, my desire to grind for 20 hours to get that shiny new +1 Int cloak gets a little tedious.
I understand that you're complaining more about the mechanics and gameplay rather than what they're doing with the money, so maybe my response is a bit off-topic... But WoW is one of the first MMOGs I've paid to play where I actually felt I was really getting my money's worth.
Blizzard is constantly rolling out new content for free - new dungeons, new raid zones, new quests, new factions... All sorts of new stuff. Compare this to something like old-school EverQuest where your money just kind of vanished and every single new addition was through a paid expansion pack.
Also, there's a lot of other issues like limiting your user base.
This has always frustrated me. A well-implemented web-based solution will run on literally anything. It doesn't matter if you've got Windows, Macintosh, Linux, BSD, or what. You just need a (mostly) standards-compliant browser. You'd think companies would love that.
Instead, you've got all these web-based applications that only work on IE and then break when a new version comes out.
Downtime is for those projects that nobody will officially let you start, nobody "wants" and nobody will pay you to implement. Then, when you spend all that downtime putting it in, you pretend that you did it in your own time alongside your normal work, and people suddenly discover that all the projects that they considered a waste of time become something that they can't live without.
Exactly. Some of the most useful stuff I've done wasn't actually billable.
All day long, while you're doing "real work", you're noticing annoying little things... Sure would be nice if we filtered out some of this crap... We really ought to get images of all these machines... I bet it'd be easier if our work orders were digital and searchable...
This is the kind of stuff you can quietly research and implement when nobody is looking, in-between the "real work."
Roll it out, tell someone "hey, check out this thing I found" and suddenly it's a vital piece of equipment.
For example, in a Windows-only school at which the only person who'd ever heard of Linux (the IT manager) treated mention of it like some kind of first word from a child ("Oh, you use Linux. That's cute. Tell me when you make something 'useful' out of it."), I had a few hours of downtime. Found a spare "obsolete" PC. Found a couple of network cards. Was tired of the "Linux being nothing more than a toy" digs.
Similarly, we're a Windows-only shop. My boss used to just scoff at the idea of running Linux on a server. We've now got three Linux servers that we couldn't live without - all put together without official approval during downtime. And as soon as the boss saw how useful the stuff was he didn't care if it was Linux or not.
I honestly can't imagine what it would be like to have a job where if what's immediately in front of me is blocked, then I am blocked from working. I battle to keep my workweek hour-count at something reasonable, and have never once lacked for (way too much) to do.
Agreed.
If I'm not actually working for a client and fixing something that is broken I've got a huge backlog of stuff that ought to be done, but I haven't had time for yet. There's always work to be done on our own in-house systems... Plenty of updates/patches/fixes that should be applied... New software to test out... Plenty of phone calls I should be making... And if all else fails there's always documentation to update.
Honestly, I consider it a major accomplishment if I can walk out the door at 5:00 without having to bring something home with me.
Apple might be good for a grandma or for a graphic designer, but for a programmer it's an annoyance.
I'm not going to argue with you... Everyone's got their own preferences, likes, dislikes...whatever... You didn't like the Mac for programming and that's fine.
I, however, would love to get BBEdit or TextMate for Windows or Linux. Those are both wonderful text editors that are an absolute joy to work with - and there is simply nothing comparable under Windows or Linux.
They have a romantic attachment to manned space flight, while everyone under 40 finds it completely natural to project a presence miles away while sitting at the controls in a dark room.
They aren't the only ones - I only recently hit 30 and I'm still offended that we haven't gotten off this rock. I remember reading Asimov and Heinlein when I was young and fantasizing about taking vacations to other planets. Sure, it may be more effective to send a rover... But it doesn't sound nearly as fun.
if there's one feature about Ubuntu that I love more than my Mac is that you can install a TON of applications from Synaptic or via the awesome Add/Remove app. OSX on the other hand, if you want to install some new piece of software, be prepared to pay for it, or to get a really useless trial version.
It's a trade-off, I guess... Linux distros typically have easy access to huge repositories of free software right at your fingertips. A couple clicks of the mouse or a few keystrokes and your software is installed. Very quick and easy. That is certainly something that both Windows and Mac OS are missing.
