Tho this is to some degree like training wheels: if you never drive without them, you can't learn how to handle a situation where the training wheels (safety features) have failed.
My vehicles have all predated the major safety features, so I learned to do without. I used to live in winter country, and I remember using the "understeer and skid" principle, among other tricks for staying on the road in bad conditions. But I don't by-habit apply such techniques outside of the correct situation -- rather, I'd apply 'em when the road felt like it needed it.
I'm a very light sleeper, and from experience I know I can be instantly ready for an emergency even in the middle of the night...
When I was in college, we still had "bed checks" in the dorms. So the proctor comes bopping along, opening doors to check whether all us miscreants, er, students were properly abed... all goes well til the hapless proctor opened MY door (my bed was right next to the door). I *was* asleep, but even so I came flying up out of the bed and ready for bear, and about gave the proctor a heart attack. Needless to say that was the end of bed checks for our wing of the dorm.:)
"Less severe forms may befall the swain who keeps his arm on his date's chair back for an entire double feature, ignoring the growing pain and paresis."
Well, that'll teach ya:)
Somewhat related, I've had to teach myself to never sleep with my arms stretched over my head (except for short naps) since after an hour or so my arms go to sleep. The curative event involved waking up with both arms dead to the shoulder, and have you ever tried to get up with a dead weight above the neck and no use of your arms? took major effort to get out of bed, and 15-20 minutes to regain use of my arms.
[Since unlike most folk I don't move in my sleep -- if I go to sleep with my thumb up my nose, that's exactly the position I'll awake in! -- it's easy enough to prevent... just don't lay down that way in the first place.]
I'm a very light sleeper, and typically quite aware of my surroundings even when asleep. True story:
I'm taking a nap. I start having a dream that a spider is builing a web attached to my nose. I wake up and find... it's TRUE! Some stupid spider had just got done running an anchor line from my nose to the ceiling.
I don't move in my sleep (I wake up to turn over). I guess the spider thought I was dead.:)
Sounds like you need to track the length of your sleep cycle, and make sure your sleep period is a multiple of that -- ie. make sure you're not being awakened during the middle of a deep sleep cycle (which WILL finish its normal run, even if you're nominally up and moving).
Frex, mine is about 2.5 hours. I can scrape by on two cycles, but I really need three. So I need to budget a dead minimum of 5 contiguous hours for sleep, but 7.5 hours is much better.
So long as I wake up at the end of a sleep cycle, I'm up and at'em immediately. But if I get woke up in the middle of the cycle, especially deep sleep, it takes me a while to get going. (REM sleep is much easier to come out of.)
Tho unlike most people, I'm not "stupid" when not properly awake (I can make reliably-correct responses to a middle-of-night emergency). But I'm also overall a very light sleeper and fairly aware of my surroundings.
I had that same thought. Several answers come to mind:
1) You don't want an AV/security product to be so easily uninstallable that any malware that comes along can do it. But that can be got around by requiring a password from the user. No need even to have the user make one up; print it on the box along with the unique product key.
2) More likely, the idea is that if it's too difficult to uninstall, ordinary users will wind up locked into it. Indeed, I've witnessed this thought process from users who would like to switch to a competing product, but don't dare because of the iffyness of removing the current product.
3) Shitty, incompetent, spaghetti programming, and the result of trying to be too many things to all users.
I inherited a W2K system with the evil Protected Recycle Bin... and have noticed that the "Empty Bin" functions are buggy as hell. Sometimes it works (tho typically it takes several tries, and thumping on two different "Empty bin" menu items), sometimes it doesn't. The rest of SystemWorks on this machine seems to keep its claws politely out of stuff, but I'd like to get rid of its recycle bin meddling.
I notice the price on Taiyo Yuiden seems to be about the same as for any other bulk media...
I understand NECs are rebadges but am not sure who makes them... sometimes the rebadges have better firmware than the mfgr's brand, sometimes the reverse.
