- Design system - Build system (involves inevitable reboots) - Test system (involves inevitable reboots) - Move system into production.
Once the services you need start up the way you want, don't play with it. Put it into service and have backups of the original image, any changes you make and a working replacement (Yes, have a working replacement - there is *nothing* better than having another machine sitting next to your server that can take over its job with the flick of a switch while you repair it - it also lets you test changes safely, and whenever you're sure the system is how you want it, you push the same image to your "copy of" server).
If you do it properly, that machine will then stay up until hardware failure. Sometimes that *can* be years away. If you do it properly, you shouldn't ever, ever, ever be rebooting a server that's in production - you're just masking the real problem. Yeah, it'll work most of the time but it's just a way of papering over the cracks. The server hung, the service died, the settings got out of sync, or whatever, for a reason. Just rebooting is ignoring that reason for sake of service continuance - if the service is that vital, you should have high enough availability to cover such incidences or that same problem will come back to bite you later.
Nobody cares about enormous uptimes, but having a server that you haven't NEEDED to touch in months is a good thing. It means that it has a well-defined function and has been performing correctly - that's your "stable" version and should be treated as such. Every time you make a change to a server, it then becomes a "current/experimental" version that you should be wary of.
At worst, when a problem appears, you turn ON a replacement server and fix the one that is showing problems. If its role is well-specified, you don't get "feature creep" where it's running a million things that it never used to and they're not in your startup properly because it's never rebooted enough for you to test them.
On Windows, or Unix, you shouldn't have to reboot. If you do, it's to test something or correctly reinitialise after fixing a problem (a post-solution reboot just to make sure it works as required isn't a bad thing but certainly not "required"). The worry of hardware failure on boot shouldn't stop you rebooting, and similarly you shouldn't reboot just to "spot" problems. Both suggest inattention and lack of suitable backups/replacements/high availability solutions.
Systems can easily go 3-4 years in operation without requiring a reboot. If your hardware is good quality, you're monitoring the server as you should be, you have adequate backups/replacements and the role it performs isn't changed, there's no need to ever reboot it past initial testing. I have internal school servers that only get rebooted in the summer (i.e. once per annum) and that's only because the power goes off to upgrade the electrics each year.
If it wasn't for that, I'd just leave them running. They don't need kernel 2.6.192830921830 and they have been doing that same job reliably for a LONG time. I'm not going to kick them into a reboot "just because". Similarly even the tiniest memory leak in their processes would cause me problems that I would spot immediately.
As it is, 450 happy users all day long for years. The last one I installed actually took a whack from a collapsed networking cabinet coming off the wall (full of fully-populated Gigabit switches) and dropping six feet onto it. Apart from a small dent it carried on just fine, and the disks were idle, and SMART / data integrity show no problems. I rebuilt the entire network cabling around it because switching it off wasn't necessary. If it did reboot and it didn't come up in the expected state? There's a copy of it on another machine on the other side of the room - it's predecessor that also didn't reboot for years but wasn't fast enough to run the amount of PHP / MySQL we needed it to among its other functions. Having the replacement machine
I stuck a tenner in. Why not? I've had infinitely more usage out of that program than I did all the others I've paid for in the past.
And I don't feel like giving *anything* to Oracle at the moment, with their mission to destroy every large open-source project.
With LibreOffice, I wanted it as soon as I heard it, waited for a stable version, tested and deployed and it's now all over my workplace and on my laptop. It fixes problems that have annoyed me in the past and allowed me to open an ANCIENT word-processor file that someone sent my employer where nothing else could. They took the right approach and their first stable was exactly what I wanted.
I shoved some money their way - I don't mind if their office suite and supported formats take over the world, so I don't see why not. Worst that happens is that I've paid some programmer somewhere for a tiny piece of time to compensate for all the features they've given me for nothing.
UK is business-hostile? That's news to our GDP. And we don't have an awful lot of silly laws that some countries have that would affect open-source (e.g. software patents, etc.)
According to Wiki, by GDP it goes:
Europe America People's Republic of China Japan Germany France United Kingdom
and has done for the last few years. PRC doesn't have a great record as regards freedom of expression, and there are communications problems in many of the others. I think just from that list, I'd be inclined to use Germany first and then UK too. Germany has a very good reputation for stability and supporting open-source.
Most places will happily give you every password in the world when you start a job there. And sometimes the "intermediate" stage between you leaving and someone else doing your job is filled with outside contractors and random people who "need" your passwords.
Whenever I leave an employer, I make a BIG list of everything I know in terms of passwords, passcodes, keys, etc. and compile it on paper or a CD. I put literally everything in there, even down to little foibles of the system and the reasoning for strange configurations. I then furnish the boss with one copy of that CD, hand him another copy to "put in a safe place" (usually a safe) and then leave.
I did this at my last workplace. They were getting increasingly silly and employing people with zero expertise, and I already had another job already lined up so my entire notice period was spent house-cleaning and compiling lists while taking care of the mundane jobs.
Technically I reported only to the headteacher of the school in question, having been employed by him without any formal assignment in a staffing structure (to the point where the local borough phoned up to complain that I was earning too much for any of their pay-scales and had to be put on my own unique one).
When I left, there was no replacement for me (because they weren't interested in employing the only guy out of all the candidates that *could* do my job because he had formerly worked in Tesco's supermarket rather than sit on his arse in the middle of a recession) so I handed off to the headteacher. This immediately caused an argument because one of the new staff who was the new "second-in-command" there (and that decision was partly responsible for me wanting to leave in the first place!) DEMANDED the "admin password for the network".
He wasn't an IT guy. He knew nothing about computers at all. He just wanted it because he was sure that the dozens of digital voice recorders that he'd bought on a whim (without IT authorisation) could be made compatible with the non-networkable, kiddified, decades-old audio editing software he'd bought on a whim (without IT authorisation) on the network he didn't know how to manage, no matter how many times I told him they were incompatible. He was convinced that if he somehow got the "magic" administrator's password and then let 1000 kids loose with it so they could listen to themselves talking, it would solve his problems with not teaching part of the IT curriculum.
Obviously I must have been deliberately lying when his DRM'd-AAC-only recorders couldn't be opened in a program that only took WAV's (not even MP3's!) and that an intermediate conversion step (which he DEMANDED shouldn't be necessary and refused to use) was required.
Apart from the fact there were three networks, there were dozens of different passwords, and he wasn't getting *ANY* of their passwords until I was way outside the building and long gone, I had a duty to protect the information secured by those passwords (information on kids, people's salaries etc.). If you read the rules precisely, that means that I had to hand off ONLY to the headteacher, who could then hand off passwords to others as they saw fit.
So I did just that, in the process making my own day by telling the guy "No." even if he WAS second-in-command there (he didn't seem to understand that I didn't report to him, no matter what he thought of that idea). He was rather miffed. I also, with the head's permission, gave a copy of the CD to the lead governor of the school who was a big-iron IT guy for his day-job, that we both knew we could trust - he would be fixing any major issues that occurred in the school until they could find a replacement and he was there to sign-off on my hand-over.
A week later, a phone call from the second-in-command. He'd got the administrator password, tried it out on several PC's and couldn't do what he wanted (ignoring the fact that he wasn't using ANY of the network software management that we had in place). So he demanded that I give
Erm... have you even USED Steam on any half-decent PC?
I'm an old DOS guy so anything over 2Mb is blasphemy for me, but Steam is currently sitting (on a machine that's been taken into and out of standby about 50 times since it was last booted about a month ago) at around 9.5Mb RAM usage according to Task Manager. It doesn't touch more than 1% CPU enough to register on any simple task list. Steam's been running ALL that time that the computer has been up, with 250+ games, and gets used every night to play a game (anything from L4D2 to Altitude to the original Counterstrike).
I don't have the overlay enabled. I do have Friends enabled. I don't have it in "large" mode. It has been running perfectly fine and doesn't interfere with *anything * do. It doesn't even allocate enough memory to worry about - my print spooler service occupies more memory.