But on Linux you've typically got some difficulty finding commercial software. I can go into just about any Best Buy, Staples, GameStop, or Wal-Mart and buy software for Windows. It takes a little more effort to find things for the Mac...we don't have any Mac retailers around here...but it's readily available through various catalogs and web stores. If you need Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office or Halo 3 for Linux you're just plain out of luck - unless you want to play around with emulators and whatnot.
I've always been very impressed with the shareware/freeware communities surrounding the Macintosh. Sure, you have to click through a few websites to download it, instead of hitting yum/apt/emerge... And you typically have to pay for it... But there's always been some great stuff available out there. Ambrosia has some really good games available very cheaply... And I really wish I could get BBEdit or TextMate on my PC.
I would like to remind you that George Orwell's 1984 is a fiction story telling people to be weary of your rights.
In case you hadn't noticed, 1984 is increasingly becoming a reality. Our rights are eroding before our very eyes. And most people don't seem to mind one bit.
For this case it is not used to make conviction but to determine if the person could possibly be a threat. As TFA stated only about 10% of the people pulled over actually committed anything, they know that. The Orwellian method is if the person is suspicious then they go to jail.
How long do you think it is until we reach that point?
That was my first thought as well... Images of Blade Runner and assorted novels by PKD... Countless scenes from sci-fi movies where the protagonist offends someone and suddenly their face is plastered across every vertical surface in the city.
I'm not quite sure why, but this bothers me quite a bit more than all the stories I've seen about pervasive surveillance.
I don't see your average joe 6-pack user benefiting from more than 2gigs.
There is no such thing as too much RAM. If you have it, you'll use it. Sure, 512 MB is enough to make a machine run...that's what I usually recommend as the bare minimum for an XP machine... 1 GB is better of course... But even if you've got 2+ GB you'll use it. Your average home user has the OS, antivirus of some kind, a couple different instant messengers, a web browser, a media player, maybe some games or an email client, and a crapton of automatic updaters all running at the same time.
And that's all assuming the computer isn't full of crapware and that they don't play any real games.
I've always told people that the quickest and easiest way to see a real speed increase in your computer is to upgrade the RAM, and that's still true today. Anything you add up to around the 3 GB limit where XP falls over is almost guaranteed to improve performance. There is always something being paged out to disk that would probably be happier sitting in RAM. There is always something that could be pre-fetched or cached.
How many of you actually use two separate browsers as described here, I am just wondering...
Generally speaking, on a day to day basis, I just use the one. I run FireFox for pretty much everything. On the few occasions I have to do some web development I'll fire up IE/Opera/Safari... But it's generally FireFox.
I also don't generally go wandering around the web clicking on random links. On a day to day basis there's probably about two dozen sites I'm actually visiting, and they'll all fairly reputable.
If I'm going to go slumming through the seedy underbelly of the Internet I'll fire up a LiveCD or a virtual machine.
why even bother with a "promiscuous" browser at all? I prefer my security to be 100% at least 100% of the time.
Frankly, if you're using a browser at all, you aren't 100% secure. The only computer that is 100% secure is locked in a closet with no power, no network, and no physical access to anything - it's also 100% useless.
The only thing this article is addressing is some of the cross-site vulnerabilities out there. The point isn't that one browser is more secure than another, the point is that you're using two different ones - and one of them is used only for secure transactions and then immediately shut down afterwards. So you don't have to worry about cross-site vulnerabilities because you've never got more than the one secure site going.
if I were to simply track the 30 pieces of Goodness on my machine, and allow nothing else to run
That is actually relatively do-able with group policies under Windows. You can create a list of things that you trust for execution and block just about everything else. If you had a fairly large IT department with the time and inclination to check every single executable component that users need this might actually be enough. The part where it all falls apart is the updates...
Windows Updates aren't always terribly well documented. Some files get updated that you aren't told about, and suddenly something won't execute. Then you've got updates for all the other pieces of software that your users run... And you can't ignore all the updates because some of them are genuinely necessary. So you wind up having to dedicate an awful lot of time and effort to simply allowing your users to run what they need to.