I've had seriously good luck with my pack of LiteOn CDRWs (thousands of disks, marathon sessions, almost no coasters, no failed drives) and on that basis, and the $40 almost-disposable price, last month I got a LiteOn DVD writer. Hopefully it'll be a credit to its kinfolk.:)
It seems to me that ISPs are missing a revenue stream -- a geek on call who visits infected customers and cleans up their systems -- for a suitable fee, of course. The going rate seems to be around $100/hr for such work. Could be a nice partnership for an ISP and local clone shops.
TIME's so-called reporting has often been so bad that if they said the sky was overhead, I'd look up to make sure. But your comment reminded me of the old jape about comparative intelligence techniques:
Objective: obtain a sample of American sand.
The Soviets send a stealth submarine, which spits forth a scuba diver equipped with all the latest camoflage, who sneaks ashore in the dead of night.
[laughing] That's the new math. The old math goes like this: In the back room I've got a G4 500MHz that followed me home... most of its innards are standard PC-interchangeable parts (only the mobo and CPU are Apple-unique). I found the original invoice on the HD: $4000.
Now, over yonder I've got an equivalent PC (P3-500 -- it has more Toys, but their performance is almost identical) that's about a year older... and it cost me around $500.
And over on the workbench I've got a Compaq dual Xeon 750 of similar vintage... originally priced at $3000. We'll take off a grand for the Compaq brand name and see how it compares then. [g]
But that's really what a resident AV is about -- the convenience factor, for people who don't habitually think about their system's security, or who habitually run unsafe apps. And there are ways to automate one-off scans of files saved to disk -- Getright can do so, and I'm sure other FTP apps can manage the same thing.
Resident AV isn't necessarily a magic bullet, tho. Frex, twice I've seen McAfee (Corporate version no less) ALLOW the SubSeven trojan to install, THEN complain about it.
It all depends on where the level of desperation lies in a society. In the middle ages, and again during the Great Depression of less than a century ago, you had a small but finite chance of being killed for your boots. Not too likely at present in the civilized world, but in third world countries, there are still people in low enough straits to have no qualms about killing you for as little as your fingerprint.
Occurs to me that not only could biometric logins be captured by a program similar to a keystroke logger. Even without murder, this could put a whole new twist on home invasion robberies: a doodad that captures your thumbprint and sends it to your PC can also capture it and send it to a laptop. So a gang invades your living room, holds you at gunpoint, takes your thumbprint (and any relevant ID info), feeds it into their handy laptop, and goes their merry way.
Now what? You can change your passwords, credit card, and bank account, but changing your name is more difficult, and changing your thumbprint is in another league entirely.
[I can just see it: your thumbprints have been stolen, so you have to resort to a set from the Used Thumb Store...]
I've been saying (and doing) the same thing with my WinBoxen for nearly a decade, and have zero infections to show for it. A resident AV is necessary mainly for users who can't resist clicking that attachment, or who use IE/Outlook. If you use a firewall, Some Other Browser, and an email client that doesn't execute attachments no matter what the user clicks, 99% of such problems go away without the need of a resident AV.
But DO remember to manually AV-scan anything you save to disk (from an attachment or a download) prior to execution/viewing. For the truly paranoid, rescan programs both after installation AND after first execution (in case something malicious is extracted or downloaded by an installation package).
A while back someone did some actual tests of burn speed vs drive speed (it was posted hereabouts), and found that while burning at 4x is fine in a 4x burner, burning at 4x in a 52x burner leads to *decreased* disk reliability. IIRC the problem was that faster burners aren't designed to operate at antique speeds, and as a result make *more* errors than when running at full speed. This was using "all speed" media; results might differ when using older "slow" media.
That said.. I have 24x, 48x, and 52x burners; most of the time I use "all speed" media and burn at 24x in all of them, or rarely, at full speed (usually cuz stupid Nero sometimes loses the setting). The only time I've had a speed-related problem was when I forgot to downset burn speed for old 4x media, and ooops, that disk wasn't readable in anything!
You got a link into the site that bypasses their flash intro page? it won't play for me... and yes, I'm interested in archival-quality disks for my critical files and final backups. Thanks!