There are network delays when I run a game as it is (I assume) authenticated, but it's the *game* and network that causes that, not CPU usage or memory allocation from Steam. Steam hardly does anything at all, whereas the initial load of something like L4D2 tries to read in 2Gb of data. Killing Floor is terrible in that respect and can take about 4-5 minutes to clean up after I come out of it. None of that is *Steam*, that's the game.
The actual *Steam* component does nothing to slow that down, but XP happens to be particularly crap at freeing memory when you've used enough to touch swap (it's XP swapping from the release of the game's 2Gb of memory that actually stops me doing anything for a little while with any program, not just Steam).
250 games and, once loaded in the file cache once, they just load barely touching the disk (I don't even notice the load times for the small indie games any more because it's instantaneous and silent because of my long "suspended" Windows session that keeps the file cache intact.
It's slow browsing the store in Steam, I give you that, but that's to be expected, especially when I'm used to Opera throwing pages on the screen faster than I can see them. And this is a laptop. In large mode, it hits 50Mb if I browse, but to be honest Opera or Firefox hit roughly the same when I browse the same websites in them. Even 200Mb is barely worth worrying about these days - I lose a Gig of my RAM just by not choosing to run a 64-bit OS.
You either have a horribly underpowered PC, not enough RAM and so are swapping WAY more than necessary, or you haven't actually LOOKED at the cause of your problem. The most I've ever seen Steam use is about 250Mb and 10% CPU averaged over a minute or so and that was just before they changed to the new integrated web browser.
I call crap on your assertions. Five years ago, yeah, maybe, they were bloating on older PC's that didn't need that kind of bloat. Now? They are smaller than my print spooler on a machine that can cope with just about anything I throw at it.
(P.S. WHOA! Memory usage just went up to 10Mb! And then strangely went back down to 7Mb when I actually brought it out of the taskbar to sit on "small mode" on the desktop).
Most "social" games aren't social? So sitting in front of a PC and shooting imaginary objects is, just because they're swearing at you as they "die"?
The biggest problem I have online is that I *don't* want the social element. I have friends, thanks, and if I'm gaming it means that I'm not with them. Sometimes we join up and have a LAN game or similar but it's rare and it's usually quite a private, organised affair.
When I do go online to play (because single-player is my favourite but does have its disadvantages after a while) I don't really *want* to socialise, or step into a well-established social circle that I'm not part of. Try joining any L4D2 game and see how "social" it is - co-operate with everything everyone says or get kicked.
Online games of *any* kind are about playing the game. Don't play the game and you'll rapidly lose "friends", find less and less servers willing to take you and will hate the whole thing. But you can play for thousands of hours without ever once being "social" in the true sense of the word.
When I'm playing a game, it's to advance myself in that game - whether that means by skill and experience, or just by some arbitrary metric. It's nice to have a "friendly" place but everyone has their own circle of friends and you can't be friends with everyone. Hence, I buy my own servers. Friends can pop onto them and even have admin if necessary. The general public are welcome to make up the numbers, but I come down pretty strong on anyone who's not playing the game properly, obviously. And in the end it doesn't matter whether it's social or not. I can name dozens of regulars that hardly speak when they're playing.
I have a run lots of servers, my latest ones are for Altitude. Almost every night they're packed full (14+ players each), some times they are empty (middle of the day). They're nice people and we often have a laugh and a chat about nothing in particular but long conversations are frowned on - you're there to play the game. And rarely do the same people come into contact on the same server regularly and if you *wanted* to meet up specifically, you'd find a common server that you both like or make one yourself.
The social element is aside from the game. In the same way that "social" networks are not social, nor are "social" games. Nor are most games. And even when they are, the social part comes from something external to the game itself (e.g. clans, private servers, LAN matches, forums, etc.).
I don't play MMORPG's for exactly that reason - it requires co-operation from complete strangers or large groups of friends playing together under the guise of "socialising". I'd much rather the two thing were separated so I could play my game properly and still talk to my friends when necessary. Hell, I have more MSN/Skype conversations while playing Steam games than I ever do over any sort of in-game chat/talk facility.
It's not facts that are the problem. It's the illogical leaps from facts into craziness that are the problem, and stating opinion as fact. If you do that, you need a good reputation.
I pretty much *guarantee* that Google has to do whatever the federal enforcement says. It's called the law. To make the leap from that to "use another search engine" is an irrelevant and illogical conclusion unless you can provide facts that other search engines aren't similar affected by any government whose jurisdiction they operate in. And in terms of things this guy has said, it's nothing.
The only thing you can take away from someone else's opinion is reliant on their reputation. This guy believes and has said a lot of crap, quite publicly, and not denounced it until months after it's caused him a lot of trouble - including having to backtrack on quite clearly calling someone (the US president) a racist.
He has a self-confessed history of severe, long-term alcohol and drug abuse, suicide attempts, he's used miscarriage as a joke to play off the mother, he's had several high profile firings, several arrests, several cities, organisations, churches and advertisers have rushed to disassociate themselves with him and he has more conspiracy theories of his own than an X-Files fan club.
And, personally, he claims to have been saved from professional obscurity (and several other things) by God, and belongs to the church of latter-day-saints, which kinda rules him out of my personal "might have an brain in there somewhere" list.
Nobody really cares if the facts are wrong or right. It's his interpretation of them that leads him into ridicule. I *know* that if I drop my laptop, it will hit the floor. I don't explain it away as a government conspiracy that all laptops are subject to gravity in order that the US can drill holes in the Earth's crust and steal my laptop. The *fact* I stated is true, the opinion / explanation is almost certainly 100% bullshit and as "unproveable" as any other.
Seriously, from not knowing anything of the guy, within about 20 minutes of independent research, I've put him on my personal "Ignore anything he says" blacklist.
Because no sensible large corporate entities IT guys would bother with pre-installed images. I never have.
My employer bought me a new laptop the other month. It came with Windows 7. Through sheer force of habit, I never even saw so much as a Windows 7 splashscreen for the initial installation - it literally didn't get to execute a single byte from the hard drive.
F12, PXE boot, apply standard image. If necessary, apply specific drivers, put them back into the standard image. It's like wondering why Google doesn't have to deal with Norton Antivirus trials on the machines they put in their server racks. They don't even *get* that far, or to execute a single byte that's not part of Google's standard images or imaging process.
Thus corporates don't care and the little guy ends up with hours of cleanup for a brand new laptop.
But I have to add - it's just NOT necessary to have a smartphone, even if you DO need to get online. Anywhere that I *want* to check a website from (i.e. not crammed against the other guy's back on the Tube (subway)) I can do with a netbook or any one of a number of devices, somewhere else, much more comfortably.
I don't want to prodding styli, or tapping ludicrously *tiny* keys to browse a website or write an email. If I'm writing an email it is, by definition, not urgent. So it can wait until I'm somewhere where I have a nice keyboard. If I'm browsing a website, it's ALWAYS not urgent.
Last year I *downgraded* my (already ancient) phone from Bluetooth, Java, camera, GPRS, etc. to one that sends and receives texts and phone calls. I never used the other features so they all seemed pointless to keep about and my phone's battery needed replacing. For the price of a cheap battery off eBay, I could get a brand new phone, battery and charger that did everything I needed it to do: GSM and SMS.
A sysadmin logging onto somewhere from a smartphone to fix a problem might "seem" cool, but it just tells me that you don't have an appropriate spread of skills / knowledge or enough staff to cope, that you have to have THAT person, WHEREVER they are, able to log in to do THAT task.
A smartphone is a toy and I'd find it almost impossible to justify commercial use of one except to show off (like those sales people who like to use tablet PC's to type your requirements into a notepad document etc.). Last year I refused a company-bought Blackberry with data plan - no way I'm getting sucked into the "can you just logon and have a look" thing when I'm on holiday.
