I haven't seen anyone in this thread mention SymForm http://www.symform.com/, which may well be an ideal solution for your situation. This is a fairly new startup operation founded by former Microsoft and Amazon engineers that manages a cooperative cloud backup platform. You'll need to do some reading of the whitepapers on their website to wrap your brain around the concept, but the gist of the idea is that you configure your spare storage device (like your Drobo box) to form a node that connects to the cooperative cloud, which is comprised of free disk space on the spare storage devices (SAN, NAS, external SATA drives, etc.) of the other members of the cloud. With 5,000-10,000 other nodes sharing exabytes of free disk space, there is plenty of capacity for all the members of the cooperative, and as the cloud is distributed worldwide, there is no single point of failure to worry about. The data is fragmented in such a way that it is distributed randomly across multiple nodes (in a system they call RAID-96) so that no single node in the network contains a complete copy of your data. You pay a flat monthly fee to join the cloud, and your data is encrypted by your node and backed up incrementally over your network connection. It may take a while to get your first full backup transmitted, but after that, the bandwidth is used only for deltas. It's kind of a brilliant idea that blew me away the first time I heard about it.
Did you even read that security policy? It covers both personal account passwords AND system passwords (e.g. Page 32, Paragraph 4.1 "root" "enable" "NT Admin" "Application Administrator Accounts"..."user-level passwords" AND "system-level passwords"). It is in many ways quite similar to the security policy I have to follow (and enforce) as a LAN admin across the Bay from San Francisco.
But I agree with you, Terry Childs is the victim here, and the whole case is crazy.
It is the public employee unions that keep the incompetent civil service managers--such as the ones who started this whole fiasco--in power. Terry Childs is a contractor, and thus is not represented by a union, and from what I observe of unions and their tactics, they are far more likely to commit criminal acts than he would ever be.
Public employee unions are driving cities, counties and states into bankruptcy with benefits packages and retirement plans that are so wildly out of proportion to anything offered in the private sector that it is not sustainable in our current economic crisis. Indeed, there are economists who claim labor unions are the primary cause of these problems. Before it filed for bankruptcy, General Motors was paying more money to their retired workforce than they paid to their active employees on the assembly lines. The City of Vallejo, California filed for bankruptcy in 2008 when a dozen of its senior police officers and fire chiefs all retired at once, and their benefits packages were so lucrative that the city treasurer regretfully informed the mayor that they could not pay the benefits and the salaries of current staff at the same time they paid their obligations to the retirees. The County of San Diego is in a similar predicament, and is trying to re-negotiate all their union contracts to avoid the same fate. For an even more egregious example, see what's happening with the newly-retired fire chief in Contra Costa County http://www.contracostatimes.com/opinion/ci_13030932.
Unions are not the answer, they are a huge part of the problem.
I'm not big fan of InfoWorld's webpage design, but I've been following this story since it broke (because it resonates with my own experience).
The easiest way is to just subscribe to the RSS feed of Paul Venizia's blog here: http://www.infoworld.com/blogs/paul-venezia. Click on the subscribe link and you'll get the whole story from a guy who has followed it more closely than anyone else, and with far greater detail than any other journalist. Paul knows his stuff, which is why he is probably the only one who's met with Childs who can speak with him as a peer (so of course, he'd be disqualified from any jury called for this case). Fortunately, all charges will probably be dropped before it ever gets that far.
Childs is not a security professional, but a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert, a much more exclusive technical club. Childs was highly paid for his work because it takes years of study and experience to earn that kind of certification (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Career_Certifications). As of June 2009, there were only 20,000 CCIE holders in the entire world, and they are in great demand. According to Global Knowledge, I could pass the CISSP test in two weeks if I take their boot camp training, which costs a fraction of the tuition for the Cisco classes that Childs had to take.
Want to bet that the newly-promoted San Francisco "IT Security Officer" who caused this whole fiasco probably doesn't hold a single certification? I know the one in my department isn't certified, and he got the job only because he was friends with the ISO who took early retirement due to a Departmental re-organization.
I would hire him in a heartbeat. This is exactly the kind of person I would want designing and securing my network. I'm a DBA, and we're all over the place. You can't spit ten feet on the sidewalk without hitting one without even trying. Terry Childs is a CCIE, a very exclusive certification (there are only 20,000 holders of the CCIE certification worldwide). If only there were more CCIE holders in the job market, I'd try to hire at least three of them, just in case one get's "hit by a bus." Most organizations are lucky to be able to afford even one.
Childs went above and beyond the call of duty to protect a network he was well-paid to administer. And he performed that job admirably. For what the City and County of San Francisco has done to him and his reputation, he deserves a generous legal settlement when (not if) all charges are dropped and he is released.
When I hosted a conference a couple of years ago, I opened a merchant account at my bank to help me handle credit card transactions for the registration fees. That's when I found out how much Visa, Mastercard, Discover and AMEX charge their real customers (merchants). It's just the cost of doing business, and the more transactions you have, the less it costs. But that didn't help me process payments over my website, so I ended up using both PayPal and Click and Pledge http://www.clickandpledge.com/, which was a perfect solution. Most of the people registering for the conference preferred using their own credit cards, and I only had two people use PayPal. While I didn't have any serious problems with PayPal, I was very impressed by Click and Pledge. Their fees were reasonable, their online technical assistance made implementing a payment button/link a snap, and they were extremely prompt in forwarding payment to me every month I used it (and they didn't charge me a dime after the conference was over and I wasn't taking any additional transactions). I closed the Merchant Account at the bank as soon as possible after the conference, because they were going to continue to charge me fees even when I had no more transactions to process.