ALL Yamaha CDRWs I've been able to track (20 to date, three of them mine) have failed prematurely (4x at 2yrs, 6x-8x at 6-9 months) due to overheating which warps the laser out of alignment. One of the first consistent symptoms of impending drive failure proved to be that while the burned disk seemed okay at the time it was made, and worked fine for some weeks, a few months later it was unreadable. Anyway, point being that a poor burn due to a defective drive CAN fail over time.
Now I've got a Plextor and four LiteOns (and have had zero dead hardware from either, and almost no coasters); their oldest disks are now 5 years old and so far I've not seen any fail over time. Not that I check 'em all every day but so it's been in random use.
Not that I don't believe they can fail -- I assume any data I don't have on at least 3 HDs, half a dozen CDs, and two FTPs is not yet adequately backed up.:)
As to disk longevity, I'm inclined to trust what the LoC had to say about that -- essentially that only the "archival" (expensive) media is reliable for long term storage, and all the rest suck to varying degrees, usually failing within a couple years. (Can't find the loc.gov article offhand, but surely someone can search it up.)
I like the idea of a rejects bin, where masoch^H^H^H^H^H those so inclined could read everything that comes in. If a "submissions moderation" function is added, then maybe a reject that reaches +NN status could get kicked back to the editors for reconsideration.
It might even have comments (and moderation) in the usual way, much akin to slashdot journals... but like journals, it wouldn't be cluttering up the front page. Ideally this might sort by story type (hardware, M$, whatever) just as the regular stories do, so dumpster divers could be selective about their trash.:)
The conspiracy junkies could have their fun, the curious could learn what's NOT considered front page story material, those with marginal interests might find a home there, and the rest of us could ignore the whole thing.
And to avoid link whoring, you might strip all submitter-ID stuff and blog-type links before sending a story to the rejects pages.
Slashdot Mirror
Tho this is to some degree like training wheels: if you never drive without them, you can't learn how to handle a situation where the training wheels (safety features) have failed.
My vehicles have all predated the major safety features, so I learned to do without. I used to live in winter country, and I remember using the "understeer and skid" principle, among other tricks for staying on the road in bad conditions. But I don't by-habit apply such techniques outside of the correct situation -- rather, I'd apply 'em when the road felt like it needed it.
I'm a very light sleeper, and from experience I know I can be instantly ready for an emergency even in the middle of the night...
:)
When I was in college, we still had "bed checks" in the dorms. So the proctor comes bopping along, opening doors to check whether all us miscreants, er, students were properly abed... all goes well til the hapless proctor opened MY door (my bed was right next to the door). I *was* asleep, but even so I came flying up out of the bed and ready for bear, and about gave the proctor a heart attack. Needless to say that was the end of bed checks for our wing of the dorm.
The Megadeth dude links to an article, http://www.ncemi.org/cse/cse0919.htm which says in part:
:)
"Less severe forms may befall the swain who keeps his arm on his date's chair back for an entire double feature, ignoring the growing pain and paresis."
Well, that'll teach ya
Somewhat related, I've had to teach myself to never sleep with my arms stretched over my head (except for short naps) since after an hour or so my arms go to sleep. The curative event involved waking up with both arms dead to the shoulder, and have you ever tried to get up with a dead weight above the neck and no use of your arms? took major effort to get out of bed, and 15-20 minutes to regain use of my arms.
[Since unlike most folk I don't move in my sleep -- if I go to sleep with my thumb up my nose, that's exactly the position I'll awake in! -- it's easy enough to prevent... just don't lay down that way in the first place.]
I'm a very light sleeper, and typically quite aware of my surroundings even when asleep. True story:
:)
I'm taking a nap. I start having a dream that a spider is builing a web attached to my nose. I wake up and find... it's TRUE! Some stupid spider had just got done running an anchor line from my nose to the ceiling.
I don't move in my sleep (I wake up to turn over). I guess the spider thought I was dead.
Sounds like you need to track the length of your sleep cycle, and make sure your sleep period is a multiple of that -- ie. make sure you're not being awakened during the middle of a deep sleep cycle (which WILL finish its normal run, even if you're nominally up and moving).
Frex, mine is about 2.5 hours. I can scrape by on two cycles, but I really need three. So I need to budget a dead minimum of 5 contiguous hours for sleep, but 7.5 hours is much better.