On another note - when I'm not at work, I'm NOT at WORK. Unless absolutely critically urgent (and it never is because of the nature of my employer's work), they have no need to have me respond outside of working hours. So I don't.
There are probably a few people who will claim they MUST be in contact all that time but it just shows that their company is happier buying some over-worked sap a smartphone so they can be called in to help whenever there's a problem instead of training people on every shift to be able to cope with anything.
If US intelligence agencies and their actions, security, political connections and control of information are *REALLY* this bad, the US has a much bigger problem than a website.
If this is how a genuine intelligence agency acts and gets caught doing so by the equivalent of a back-bedroom UFO hunter, then the first ever *real* cyberwar will see them wiped off the planet.
The UK, in the middle of a war, infiltrated by spies, managed to capture, analyse, decrypt, monitor and intercept German communications for YEARS, to the extent that they could literally direct the enemy to move their defences to cover false "threats" while watching them do that. And most of exactly what happened took 50+ years to come out and we still don't know *all* of it.
The US, in peacetime (so no major distractions, counter-incentive, etc.), can't stop their own soldiers putting documents into the public domain, with HUGE fanfare, then "rubber-stamp" those documents as official by "hunting down" a civilian not really related to the leak, when the guy handed himself into a police station in an allied country and told the newspapers about it. If the US "anti-cyber-warfare" campaign is anywhere near as ineffective, you better hope nobody tech-savvy *bothers* to go to war with the US.
You mean you *don't* have a local caching DNS server in an SMB envrionment? One that could either avoid that 6-second timeout directly and/or make sure that only the first EVER hit on www.example.com in the entire company is delayed during the course of its entire operation? And where you can easily blacklist, edit and play with DNS settings to prevent other breakage (such as non-existinent-DNS-redirection that some ISP's practice on a whim?).
Or are all of your clients accessing external DNS to resolve domains each and every time?
Please, then, tell me how it is that every Windows network I've ever worked in / on or built in the last 15 years has succumbed to a virus on at least one client sooner or later, even if managed by a huge multi-national company? Could it be that antivirus is actually pretty worthless because it doesn't do its job as advertised?
Back in my previous workplaces, we would refer to it as a "canary". When the antivirus was disabled and stopped talking back to the antivirus consoles on the server, we knew that machine was infected and would require reimaging. Viruses disabling or slipping past the antivirus without any other indication there was something wrong were very common. The antivirus itself ever only detected false positives and/or very trivial, fleeting "viruses" like a javascript malware page that only worked in IE (and we weren't using IE - it just saw it in the Firefox cache!).
Antivirus is snake-oil. If you're relying on that to protect you against malware, good luck. Chances are that your antivirus will *not* catch the majority of viruses that you're likely to encounter. Go check out the statistics on VirusTotal.com - most antivirus programs, even the most up-to-date, can't even detect viruses that other antivirus do, let alone all the ones that sneak past ALL antivirus packages.
Antivirus is a tool, not a cure. It's useful for detecting an existing virus infection. It does *not* prevent it, by any means. However, autorun being off can *totally* prevent an autorun-distributed virus.
Viruses *work* by deliberately crashing, hanging, exploiting, etc. programs into order to execute code - in the process they then want to download more code, store it, modify the disk, trampoline onto another saved executable, etc. By the time something hits the disk, the virus is already executing, by the time something appears in the process list, the virus is already executing - and it *doesn't* necessarily mean that at any point any antivirus "hook" (like disk reads/writes, etc.) would even execute.
Antivirus, generally, doesn't stop virus infections, it merely detects and/or cleans them. Decent security procedure (and proper programming) is the only thing that *stops* a virus - firewalls, least-privilege and turning off crap that wants to execute code.
Then initiate a lawsuit. You *know* you will win, so where's the harm? You'll probably get damages and lost sales paid on top of costs if the court thinks that the lawsuit was baseless and malicious.
The fact is that you *might* be right. But if you're *THAT* certain, there's nothing to stop you or any one of a million people who have received similar letters from similar companies asserting similar nonsense from going to court. In fact, by immediately agreeing to any legal-looking paper you get and then posting on Slashdot about it, you just compromised the legal integrity of your case yourself.
If you'd kept quiet, gone to a lawyer (it's not unusual to find one that'll give you an hour or so's "advice" for a reasonable price), got a draft response and posted it back, they'd probably immediately retract all their statements and you'd have an article worth posting, like an awful lot of people did with the ACS:Law cases, and they were a lot less grey-area.
As it is - small guy falls foul of grey area of law, decides to concede, then whinge about it. Fight, form a team to fight, find someone to fight for you (e.g. EFF, etc.) or, well, put up with it. Chances are a lawyer would be unwilling to touch you now because of certain admissions that would make the case much more difficult than necessary.
My mum got her first ever laptop for Christmas. She is totally PC-illiterate, doesn't browse or email or anything and has little interest but is a big games-player, so we bought it to be a little offline machine for games for her.
Came with Windows 7 pre-installed. I told dad not to touch it yet because I knew it would be bloated. Spent THREE HOURS on New Year cleaning it up of superfluous crap that really had *no* need to be on there at all (so not including things like anti-virus trials, office trials, etc.).
Ran a startup-entry util and cleared out a lot more crap like Adobe updaters etc. Afterwards, got rid of anything that she might "click on by accident" (e.g. trial software) and finally gave it back to them with a couple of Steam games on (AND NO, STEAM, YOU DON'T NEED TO RUN AT STARTUP, nor do I want an advert every time I run you!).
In the end, got to a desktop with a mere half-dozen icons, a start menu with little more than that, one or two taskbar entries more than the default Windows ones (and even some of those I hid) and a startup time that was one EIGHTH of what it was before. No pop-ups, no reminders, no adverts, no spyware, no confusing notifications (do I *really* need to be notified all the time that I've deliberately disabled Windows Update?), and she could play with it without constant "Oh, something's popped up, what do I do?" worries.
Do you honestly need a little "EXIF Launcher" icon for when you plug in an SD card? Or a *second* volume control for your Realtek card? Or a taskbar run-all-the-time icon for Quicktime, Adobe, Java, OpenOffice, etc. No. You're just trying to advertise at me and show me how wonderful your "technology" is in preference to your competitors. Your competitors don't *NEED* to shout at me all day long without my consent in order to get installed, in fact that's the REASON they are installed in preference, or the reason I turn off all that crap in the first place.
Advertise at me without my consent and watch your brand disappear from my machine entirely. And all of those that I manage. The first day of a new network deployment is building a clean image with all necessary software installed without all the junk they want to push to my users.
Like mobile phones, PC's need to get simpler again. If I want to play a video, I use VLC which doesn't show me NOT EVEN ONCE what type of video it is, or a corporate logo for every type. If I want to do that with other players, I can guarantee I have to sit through several splashscreens, configure numerous taskbar icons, install extra software etc. Guess what media player is the default on my networks and my mum's PC?
My desktop isn't your brand-building advertising space. It's the place where I live my IT life. Get your logos off it, or I'll do it for you and find out that it's actually easier to live WITHOUT your logos than with them - I now associate the Apple logo on a computer with a piece of software that needs to be removed, as do my users. And users *complain* when an unscheduled Java update pops up in the middle of a school lesson. Guess what that does for your brand awareness? Nothing positive, I tell you.
And at least the UK places are bound by Data Protection laws with regards the electronic data they collect - sounds like these Aussie pubs aren't.
But then, I echo the sentiment - you want my biometric to do X? Won't be doing X then.
My daughter's nursery wanted my fingerprint in order to ensure that whoever comes to collect her is me or my wife. "What if we weren't available?" I pointed out, given that she's in childcare precisely because we both work all day. "Oh, then you could phone and give us permission to let someone else collect her"... "And then how would you know that the person on the phone was me?" Cue baffled looks, hasty assertions and bluffing to try to cover it.