I tried such a draconian policy at home with my son's computer... It worked fine for about a month, and then I got sick of constantly adding new things to the trusted list. I have since gone to a more relaxed group policy and installed some decent antivirus on his machine. The combination has worked quite well.
Just don't have AV's installed at all. Not having AV installed on my system keeps me from even thinking of trying anything stupid. every month or so I download a free trial of a Non Norton / Non Mcaffee AV program, update it and run a full scan. Then I do the same with a different one. Then I repeat with Spyware/malware programs. All that has ever been found is a few cookies. Safety through not doing stupid shit.
That works fine for cautious and educated users... But it relies on the user not being stupid, which cannot be assumed in all cases.
My wife and I do not run antivirus, and we're fine without it. I'll periodically download and run something free just to make sure we haven't picked up anything nasty - and as you said the worst I've ever seen is cookies and random adware. That does not work for my son though. Despite repeated warnings, disasters, punishment, and threats he will still click on something interesting looking that seems to be coming from one of his friends. For him I've had to set up a group policy that dramatically restricts what he can run (but I can't set him as a restricted user or else his games won't work) and we've got antivirus running constantly on his machine. It works relatively well, but I keep an image around just in case.
At work we generally install antivirus of some sort on every single machine. Once you've got more than one or two people on a network you really can't assume that they're all computer savvy. Someone's going to click something they shouldn't and you're going to need to keep the nastiness from spreading. Good group policies and restricted users go a long way to reduce the damage that someone can do...but decent antivirus is still important.
I think the real problem with malware is that by the time an antivirus/antispyware program is needed IT IS TOO LATE. you have already been infected, antivirus software is for after the fact, cleaning up the files that were installed or warning you of their presence in a file atatchment etc.
Generally speaking, the antivirus that we sell and install is a preventative measure. Sure, educating users is the best way to go...but even then you've got mistakes and mis-clicks. And some folks just don't learn. Good antivirus scans executables and attachments as they're encountered and will block execution and warn you if it sees something suspicious. Good antivirus can actually protect you from getting infected even if you click on something you shouldn't. No, it isn't perfect, but it's another layer of protection.
I don't think I've seen a computer with a traditional virus infection in months now. They're all coming in with that smit crap - and you're right, commercial antivirus doesn't pick it up at all.
The diagnosis is quick and obvious, the machine literally screams at you that it's infected. The disinfection tools are readily available, quick and effective. All things considered it's relatively painless to disinfect one of these machines.
But I'm really surprised that commercial antivirus software isn't picking this stuff up. I've had quite a few unhappy customers wondering what their commercial antivirus was actually protecting them from.
WHat's also at issue is that submitting a computer for repairs does not give the service people a blank check to read my email or browse through my vacation pictures. I fix my own machine, but I don't fix my car myself, and I expect the technician not to rummage through stuff I may have left in the boot, looking for thrills.
I've done plenty of basic work for home users, including installing several CD/DVD burners. Of course you want to test them once they're installed, to make sure the software and hardware do what they're supposed to. I guess I could just throw a single test.txt file onto the disc, but that doesn't seem like a very good test... It'd finish burning in literally seconds. I'd like something that will keep the drive busy for a minute or so at least. I don't carry around a flash drive full of random files to burn. I usually just grab a pile of documents from My Documents or My Pictures - it's usually a relatively quick and easy way to come up with a few hundred MB of files to burn. I certainly don't go looking for juicy stuff, but My Pictures likes to default to thumbnail view...and believe me, I've seen things I wish I hadn't.
By a similar token, if I'm asked to do data recovery I'll usually wind up double-clicking on a few random files just to make sure they open properly and aren't filled with gibberish. If it happens to be a Word document with "KILL THE PRESIDENT" written in 20-point text it'll probably catch my attention.
Or if someone brings in a machine because their email doesn't work I will, at some point, hit send/receive to see what happens. If you've got auto-preview turned on and something confidential comes in I'll likely see something I'm not supposed to.
I'm not going to say that nobody in the IT industry, or even in my shop specifically, goes looking for juicy porn on a client's PC... I'm certain that some people do. But I'm not certain that this case is specifically a loss-of-privacy issue.