So long as I wake up at the end of a sleep cycle, I'm up and at'em immediately. But if I get woke up in the middle of the cycle, especially deep sleep, it takes me a while to get going. (REM sleep is much easier to come out of.)
Tho unlike most people, I'm not "stupid" when not properly awake (I can make reliably-correct responses to a middle-of-night emergency). But I'm also overall a very light sleeper and fairly aware of my surroundings.
I've seen that road. Guess what... there ain't no pavement. It's a dirt road...!!
[laughing] Okay, how DO you make the DOS cursor into a flashing smiley face?
:)
That would be just too damn funny
I had that same thought. Several answers come to mind:
1) You don't want an AV/security product to be so easily uninstallable that any malware that comes along can do it. But that can be got around by requiring a password from the user. No need even to have the user make one up; print it on the box along with the unique product key.
2) More likely, the idea is that if it's too difficult to uninstall, ordinary users will wind up locked into it. Indeed, I've witnessed this thought process from users who would like to switch to a competing product, but don't dare because of the iffyness of removing the current product.
3) Shitty, incompetent, spaghetti programming, and the result of trying to be too many things to all users.
I inherited a W2K system with the evil Protected Recycle Bin... and have noticed that the "Empty Bin" functions are buggy as hell. Sometimes it works (tho typically it takes several tries, and thumping on two different "Empty bin" menu items), sometimes it doesn't. The rest of SystemWorks on this machine seems to keep its claws politely out of stuff, but I'd like to get rid of its recycle bin meddling.
I notice the price on Taiyo Yuiden seems to be about the same as for any other bulk media...
:)
I understand NECs are rebadges but am not sure who makes them... sometimes the rebadges have better firmware than the mfgr's brand, sometimes the reverse.
I've had seriously good luck with my pack of LiteOn CDRWs (thousands of disks, marathon sessions, almost no coasters, no failed drives) and on that basis, and the $40 almost-disposable price, last month I got a LiteOn DVD writer. Hopefully it'll be a credit to its kinfolk.
Nifty. Bonus points for you guys for customer service!
You forgot the sarcasm mark [g] Was a good point tho, regardless.
It seems to me that ISPs are missing a revenue stream -- a geek on call who visits infected customers and cleans up their systems -- for a suitable fee, of course. The going rate seems to be around $100/hr for such work. Could be a nice partnership for an ISP and local clone shops.
TIME's so-called reporting has often been so bad that if they said the sky was overhead, I'd look up to make sure. But your comment reminded me of the old jape about comparative intelligence techniques:
Objective: obtain a sample of American sand.
The Soviets send a stealth submarine, which spits forth a scuba diver equipped with all the latest camoflage, who sneaks ashore in the dead of night.
The Chinese send a million tourists to the beach.
[laughing] That's the new math. The old math goes like this: In the back room I've got a G4 500MHz that followed me home... most of its innards are standard PC-interchangeable parts (only the mobo and CPU are Apple-unique). I found the original invoice on the HD: $4000.
Now, over yonder I've got an equivalent PC (P3-500 -- it has more Toys, but their performance is almost identical) that's about a year older... and it cost me around $500.
And over on the workbench I've got a Compaq dual Xeon 750 of similar vintage... originally priced at $3000. We'll take off a grand for the Compaq brand name and see how it compares then. [g]
But that's really what a resident AV is about -- the convenience factor, for people who don't habitually think about their system's security, or who habitually run unsafe apps. And there are ways to automate one-off scans of files saved to disk -- Getright can do so, and I'm sure other FTP apps can manage the same thing.
Resident AV isn't necessarily a magic bullet, tho. Frex, twice I've seen McAfee (Corporate version no less) ALLOW the SubSeven trojan to install, THEN complain about it.
It all depends on where the level of desperation lies in a society. In the middle ages, and again during the Great Depression of less than a century ago, you had a small but finite chance of being killed for your boots. Not too likely at present in the civilized world, but in third world countries, there are still people in low enough straits to have no qualms about killing you for as little as your fingerprint.