They never got my fingerprint. And I can still collect her whenever I need to. And if I *can't* there will be merry hell to pay when it comes to collection time. Sorry, it's just a complete misapplication of biometrics, as is the fingerprint-based library system for primary school kids (which I refuse to implement or operate as a school IT manager).
The best way to lose custom is to make it more hassle to deal with you than to not. This applies whether it's not accepting certain (perfectly valid) payment methods, making people go through long-winded registration processes, or just otherwise being an arse about who can give you money and who can't. I'm all for permanently barring anyone who will cause you trouble - and you have to have a bouncer at the door to administer such a system anyway. If your bouncer can't manage the door, and keep out the troublemakers, he shouldn't be there.
The touchscreen displays that I use for electronic signage throughout the school I work in have only Windows drivers, if you read the blurb.
Plugged it into Ubuntu. Detected both the touchscreen (which *ISN'T* just mouse emulation over USB) and the screen no problem at all, and I didn't have to change a single option anywhere.
Just because it says "Windows-only" doesn't mean it's true by a long-shot. I've seen mice that say "Made for Windows 7". Doesn't mean you can't plug them into an XP machine.
Nobody need know or care that a client on the Internet is using IPv6 or IPv4 - ISP's can easily form automatic proxies, bridges or whatever else is necessary and nobody needs to change a thing.
Those who *want* to help can change onto an IPv6 network in about 2-3 minutes per computer (provided it's fairly recent, i.e 2000/XP, Linux 2.6 or above). Network managers can upgrade in a matter of minutes for every user behind their NAT.
The problem is... why? As has been stated many times before, when Slashdot, or the BBC, or the ordinary "google.com" site (not the ipv6.google.com test) give me some AAAA records then I will see a point to it. Until then, I have an allocated address and all the websites I want to communicate with ONLY speak IPv4 anyway. When that changes and an IPv6 route to the same website exists, there's a reason to upgrade (i.e. the transition has started), and even for YEARS afterwards, there will still be no *advantage* to talking IPv6 over IPv4 to that particular site.
Now, the Internet *isn't* just websites but the same holds. When my dedicated server comes pre-installed with IPv6 connectivity for remote SSH access, then I can start taking it seriously. Until then, there's no *point* in me spending even the ten minutes it takes to convert the systems under my control.
Publishing an AAAA address on a dedicated website server or even a whole cluster of servers is no more difficult or intrusive than publishing an A address. Until some of the largest sites in the world start to bother, what's the point?
Would you like to explain how that's any different to the ordinary evolutionary process where ANY gene can have unforeseen consequences, propagate, do so on a whim, intermix with other "normal" organisms, etc. in a completely unregulated manner? Where every single generation contains many "mutations" (scary word, don't panic!) with virtually absolute certainty, almost all of which will not be beneficial and some of which can be detrimental?
Genes are highly structured, easily changed (otherwise they wouldn't exist), self-modifying, deliberately mutating, replicating machines. What GE does is to lock down a particular, known, well-tested variant of the species from which we can "clone" (scary word, don't panic!) other, identical specimens. It actually *stops* the process of random mutations and interactions occurring and replaces it with a well-defined one. And if something's going to interact badly with other crops, you will be WISHING it had a well-defined, singular genetic origin that you can study, analyse and counteract.
That's actually the real problem associated with GE - that we might have a very shallow gene pool in the future from which to extract things and have trouble should something attack a weakness in its genetic structure - but that's *always* been the case, whether GM existed or not. Chances are that without modern vaccines, quarantine, breeding from "known good" specimens, etc. things like BSE, foot-and-mouth, and thousands of other diseases that animals *aren't* naturally immune to would be rampant in the entire food chain.
It's extraordinarily hard to breed livestock or grow crops without using something along the way that "cheats" nature by providing immunity to things that the animal isn't naturally immune to, or adjusting the yield of the crop. You can do it. And a family can live off it. But if you want to get *anywhere* near the sheer volume of food required for a developed country, (putting aside issues like battery-farming, etc. and concentrating on even a mostly-"organic" farming method) you cannot possibly do so without immunising your animals (sometimes by law), feeding them only regulated foodstuffs (sometimes by law) and deliberately "forcing" crops to grow faster than nature intended.
So if you want to be "GE-free", you have to stop immunising your animals and "breeding" ones that are immune to a particular disease by picking off the survivors and breeding from them - sounds like GE to me, and also you better hope that the random gene mutation that saves that particular animal doesn't negatively affect its food yield at the same time - if there even IS a random mutation that can provide that immunity and/or that mutation happens by a billion-to-one chance on your particular farm.
Now, let's be honest, how many thoroughbred racehorses can't trace their ancestry back to a particular single set of genes? Virtually all of them. How much genetic variation do you see in cows bred for even organic meat (i.e. I bet you they got those cows from a a breeder who also used one particularly fine bull's sperm to fertilise thousands of cows who all were bred from a handful of unique "fathers")? Instant genetic mono-culture. How many distinct crops of mushrooms do you think we are using to put on your plate even if we grow them on an organic farm? Probably the ONE that works the best.
I'm English and therefore eat a lot of potatoes - given that the potato is *not* of European origin, just how do you think they get such numbers of them over here and how do they have them of such even consistency? They choose the "best" (e.g. tastiest, longest-lasting, best-looking, most-resistant, etc.) and use those AND ONLY THOSE to develop the next crops.
The genetic mono-culture is already there, and we're already playing with it and have been for several thousand years.
And even avoiding the mono-culture problem, why do you think there are so many breeds of dogs suited to their particular tasks - because we took wolves, deliberately changed their natur
Please, then, stick with your steroid-injected, BSE-ridden, hormone-packed, coloured, flavoured, seasoned, salted, vitamin-fortified, water-engorged joints of meat that are currently on the shelf.
The problem with people who *won't* buy "genetically modified", non-organic etc. foods is that they have no idea what they are *currently* eating anyway.
Growing "clean" meat in a lab sounds a good way to produce cheap meat for actually *feeding* people, e.g. developing countries, without needing to have acres of perfectly-good farmland dedicated to producing enough feed to sustain a whole herd of animals for years in order to slaughter one at a later date.
It would also work well for "essentials" meat, such as superstore value ranges for people who can only just afford it. I think I'd rather eat a generic, clean meat than the cheap offcuts of the cheapest animal, packaged in the cheapest possible way - especially if there are no possible BSE, etc. problems with it.
And meat production currently causes 18% of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions, and for various meats we push somewhere between 4 and 54 times the amount of energy into producing meat than we get in useful protein from the meat.
I don't give a shit what it says on the packet - and a bit of honesty would go a long way with me, in fact, rather than misleading and inaccurate statements like "organic" or "diet" or "reduced sugar" etc. - as long as it's edible. That doesn't mean I'd eat it for every meal but as a cheap way to get the energy I need to survive when I don't have much money? Bring it on.
What about the several rulings in the EU that the EULA inside a software box cannot be enforceable because you have agree to it before you know what it is?
MS got caught by that one and had to give refunds to people who *didn't* agree with the EULA but had already "agreed" to it by opening the box.
Contract law is much more complicated than just "he signed it". For a start, a court can throw out almost anything in a contract they don't think is fair. But it takes a court to do it, because they alone can determine if a contract is fair, and if you don't bring it to court, it doesn't happen. It doesn't mean the contract IS fair, it just means it's untested. Similarly, the GPL is untested too - same prevalence, same situation. It doesn't mean it *IS* legal under any jurisdiction (and could well be legal in one and not another), it just means nobody's bothered to go to the expense of finding out for the sake of a £100 Windows license.
Slashdot Mirror
- Design system
- Build system (involves inevitable reboots)
- Test system (involves inevitable reboots)
- Move system into production.
Once the services you need start up the way you want, don't play with it. Put it into service and have backups of the original image, any changes you make and a working replacement (Yes, have a working replacement - there is *nothing* better than having another machine sitting next to your server that can take over its job with the flick of a switch while you repair it - it also lets you test changes safely, and whenever you're sure the system is how you want it, you push the same image to your "copy of" server).