If you brought your car into the shop because the trunk won't open, and you happen to have a pile of child pornography in the trunk, are you going to be surprised to hear from the police?
I don't get why the Slashdot groupthink is trashing this. It's been vaporware for way too long, I for one look forward to the possibility that it will get taken off the vaporware list in the foreseeable future.
I don't know how much of it is actually serious trashing... A lot of us are just poking fun at it. But I'd say that a lot of the hostility is due to the fact that a lot of us were looking forward to this game for quite some time. These days a lot of that anticipation has soured.
Back in the day Duke Nukem wasn't terribly revolutionary... It didn't have bleeding edge graphics or anything then... But it was fun. The combination of characters, settings, weapons...it all added up to a very fun experience.
Honestly though, I'd be surprised if they managed to keep it that fun after all these years in development. I suspect that it'll turn out to be just another shooter. Which is a shame, really, when the original was so much more interesting than "just another shooter."
Wow... It's been ages since I watched that 2001 trailer... The graphics certainly look dated now, but at least that old trailer looks like a genuine game. The new one is much better looking, but it doesn't look like there's a game at all - just cutscenes.
and for the amount of time we wasted on the phone with dell support getting them to send replacement parts for a fricking known problem...They should have looked at the service tag said, "Is it not booting?" and sent us a new motherboard with no further questions....Not made us jump through the goddamn hoops every single time. We got a guy who's Dell certified on staff, which usually means they'll take your word for it, but noooooo.
Dell's technical support is infuriatingly inconsistent... Doesn't seem to matter if you've got the ultra-deluxe business support or the default warranty they throw on new hardware... Doesn't seem to matter if you're Dell certified or not... Doesn't seem to matter if it's a critical server down or a stuck key in a home computer...
Half the time you get some idiot on the phone who wastes literally hours troubleshooting a problem that should be fairly obvious. Then they'll send out a clueless tech to replace the part, even if you don't need the help. And that's assuming it's the right part and it actually works.
The other half the time you'll get someone who listens intently to what you say, asks a couple relevant questions, and gets the part in your hands within hours.
I wish I knew how to consistently get that second guy on the phone...
I would buy 10 identical computers, open them up and find a zillion different parts from a zillion manufacturers in them. This drives me crazy. I heard tell that Dell was addressing this, but haven't followed up. I switched to Acer a few years back. If Dell wants to sell me computers again they need A. a guarantee that the sub-contracted bits inside are of a consistent quality, and B. a non-Vista option.
It depends on what model line you're buying. The business-grade stuff like the Optiplexes are very consistent. You've got identical parts in all of them, nice and predictable. I don't think I've ever ordered in a pile of Optiplexes and found different parts in them. Their servers, also, are very consistent. The Vostro line is still a little new, so I haven't seen a whole ton of them, but so far they're turning out to be consistent as well. Out of the half-dozen or so I've seen there haven't been any surprises. The home level stuff, like their Inspirons, is very inconsistent. They basically throw in whatever parts they can get cheapest.
As for a non-Vista option, there are plenty. You can order the business stuff with XP loaded on it instead of Vista. They offer machines pre-loaded with Ubuntu as well. All of their server hardware comes with a disc full of Red Hat drivers. And last time I checked you could still order a machine without any OS at all.
I have no specific objection, but I'm just not sure I see the advantage. Well, the only advantage I can see is that not all computers have an office suit installed that's capable of reading/writing ODF files, but that's just a problem and a disappointment.
One of the reasons that Microsoft's office suite has become the standard is that it is literally everywhere. You can almost always count on having some version of MS Word available to open your document. It's safe to send things out as.docs OOo is freely available, sure, but not everyone actually has it installed. And depending on where you are, you may not even have the ability to install it. By making it available through a web browser, something virtually every PC has, you are basically making it available to everyone.
Personally, I use OOo for just about everything I do at home, but if I'm taking documents on the road I make sure to convert them into.doc or.rtf or something else more universally readable. Now that OOo is available through a web browser I'm not going to need to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
If it does actually work like it is supposed to it won't matter if the white space between channels moves or vanishes - the device will stop using that chunk of spectrum and move to another. The only real problem you'd have is if you completely saturated the spectrum with television, which could happen. But in that case the devices would simply be unable to find any white space and would not be able to transmit - it wouldn't actually interfere with the television broadcast.