Occurs to me that not only could biometric logins be captured by a program similar to a keystroke logger. Even without murder, this could put a whole new twist on home invasion robberies: a doodad that captures your thumbprint and sends it to your PC can also capture it and send it to a laptop. So a gang invades your living room, holds you at gunpoint, takes your thumbprint (and any relevant ID info), feeds it into their handy laptop, and goes their merry way.
Now what? You can change your passwords, credit card, and bank account, but changing your name is more difficult, and changing your thumbprint is in another league entirely.
[I can just see it: your thumbprints have been stolen, so you have to resort to a set from the Used Thumb Store...]
I've been saying (and doing) the same thing with my WinBoxen for nearly a decade, and have zero infections to show for it. A resident AV is necessary mainly for users who can't resist clicking that attachment, or who use IE/Outlook. If you use a firewall, Some Other Browser, and an email client that doesn't execute attachments no matter what the user clicks, 99% of such problems go away without the need of a resident AV.
But DO remember to manually AV-scan anything you save to disk (from an attachment or a download) prior to execution/viewing. For the truly paranoid, rescan programs both after installation AND after first execution (in case something malicious is extracted or downloaded by an installation package).
That one works for me, thanks!!
A while back someone did some actual tests of burn speed vs drive speed (it was posted hereabouts), and found that while burning at 4x is fine in a 4x burner, burning at 4x in a 52x burner leads to *decreased* disk reliability. IIRC the problem was that faster burners aren't designed to operate at antique speeds, and as a result make *more* errors than when running at full speed. This was using "all speed" media; results might differ when using older "slow" media.
That said.. I have 24x, 48x, and 52x burners; most of the time I use "all speed" media and burn at 24x in all of them, or rarely, at full speed (usually cuz stupid Nero sometimes loses the setting). The only time I've had a speed-related problem was when I forgot to downset burn speed for old 4x media, and ooops, that disk wasn't readable in anything!
Just curious, what brands (hardware and media) have you had good and bad results with? even if my milage varies, it's still good info to have :)
You got a link into the site that bypasses their flash intro page? it won't play for me... and yes, I'm interested in archival-quality disks for my critical files and final backups. Thanks!
ALL Yamaha CDRWs I've been able to track (20 to date, three of them mine) have failed prematurely (4x at 2yrs, 6x-8x at 6-9 months) due to overheating which warps the laser out of alignment. One of the first consistent symptoms of impending drive failure proved to be that while the burned disk seemed okay at the time it was made, and worked fine for some weeks, a few months later it was unreadable. Anyway, point being that a poor burn due to a defective drive CAN fail over time.
:)
Now I've got a Plextor and four LiteOns (and have had zero dead hardware from either, and almost no coasters); their oldest disks are now 5 years old and so far I've not seen any fail over time. Not that I check 'em all every day but so it's been in random use.
Not that I don't believe they can fail -- I assume any data I don't have on at least 3 HDs, half a dozen CDs, and two FTPs is not yet adequately backed up.
As to disk longevity, I'm inclined to trust what the LoC had to say about that -- essentially that only the "archival" (expensive) media is reliable for long term storage, and all the rest suck to varying degrees, usually failing within a couple years. (Can't find the loc.gov article offhand, but surely someone can search it up.)
The editor and story mix must work, or we wouldn't be here in such ravening hordes :)
Yeah, slashdot goes thru days or even weeks when I find little or nothing of interest. But give it a week or two and something will come along.
I'm reminded of Montana's unofficial motto: "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes, and it'll change."
I like the idea of a rejects bin, where masoch^H^H^H^H^H those so inclined could read everything that comes in. If a "submissions moderation" function is added, then maybe a reject that reaches +NN status could get kicked back to the editors for reconsideration.
:)
It might even have comments (and moderation) in the usual way, much akin to slashdot journals... but like journals, it wouldn't be cluttering up the front page. Ideally this might sort by story type (hardware, M$, whatever) just as the regular stories do, so dumpster divers could be selective about their trash.
The conspiracy junkies could have their fun, the curious could learn what's NOT considered front page story material, those with marginal interests might find a home there, and the rest of us could ignore the whole thing.
And to avoid link whoring, you might strip all submitter-ID stuff and blog-type links before sending a story to the rejects pages.