If you do it properly, that machine will then stay up until hardware failure. Sometimes that *can* be years away. If you do it properly, you shouldn't ever, ever, ever be rebooting a server that's in production - you're just masking the real problem. Yeah, it'll work most of the time but it's just a way of papering over the cracks. The server hung, the service died, the settings got out of sync, or whatever, for a reason. Just rebooting is ignoring that reason for sake of service continuance - if the service is that vital, you should have high enough availability to cover such incidences or that same problem will come back to bite you later.
Nobody cares about enormous uptimes, but having a server that you haven't NEEDED to touch in months is a good thing. It means that it has a well-defined function and has been performing correctly - that's your "stable" version and should be treated as such. Every time you make a change to a server, it then becomes a "current/experimental" version that you should be wary of.
At worst, when a problem appears, you turn ON a replacement server and fix the one that is showing problems. If its role is well-specified, you don't get "feature creep" where it's running a million things that it never used to and they're not in your startup properly because it's never rebooted enough for you to test them.
On Windows, or Unix, you shouldn't have to reboot. If you do, it's to test something or correctly reinitialise after fixing a problem (a post-solution reboot just to make sure it works as required isn't a bad thing but certainly not "required"). The worry of hardware failure on boot shouldn't stop you rebooting, and similarly you shouldn't reboot just to "spot" problems. Both suggest inattention and lack of suitable backups/replacements/high availability solutions.
Systems can easily go 3-4 years in operation without requiring a reboot. If your hardware is good quality, you're monitoring the server as you should be, you have adequate backups/replacements and the role it performs isn't changed, there's no need to ever reboot it past initial testing. I have internal school servers that only get rebooted in the summer (i.e. once per annum) and that's only because the power goes off to upgrade the electrics each year.
If it wasn't for that, I'd just leave them running. They don't need kernel 2.6.192830921830 and they have been doing that same job reliably for a LONG time. I'm not going to kick them into a reboot "just because". Similarly even the tiniest memory leak in their processes would cause me problems that I would spot immediately.
As it is, 450 happy users all day long for years. The last one I installed actually took a whack from a collapsed networking cabinet coming off the wall (full of fully-populated Gigabit switches) and dropping six feet onto it. Apart from a small dent it carried on just fine, and the disks were idle, and SMART / data integrity show no problems. I rebuilt the entire network cabling around it because switching it off wasn't necessary. If it did reboot and it didn't come up in the expected state? There's a copy of it on another machine on the other side of the room - it's predecessor that also didn't reboot for years but wasn't fast enough to run the amount of PHP / MySQL we needed it to among its other functions. Having the replacement machine
Stop buying faulty shit and paying for subscriptions / devices that don't work because of admitted flaws and "bodge-job" hardware.
Simple really. You're paying for something you can't use.
I stuck a tenner in. Why not? I've had infinitely more usage out of that program than I did all the others I've paid for in the past.
And I don't feel like giving *anything* to Oracle at the moment, with their mission to destroy every large open-source project.
With LibreOffice, I wanted it as soon as I heard it, waited for a stable version, tested and deployed and it's now all over my workplace and on my laptop. It fixes problems that have annoyed me in the past and allowed me to open an ANCIENT word-processor file that someone sent my employer where nothing else could. They took the right approach and their first stable was exactly what I wanted.
I shoved some money their way - I don't mind if their office suite and supported formats take over the world, so I don't see why not. Worst that happens is that I've paid some programmer somewhere for a tiny piece of time to compensate for all the features they've given me for nothing.
UK is business-hostile? That's news to our GDP. And we don't have an awful lot of silly laws that some countries have that would affect open-source (e.g. software patents, etc.)
According to Wiki, by GDP it goes:
Europe
America
People's Republic of China
Japan
Germany
France
United Kingdom
and has done for the last few years. PRC doesn't have a great record as regards freedom of expression, and there are communications problems in many of the others. I think just from that list, I'd be inclined to use Germany first and then UK too. Germany has a very good reputation for stability and supporting open-source.
"but hides a nasty surprise for those who support open source ideals"
"Surprise" - I do not think it means what *you* think it means.
MS not allowing OpenSource stuff in some fashion? Well, pinch my nipples and send me to Alaska. I never would have guessed.
Most places will happily give you every password in the world when you start a job there. And sometimes the "intermediate" stage between you leaving and someone else doing your job is filled with outside contractors and random people who "need" your passwords.
Whenever I leave an employer, I make a BIG list of everything I know in terms of passwords, passcodes, keys, etc. and compile it on paper or a CD. I put literally everything in there, even down to little foibles of the system and the reasoning for strange configurations. I then furnish the boss with one copy of that CD, hand him another copy to "put in a safe place" (usually a safe) and then leave.
I did this at my last workplace. They were getting increasingly silly and employing people with zero expertise, and I already had another job already lined up so my entire notice period was spent house-cleaning and compiling lists while taking care of the mundane jobs.
Technically I reported only to the headteacher of the school in question, having been employed by him without any formal assignment in a staffing structure (to the point where the local borough phoned up to complain that I was earning too much for any of their pay-scales and had to be put on my own unique one).
When I left, there was no replacement for me (because they weren't interested in employing the only guy out of all the candidates that *could* do my job because he had formerly worked in Tesco's supermarket rather than sit on his arse in the middle of a recession) so I handed off to the headteacher. This immediately caused an argument because one of the new staff who was the new "second-in-command" there (and that decision was partly responsible for me wanting to leave in the first place!) DEMANDED the "admin password for the network".
He wasn't an IT guy. He knew nothing about computers at all. He just wanted it because he was sure that the dozens of digital voice recorders that he'd bought on a whim (without IT authorisation) could be made compatible with the non-networkable, kiddified, decades-old audio editing software he'd bought on a whim (without IT authorisation) on the network he didn't know how to manage, no matter how many times I told him they were incompatible. He was convinced that if he somehow got the "magic" administrator's password and then let 1000 kids loose with it so they could listen to themselves talking, it would solve his problems with not teaching part of the IT curriculum.
Obviously I must have been deliberately lying when his DRM'd-AAC-only recorders couldn't be opened in a program that only took WAV's (not even MP3's!) and that an intermediate conversion step (which he DEMANDED shouldn't be necessary and refused to use) was required.
Apart from the fact there were three networks, there were dozens of different passwords, and he wasn't getting *ANY* of their passwords until I was way outside the building and long gone, I had a duty to protect the information secured by those passwords (information on kids, people's salaries etc.). If you read the rules precisely, that means that I had to hand off ONLY to the headteacher, who could then hand off passwords to others as they saw fit.
So I did just that, in the process making my own day by telling the guy "No." even if he WAS second-in-command there (he didn't seem to understand that I didn't report to him, no matter what he thought of that idea). He was rather miffed. I also, with the head's permission, gave a copy of the CD to the lead governor of the school who was a big-iron IT guy for his day-job, that we both knew we could trust - he would be fixing any major issues that occurred in the school until they could find a replacement and he was there to sign-off on my hand-over.
A week later, a phone call from the second-in-command. He'd got the administrator password, tried it out on several PC's and couldn't do what he wanted (ignoring the fact that he wasn't using ANY of the network software management that we had in place). So he demanded that I give
Erm... have you even USED Steam on any half-decent PC?
I'm an old DOS guy so anything over 2Mb is blasphemy for me, but Steam is currently sitting (on a machine that's been taken into and out of standby about 50 times since it was last booted about a month ago) at around 9.5Mb RAM usage according to Task Manager. It doesn't touch more than 1% CPU enough to register on any simple task list. Steam's been running ALL that time that the computer has been up, with 250+ games, and gets used every night to play a game (anything from L4D2 to Altitude to the original Counterstrike).
I don't have the overlay enabled. I do have Friends enabled. I don't have it in "large" mode. It has been running perfectly fine and doesn't interfere with *anything * do. It doesn't even allocate enough memory to worry about - my print spooler service occupies more memory.