That's how it's supposed to work, at least.
My wife and I are both gamers. Before we discovered MMOGs we used to play console games and single-player computer games.
We usually play WoW for about two hours a day...which comes out to around 14 hours a week, more or less...or 56 hours a month.
Yes, I suppose I could get another job and spend those hours working. It'd probably be a "better" way to spend my time. Although I wouldn't be spending those hours with my wife... And I doubt if having another job would be terribly relaxing or enjoyable... But yes, you are correct, I am paying an opportunity cost.
For some reason video gaming seems to have some kind of stigma attached to it... Whenever I mention to friends/family that I'm a gamer I'll get odd looks - yet none of them have any problem with spending their evening reading a novel, watching TV, or at the movies. Personally, I see it as a very good deal - I'm paying $0.25/hour or less for my entertainment while they're paying $5/hour or more to go see a movie.
Blizzard is constantly rolling out new content for free - new dungeons, new raid zones, new quests, new factions... All sorts of new stuff. Compare this to something like old-school EverQuest where your money just kind of vanished and every single new addition was through a paid expansion pack.
Instead, you've got all these web-based applications that only work on IE and then break when a new version comes out.
All day long, while you're doing "real work", you're noticing annoying little things... Sure would be nice if we filtered out some of this crap... We really ought to get images of all these machines... I bet it'd be easier if our work orders were digital and searchable...
This is the kind of stuff you can quietly research and implement when nobody is looking, in-between the "real work."
Roll it out, tell someone "hey, check out this thing I found" and suddenly it's a vital piece of equipment.Similarly, we're a Windows-only shop. My boss used to just scoff at the idea of running Linux on a server. We've now got three Linux servers that we couldn't live without - all put together without official approval during downtime. And as soon as the boss saw how useful the stuff was he didn't care if it was Linux or not.
If I'm not actually working for a client and fixing something that is broken I've got a huge backlog of stuff that ought to be done, but I haven't had time for yet. There's always work to be done on our own in-house systems... Plenty of updates/patches/fixes that should be applied... New software to test out... Plenty of phone calls I should be making... And if all else fails there's always documentation to update.
Honestly, I consider it a major accomplishment if I can walk out the door at 5:00 without having to bring something home with me.
I, however, would love to get BBEdit or TextMate for Windows or Linux. Those are both wonderful text editors that are an absolute joy to work with - and there is simply nothing comparable under Windows or Linux.
But on Linux you've typically got some difficulty finding commercial software. I can go into just about any Best Buy, Staples, GameStop, or Wal-Mart and buy software for Windows. It takes a little more effort to find things for the Mac...we don't have any Mac retailers around here...but it's readily available through various catalogs and web stores. If you need Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office or Halo 3 for Linux you're just plain out of luck - unless you want to play around with emulators and whatnot.
I've always been very impressed with the shareware/freeware communities surrounding the Macintosh. Sure, you have to click through a few websites to download it, instead of hitting yum/apt/emerge... And you typically have to pay for it... But there's always been some great stuff available out there. Ambrosia has some really good games available very cheaply... And I really wish I could get BBEdit or TextMate on my PC.
That was my first thought as well... Images of Blade Runner and assorted novels by PKD... Countless scenes from sci-fi movies where the protagonist offends someone and suddenly their face is plastered across every vertical surface in the city.
I'm not quite sure why, but this bothers me quite a bit more than all the stories I've seen about pervasive surveillance.
And that's all assuming the computer isn't full of crapware and that they don't play any real games.
I've always told people that the quickest and easiest way to see a real speed increase in your computer is to upgrade the RAM, and that's still true today. Anything you add up to around the 3 GB limit where XP falls over is almost guaranteed to improve performance. There is always something being paged out to disk that would probably be happier sitting in RAM. There is always something that could be pre-fetched or cached.
I also don't generally go wandering around the web clicking on random links. On a day to day basis there's probably about two dozen sites I'm actually visiting, and they'll all fairly reputable.
If I'm going to go slumming through the seedy underbelly of the Internet I'll fire up a LiveCD or a virtual machine.