There are network delays when I run a game as it is (I assume) authenticated, but it's the *game* and network that causes that, not CPU usage or memory allocation from Steam. Steam hardly does anything at all, whereas the initial load of something like L4D2 tries to read in 2Gb of data. Killing Floor is terrible in that respect and can take about 4-5 minutes to clean up after I come out of it. None of that is *Steam*, that's the game.
The actual *Steam* component does nothing to slow that down, but XP happens to be particularly crap at freeing memory when you've used enough to touch swap (it's XP swapping from the release of the game's 2Gb of memory that actually stops me doing anything for a little while with any program, not just Steam).
250 games and, once loaded in the file cache once, they just load barely touching the disk (I don't even notice the load times for the small indie games any more because it's instantaneous and silent because of my long "suspended" Windows session that keeps the file cache intact.
It's slow browsing the store in Steam, I give you that, but that's to be expected, especially when I'm used to Opera throwing pages on the screen faster than I can see them. And this is a laptop. In large mode, it hits 50Mb if I browse, but to be honest Opera or Firefox hit roughly the same when I browse the same websites in them. Even 200Mb is barely worth worrying about these days - I lose a Gig of my RAM just by not choosing to run a 64-bit OS.
You either have a horribly underpowered PC, not enough RAM and so are swapping WAY more than necessary, or you haven't actually LOOKED at the cause of your problem. The most I've ever seen Steam use is about 250Mb and 10% CPU averaged over a minute or so and that was just before they changed to the new integrated web browser.
I call crap on your assertions. Five years ago, yeah, maybe, they were bloating on older PC's that didn't need that kind of bloat. Now? They are smaller than my print spooler on a machine that can cope with just about anything I throw at it.
(P.S. WHOA! Memory usage just went up to 10Mb! And then strangely went back down to 7Mb when I actually brought it out of the taskbar to sit on "small mode" on the desktop).
Most "social" games aren't social? So sitting in front of a PC and shooting imaginary objects is, just because they're swearing at you as they "die"?
The biggest problem I have online is that I *don't* want the social element. I have friends, thanks, and if I'm gaming it means that I'm not with them. Sometimes we join up and have a LAN game or similar but it's rare and it's usually quite a private, organised affair.
When I do go online to play (because single-player is my favourite but does have its disadvantages after a while) I don't really *want* to socialise, or step into a well-established social circle that I'm not part of. Try joining any L4D2 game and see how "social" it is - co-operate with everything everyone says or get kicked.
Online games of *any* kind are about playing the game. Don't play the game and you'll rapidly lose "friends", find less and less servers willing to take you and will hate the whole thing. But you can play for thousands of hours without ever once being "social" in the true sense of the word.
When I'm playing a game, it's to advance myself in that game - whether that means by skill and experience, or just by some arbitrary metric. It's nice to have a "friendly" place but everyone has their own circle of friends and you can't be friends with everyone. Hence, I buy my own servers. Friends can pop onto them and even have admin if necessary. The general public are welcome to make up the numbers, but I come down pretty strong on anyone who's not playing the game properly, obviously. And in the end it doesn't matter whether it's social or not. I can name dozens of regulars that hardly speak when they're playing.
I have a run lots of servers, my latest ones are for Altitude. Almost every night they're packed full (14+ players each), some times they are empty (middle of the day). They're nice people and we often have a laugh and a chat about nothing in particular but long conversations are frowned on - you're there to play the game. And rarely do the same people come into contact on the same server regularly and if you *wanted* to meet up specifically, you'd find a common server that you both like or make one yourself.
The social element is aside from the game. In the same way that "social" networks are not social, nor are "social" games. Nor are most games. And even when they are, the social part comes from something external to the game itself (e.g. clans, private servers, LAN matches, forums, etc.).
I don't play MMORPG's for exactly that reason - it requires co-operation from complete strangers or large groups of friends playing together under the guise of "socialising". I'd much rather the two thing were separated so I could play my game properly and still talk to my friends when necessary. Hell, I have more MSN/Skype conversations while playing Steam games than I ever do over any sort of in-game chat/talk facility.
It's not facts that are the problem. It's the illogical leaps from facts into craziness that are the problem, and stating opinion as fact. If you do that, you need a good reputation.
I pretty much *guarantee* that Google has to do whatever the federal enforcement says. It's called the law. To make the leap from that to "use another search engine" is an irrelevant and illogical conclusion unless you can provide facts that other search engines aren't similar affected by any government whose jurisdiction they operate in. And in terms of things this guy has said, it's nothing.
The only thing you can take away from someone else's opinion is reliant on their reputation. This guy believes and has said a lot of crap, quite publicly, and not denounced it until months after it's caused him a lot of trouble - including having to backtrack on quite clearly calling someone (the US president) a racist.
He has a self-confessed history of severe, long-term alcohol and drug abuse, suicide attempts, he's used miscarriage as a joke to play off the mother, he's had several high profile firings, several arrests, several cities, organisations, churches and advertisers have rushed to disassociate themselves with him and he has more conspiracy theories of his own than an X-Files fan club.
And, personally, he claims to have been saved from professional obscurity (and several other things) by God, and belongs to the church of latter-day-saints, which kinda rules him out of my personal "might have an brain in there somewhere" list.
Nobody really cares if the facts are wrong or right. It's his interpretation of them that leads him into ridicule. I *know* that if I drop my laptop, it will hit the floor. I don't explain it away as a government conspiracy that all laptops are subject to gravity in order that the US can drill holes in the Earth's crust and steal my laptop. The *fact* I stated is true, the opinion / explanation is almost certainly 100% bullshit and as "unproveable" as any other.
Seriously, from not knowing anything of the guy, within about 20 minutes of independent research, I've put him on my personal "Ignore anything he says" blacklist.
Never heard of the guy.
Went to look him up.
Within three pages of Google searches, couldn't find a single reason to listen to anything he says.
Either he's right, and Google is also actively trying to discredit him, or he's an idiot.
My money's on the second option.
Because no sensible large corporate entities IT guys would bother with pre-installed images. I never have.
My employer bought me a new laptop the other month. It came with Windows 7. Through sheer force of habit, I never even saw so much as a Windows 7 splashscreen for the initial installation - it literally didn't get to execute a single byte from the hard drive.
F12, PXE boot, apply standard image. If necessary, apply specific drivers, put them back into the standard image. It's like wondering why Google doesn't have to deal with Norton Antivirus trials on the machines they put in their server racks. They don't even *get* that far, or to execute a single byte that's not part of Google's standard images or imaging process.
Thus corporates don't care and the little guy ends up with hours of cleanup for a brand new laptop.
Snap.
But I have to add - it's just NOT necessary to have a smartphone, even if you DO need to get online. Anywhere that I *want* to check a website from (i.e. not crammed against the other guy's back on the Tube (subway)) I can do with a netbook or any one of a number of devices, somewhere else, much more comfortably.
I don't want to prodding styli, or tapping ludicrously *tiny* keys to browse a website or write an email. If I'm writing an email it is, by definition, not urgent. So it can wait until I'm somewhere where I have a nice keyboard. If I'm browsing a website, it's ALWAYS not urgent.
Last year I *downgraded* my (already ancient) phone from Bluetooth, Java, camera, GPRS, etc. to one that sends and receives texts and phone calls. I never used the other features so they all seemed pointless to keep about and my phone's battery needed replacing. For the price of a cheap battery off eBay, I could get a brand new phone, battery and charger that did everything I needed it to do: GSM and SMS.
A sysadmin logging onto somewhere from a smartphone to fix a problem might "seem" cool, but it just tells me that you don't have an appropriate spread of skills / knowledge or enough staff to cope, that you have to have THAT person, WHEREVER they are, able to log in to do THAT task.
A smartphone is a toy and I'd find it almost impossible to justify commercial use of one except to show off (like those sales people who like to use tablet PC's to type your requirements into a notepad document etc.). Last year I refused a company-bought Blackberry with data plan - no way I'm getting sucked into the "can you just logon and have a look" thing when I'm on holiday.
On another note - when I'm not at work, I'm NOT at WORK. Unless absolutely critically urgent (and it never is because of the nature of my employer's work), they have no need to have me respond outside of working hours. So I don't.
There are probably a few people who will claim they MUST be in contact all that time but it just shows that their company is happier buying some over-worked sap a smartphone so they can be called in to help whenever there's a problem instead of training people on every shift to be able to cope with anything.
I'll say it again.
If US intelligence agencies and their actions, security, political connections and control of information are *REALLY* this bad, the US has a much bigger problem than a website.
If this is how a genuine intelligence agency acts and gets caught doing so by the equivalent of a back-bedroom UFO hunter, then the first ever *real* cyberwar will see them wiped off the planet.
The UK, in the middle of a war, infiltrated by spies, managed to capture, analyse, decrypt, monitor and intercept German communications for YEARS, to the extent that they could literally direct the enemy to move their defences to cover false "threats" while watching them do that. And most of exactly what happened took 50+ years to come out and we still don't know *all* of it.
The US, in peacetime (so no major distractions, counter-incentive, etc.), can't stop their own soldiers putting documents into the public domain, with HUGE fanfare, then "rubber-stamp" those documents as official by "hunting down" a civilian not really related to the leak, when the guy handed himself into a police station in an allied country and told the newspapers about it. If the US "anti-cyber-warfare" campaign is anywhere near as ineffective, you better hope nobody tech-savvy *bothers* to go to war with the US.
You mean you *don't* have a local caching DNS server in an SMB envrionment? One that could either avoid that 6-second timeout directly and/or make sure that only the first EVER hit on www.example.com in the entire company is delayed during the course of its entire operation? And where you can easily blacklist, edit and play with DNS settings to prevent other breakage (such as non-existinent-DNS-redirection that some ISP's practice on a whim?).
Or are all of your clients accessing external DNS to resolve domains each and every time?
Please, then, tell me how it is that every Windows network I've ever worked in / on or built in the last 15 years has succumbed to a virus on at least one client sooner or later, even if managed by a huge multi-national company? Could it be that antivirus is actually pretty worthless because it doesn't do its job as advertised?
Back in my previous workplaces, we would refer to it as a "canary". When the antivirus was disabled and stopped talking back to the antivirus consoles on the server, we knew that machine was infected and would require reimaging. Viruses disabling or slipping past the antivirus without any other indication there was something wrong were very common. The antivirus itself ever only detected false positives and/or very trivial, fleeting "viruses" like a javascript malware page that only worked in IE (and we weren't using IE - it just saw it in the Firefox cache!).
Antivirus is snake-oil. If you're relying on that to protect you against malware, good luck. Chances are that your antivirus will *not* catch the majority of viruses that you're likely to encounter. Go check out the statistics on VirusTotal.com - most antivirus programs, even the most up-to-date, can't even detect viruses that other antivirus do, let alone all the ones that sneak past ALL antivirus packages.
Antivirus is a tool, not a cure. It's useful for detecting an existing virus infection. It does *not* prevent it, by any means. However, autorun being off can *totally* prevent an autorun-distributed virus.
Viruses *work* by deliberately crashing, hanging, exploiting, etc. programs into order to execute code - in the process they then want to download more code, store it, modify the disk, trampoline onto another saved executable, etc. By the time something hits the disk, the virus is already executing, by the time something appears in the process list, the virus is already executing - and it *doesn't* necessarily mean that at any point any antivirus "hook" (like disk reads/writes, etc.) would even execute.
Antivirus, generally, doesn't stop virus infections, it merely detects and/or cleans them. Decent security procedure (and proper programming) is the only thing that *stops* a virus - firewalls, least-privilege and turning off crap that wants to execute code.
Then initiate a lawsuit. You *know* you will win, so where's the harm? You'll probably get damages and lost sales paid on top of costs if the court thinks that the lawsuit was baseless and malicious.
The fact is that you *might* be right. But if you're *THAT* certain, there's nothing to stop you or any one of a million people who have received similar letters from similar companies asserting similar nonsense from going to court. In fact, by immediately agreeing to any legal-looking paper you get and then posting on Slashdot about it, you just compromised the legal integrity of your case yourself.
If you'd kept quiet, gone to a lawyer (it's not unusual to find one that'll give you an hour or so's "advice" for a reasonable price), got a draft response and posted it back, they'd probably immediately retract all their statements and you'd have an article worth posting, like an awful lot of people did with the ACS:Law cases, and they were a lot less grey-area.
As it is - small guy falls foul of grey area of law, decides to concede, then whinge about it. Fight, form a team to fight, find someone to fight for you (e.g. EFF, etc.) or, well, put up with it. Chances are a lawyer would be unwilling to touch you now because of certain admissions that would make the case much more difficult than necessary.
My mum got her first ever laptop for Christmas. She is totally PC-illiterate, doesn't browse or email or anything and has little interest but is a big games-player, so we bought it to be a little offline machine for games for her.
Came with Windows 7 pre-installed. I told dad not to touch it yet because I knew it would be bloated. Spent THREE HOURS on New Year cleaning it up of superfluous crap that really had *no* need to be on there at all (so not including things like anti-virus trials, office trials, etc.).
Ran a startup-entry util and cleared out a lot more crap like Adobe updaters etc. Afterwards, got rid of anything that she might "click on by accident" (e.g. trial software) and finally gave it back to them with a couple of Steam games on (AND NO, STEAM, YOU DON'T NEED TO RUN AT STARTUP, nor do I want an advert every time I run you!).
In the end, got to a desktop with a mere half-dozen icons, a start menu with little more than that, one or two taskbar entries more than the default Windows ones (and even some of those I hid) and a startup time that was one EIGHTH of what it was before. No pop-ups, no reminders, no adverts, no spyware, no confusing notifications (do I *really* need to be notified all the time that I've deliberately disabled Windows Update?), and she could play with it without constant "Oh, something's popped up, what do I do?" worries.
Do you honestly need a little "EXIF Launcher" icon for when you plug in an SD card? Or a *second* volume control for your Realtek card? Or a taskbar run-all-the-time icon for Quicktime, Adobe, Java, OpenOffice, etc. No. You're just trying to advertise at me and show me how wonderful your "technology" is in preference to your competitors. Your competitors don't *NEED* to shout at me all day long without my consent in order to get installed, in fact that's the REASON they are installed in preference, or the reason I turn off all that crap in the first place.
Advertise at me without my consent and watch your brand disappear from my machine entirely. And all of those that I manage. The first day of a new network deployment is building a clean image with all necessary software installed without all the junk they want to push to my users.
Like mobile phones, PC's need to get simpler again. If I want to play a video, I use VLC which doesn't show me NOT EVEN ONCE what type of video it is, or a corporate logo for every type. If I want to do that with other players, I can guarantee I have to sit through several splashscreens, configure numerous taskbar icons, install extra software etc. Guess what media player is the default on my networks and my mum's PC?
My desktop isn't your brand-building advertising space. It's the place where I live my IT life. Get your logos off it, or I'll do it for you and find out that it's actually easier to live WITHOUT your logos than with them - I now associate the Apple logo on a computer with a piece of software that needs to be removed, as do my users. And users *complain* when an unscheduled Java update pops up in the middle of a school lesson. Guess what that does for your brand awareness? Nothing positive, I tell you.
And at least the UK places are bound by Data Protection laws with regards the electronic data they collect - sounds like these Aussie pubs aren't.
But then, I echo the sentiment - you want my biometric to do X? Won't be doing X then.
My daughter's nursery wanted my fingerprint in order to ensure that whoever comes to collect her is me or my wife. "What if we weren't available?" I pointed out, given that she's in childcare precisely because we both work all day. "Oh, then you could phone and give us permission to let someone else collect her"... "And then how would you know that the person on the phone was me?" Cue baffled looks, hasty assertions and bluffing to try to cover it.