The only thing this article is addressing is some of the cross-site vulnerabilities out there. The point isn't that one browser is more secure than another, the point is that you're using two different ones - and one of them is used only for secure transactions and then immediately shut down afterwards. So you don't have to worry about cross-site vulnerabilities because you've never got more than the one secure site going.
Windows Updates aren't always terribly well documented. Some files get updated that you aren't told about, and suddenly something won't execute. Then you've got updates for all the other pieces of software that your users run... And you can't ignore all the updates because some of them are genuinely necessary. So you wind up having to dedicate an awful lot of time and effort to simply allowing your users to run what they need to.
I tried such a draconian policy at home with my son's computer... It worked fine for about a month, and then I got sick of constantly adding new things to the trusted list. I have since gone to a more relaxed group policy and installed some decent antivirus on his machine. The combination has worked quite well.
My wife and I do not run antivirus, and we're fine without it. I'll periodically download and run something free just to make sure we haven't picked up anything nasty - and as you said the worst I've ever seen is cookies and random adware. That does not work for my son though. Despite repeated warnings, disasters, punishment, and threats he will still click on something interesting looking that seems to be coming from one of his friends. For him I've had to set up a group policy that dramatically restricts what he can run (but I can't set him as a restricted user or else his games won't work) and we've got antivirus running constantly on his machine. It works relatively well, but I keep an image around just in case.
At work we generally install antivirus of some sort on every single machine. Once you've got more than one or two people on a network you really can't assume that they're all computer savvy. Someone's going to click something they shouldn't and you're going to need to keep the nastiness from spreading. Good group policies and restricted users go a long way to reduce the damage that someone can do...but decent antivirus is still important.
I don't think I've seen a computer with a traditional virus infection in months now. They're all coming in with that smit crap - and you're right, commercial antivirus doesn't pick it up at all.
The diagnosis is quick and obvious, the machine literally screams at you that it's infected. The disinfection tools are readily available, quick and effective. All things considered it's relatively painless to disinfect one of these machines.
But I'm really surprised that commercial antivirus software isn't picking this stuff up. I've had quite a few unhappy customers wondering what their commercial antivirus was actually protecting them from.
By a similar token, if I'm asked to do data recovery I'll usually wind up double-clicking on a few random files just to make sure they open properly and aren't filled with gibberish. If it happens to be a Word document with "KILL THE PRESIDENT" written in 20-point text it'll probably catch my attention.
Or if someone brings in a machine because their email doesn't work I will, at some point, hit send/receive to see what happens. If you've got auto-preview turned on and something confidential comes in I'll likely see something I'm not supposed to.
I'm not going to say that nobody in the IT industry, or even in my shop specifically, goes looking for juicy porn on a client's PC... I'm certain that some people do. But I'm not certain that this case is specifically a loss-of-privacy issue.
If you brought your car into the shop because the trunk won't open, and you happen to have a pile of child pornography in the trunk, are you going to be surprised to hear from the police?
Honestly though, I'd be surprised if they managed to keep it that fun after all these years in development. I suspect that it'll turn out to be just another shooter. Which is a shame, really, when the original was so much more interesting than "just another shooter."
Wow... It's been ages since I watched that 2001 trailer... The graphics certainly look dated now, but at least that old trailer looks like a genuine game. The new one is much better looking, but it doesn't look like there's a game at all - just cutscenes.
Half the time you get some idiot on the phone who wastes literally hours troubleshooting a problem that should be fairly obvious. Then they'll send out a clueless tech to replace the part, even if you don't need the help. And that's assuming it's the right part and it actually works.
The other half the time you'll get someone who listens intently to what you say, asks a couple relevant questions, and gets the part in your hands within hours.
I wish I knew how to consistently get that second guy on the phone...
As for a non-Vista option, there are plenty. You can order the business stuff with XP loaded on it instead of Vista. They offer machines pre-loaded with Ubuntu as well. All of their server hardware comes with a disc full of Red Hat drivers. And last time I checked you could still order a machine without any OS at all.
Personally, I use OOo for just about everything I do at home, but if I'm taking documents on the road I make sure to convert them into