They never got my fingerprint. And I can still collect her whenever I need to. And if I *can't* there will be merry hell to pay when it comes to collection time. Sorry, it's just a complete misapplication of biometrics, as is the fingerprint-based library system for primary school kids (which I refuse to implement or operate as a school IT manager).
The best way to lose custom is to make it more hassle to deal with you than to not. This applies whether it's not accepting certain (perfectly valid) payment methods, making people go through long-winded registration processes, or just otherwise being an arse about who can give you money and who can't. I'm all for permanently barring anyone who will cause you trouble - and you have to have a bouncer at the door to administer such a system anyway. If your bouncer can't manage the door, and keep out the troublemakers, he shouldn't be there.
JTAG port.
The touchscreen displays that I use for electronic signage throughout the school I work in have only Windows drivers, if you read the blurb.
Plugged it into Ubuntu. Detected both the touchscreen (which *ISN'T* just mouse emulation over USB) and the screen no problem at all, and I didn't have to change a single option anywhere.
Just because it says "Windows-only" doesn't mean it's true by a long-shot. I've seen mice that say "Made for Windows 7". Doesn't mean you can't plug them into an XP machine.
Nobody need know or care that a client on the Internet is using IPv6 or IPv4 - ISP's can easily form automatic proxies, bridges or whatever else is necessary and nobody needs to change a thing.
Those who *want* to help can change onto an IPv6 network in about 2-3 minutes per computer (provided it's fairly recent, i.e 2000/XP, Linux 2.6 or above). Network managers can upgrade in a matter of minutes for every user behind their NAT.
The problem is... why? As has been stated many times before, when Slashdot, or the BBC, or the ordinary "google.com" site (not the ipv6.google.com test) give me some AAAA records then I will see a point to it. Until then, I have an allocated address and all the websites I want to communicate with ONLY speak IPv4 anyway. When that changes and an IPv6 route to the same website exists, there's a reason to upgrade (i.e. the transition has started), and even for YEARS afterwards, there will still be no *advantage* to talking IPv6 over IPv4 to that particular site.
Now, the Internet *isn't* just websites but the same holds. When my dedicated server comes pre-installed with IPv6 connectivity for remote SSH access, then I can start taking it seriously. Until then, there's no *point* in me spending even the ten minutes it takes to convert the systems under my control.
Publishing an AAAA address on a dedicated website server or even a whole cluster of servers is no more difficult or intrusive than publishing an A address. Until some of the largest sites in the world start to bother, what's the point?
Stop buying shit that doesn't do what you want, then?
I'd have thought it was a pretty simple, and obvious, solution that you could have seen years ago.
Would you like to explain how that's any different to the ordinary evolutionary process where ANY gene can have unforeseen consequences, propagate, do so on a whim, intermix with other "normal" organisms, etc. in a completely unregulated manner? Where every single generation contains many "mutations" (scary word, don't panic!) with virtually absolute certainty, almost all of which will not be beneficial and some of which can be detrimental?
Genes are highly structured, easily changed (otherwise they wouldn't exist), self-modifying, deliberately mutating, replicating machines. What GE does is to lock down a particular, known, well-tested variant of the species from which we can "clone" (scary word, don't panic!) other, identical specimens. It actually *stops* the process of random mutations and interactions occurring and replaces it with a well-defined one. And if something's going to interact badly with other crops, you will be WISHING it had a well-defined, singular genetic origin that you can study, analyse and counteract.
That's actually the real problem associated with GE - that we might have a very shallow gene pool in the future from which to extract things and have trouble should something attack a weakness in its genetic structure - but that's *always* been the case, whether GM existed or not. Chances are that without modern vaccines, quarantine, breeding from "known good" specimens, etc. things like BSE, foot-and-mouth, and thousands of other diseases that animals *aren't* naturally immune to would be rampant in the entire food chain.
It's extraordinarily hard to breed livestock or grow crops without using something along the way that "cheats" nature by providing immunity to things that the animal isn't naturally immune to, or adjusting the yield of the crop. You can do it. And a family can live off it. But if you want to get *anywhere* near the sheer volume of food required for a developed country, (putting aside issues like battery-farming, etc. and concentrating on even a mostly-"organic" farming method) you cannot possibly do so without immunising your animals (sometimes by law), feeding them only regulated foodstuffs (sometimes by law) and deliberately "forcing" crops to grow faster than nature intended.
So if you want to be "GE-free", you have to stop immunising your animals and "breeding" ones that are immune to a particular disease by picking off the survivors and breeding from them - sounds like GE to me, and also you better hope that the random gene mutation that saves that particular animal doesn't negatively affect its food yield at the same time - if there even IS a random mutation that can provide that immunity and/or that mutation happens by a billion-to-one chance on your particular farm.
Now, let's be honest, how many thoroughbred racehorses can't trace their ancestry back to a particular single set of genes? Virtually all of them. How much genetic variation do you see in cows bred for even organic meat (i.e. I bet you they got those cows from a a breeder who also used one particularly fine bull's sperm to fertilise thousands of cows who all were bred from a handful of unique "fathers")? Instant genetic mono-culture. How many distinct crops of mushrooms do you think we are using to put on your plate even if we grow them on an organic farm? Probably the ONE that works the best.
I'm English and therefore eat a lot of potatoes - given that the potato is *not* of European origin, just how do you think they get such numbers of them over here and how do they have them of such even consistency? They choose the "best" (e.g. tastiest, longest-lasting, best-looking, most-resistant, etc.) and use those AND ONLY THOSE to develop the next crops.
The genetic mono-culture is already there, and we're already playing with it and have been for several thousand years.
And even avoiding the mono-culture problem, why do you think there are so many breeds of dogs suited to their particular tasks - because we took wolves, deliberately changed their natur
Please, then, stick with your steroid-injected, BSE-ridden, hormone-packed, coloured, flavoured, seasoned, salted, vitamin-fortified, water-engorged joints of meat that are currently on the shelf.
The problem with people who *won't* buy "genetically modified", non-organic etc. foods is that they have no idea what they are *currently* eating anyway.
Growing "clean" meat in a lab sounds a good way to produce cheap meat for actually *feeding* people, e.g. developing countries, without needing to have acres of perfectly-good farmland dedicated to producing enough feed to sustain a whole herd of animals for years in order to slaughter one at a later date.
It would also work well for "essentials" meat, such as superstore value ranges for people who can only just afford it. I think I'd rather eat a generic, clean meat than the cheap offcuts of the cheapest animal, packaged in the cheapest possible way - especially if there are no possible BSE, etc. problems with it.
And meat production currently causes 18% of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions, and for various meats we push somewhere between 4 and 54 times the amount of energy into producing meat than we get in useful protein from the meat.
I don't give a shit what it says on the packet - and a bit of honesty would go a long way with me, in fact, rather than misleading and inaccurate statements like "organic" or "diet" or "reduced sugar" etc. - as long as it's edible. That doesn't mean I'd eat it for every meal but as a cheap way to get the energy I need to survive when I don't have much money? Bring it on.
What about the several rulings in the EU that the EULA inside a software box cannot be enforceable because you have agree to it before you know what it is?
MS got caught by that one and had to give refunds to people who *didn't* agree with the EULA but had already "agreed" to it by opening the box.
Contract law is much more complicated than just "he signed it". For a start, a court can throw out almost anything in a contract they don't think is fair. But it takes a court to do it, because they alone can determine if a contract is fair, and if you don't bring it to court, it doesn't happen. It doesn't mean the contract IS fair, it just means it's untested. Similarly, the GPL is untested too - same prevalence, same situation. It doesn't mean it *IS* legal under any jurisdiction (and could well be legal in one and not another), it just means nobody's bothered to go to the expense of finding out for the sake of a £100 Windows license.