Like PayPal, Mastercard and Visa are still just transaction brokers (very lucrative business, by the way), but late last year, American Express became a bank almost overnight. Ever since Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), otherwise known as the Great Bank Bailout of 2008, any institution that wanted a chunk of bailout money had to be a bank (or an insurance company, like AIG, that insured banks and their worthless securities). In November 2008, after the government started handing out billions of federal reserve notes to failing institutions that were "too big to fail," American Express filed all the forms necessary to re-organize itself as a bank, and then recieved $3.4 billion (see http://bailout.propublica.org/entities/15-american-express). Fortunately, they just re-paid the entire loan--with interest--back to the U.S. Treasury Department, but they are now a bank, and will probably continue to be one as long as it benefits them.
Sorry to disagree with you, but I would have no problem at all living in a world where OS/2 was the rival OS to Apple and Amiga. OS/2 Warp 3.0 was my first deeply personal experience with x86 computers, the platform I installed on my first home-brewed 486-class PC that ran a BBS out of my home (well, second, if you count the years I used an Atari ST). It was a great system and gave me the tools I needed to find a job in the tech industry. I still have (and frequently wear) my old Team OS/2 tee shirt.
Technet gives you the ability to download all of Microsoft's products, even old releases of Windows 3.1 and DOS 6 and earlier. Good for testing things in virtual environments. You also get two free Technical Support Incident calls with your subscription (which would normally cost >$200 each). But note that none of the Technet downloads are licensed for production use, so you can't run your business on them, or sell them to anyone else. You would need the Action Pack for that, which costs more, but allows you to support the products and install them as a re-seller. You also have to really, really learn just about everything about the whole range of products to provide a competent level of support to your small business customers. Action Pack subscribers who don't know what they're doing are wasting their money and the money their downstream customers pay them. They won't have those customers for very long.
I got my initial TechNet subscription through a User Group discount for the renewal price of $249, and now I pay $249 annually to continue the subscription. Yes, I consider it a bargain, but it also allows me to keep my skills up to date. Don't forget about the online training portal that you get with TechNet, another little bonus that is rarely discussed. MS Training can be really expensive, but the self-paced modules available through TechNet are a great investment.
At least until the RC install starts re-booting every 2 hours begining in March 2010. If you can live with that little problem, it should continue to work fine until June 2010. Or you can just re-set your system date in the BIOS to stay at 2009 for a while, if that doesn't screw up some of your applicationss (if you're using it primarily as a gaming box, then that shouldn't be a problem).
But I expect some clever coder will figure out a way to hack around this timebomb by then.
I had some initial problems with the first Longhorn beta and the Vista CTP (both obtained from my good friend who works at MS). One system had frequent BSOD problems while the other did not. Eventually, NVidia managed to provide working Vista drivers, and afterward, the BSOD problem was resolved and has never returned. Both systems are now running on Vista SP2 and doing quite well.
The Windows 7 Beta and now the RC (Build 7100) have both run completely stable on all four systems I've installed. Never had any BSOD problems, and the OS never hung up on me once(though some applications, notably Quicken, have had some issues running under Win7). I'm a TechNet subscriber, so I'll be putting the RTM on all these next month when the final code is available to download. Of course, I'll still dual-boot with Ubuntu.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the markets are completely rational. Now, this is not to imply that the markets are at all predictable. That's where risk comes into play. The "irrational exhuberance" of recent years has been severely punished and the market is just correcting itself. You may not like what it's doing, or how the government is responding, but it is doing exactly what Hayek and Friedman and Krugman and decades of economic models all predicted it should do.
I believe you're thinking of the original pilot episode "Where is Everybody?" written by Rod Serling that helped sell the series concpet to CBS. Astronaut (played by Earl Holliman) flips out after 484 days of an isolation experiment.
"Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is the sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars, waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting... in The Twilight Zone." -- Serling's final narration at the end of the episode.
Tell your IT foiks that IE8 has a "compatibility mode" tab that launches the IE6 rendering engine in an isolated/sandboxed tab, so that any web page coded for IE6 can be displayed in IE8 if you can train your users to click on the Compabitility tab. I think it is rather like the IETab extension you can install in Firefox, which will open a Firefox tab using the IE6 engine. I use it to play NetFlix "Watch Now" videos in Firefox, which normally only play in IE.
Many businesses still run Win2K, but Microsoft no longer supports it. End of life for that product was announced three years ago. It may be "stable, well-known & well-documented" but Microsoft does not support it any longer and does not issue any new security updates for it. If you still run Win2K Server, you'd better be using it for a honeypot, because it's probably already compromised and part of a botnet.
This is the case in my office, where IE6 is the approved standard, and no one is allowed to use FireFox or Opera or Chrome unless they can submit a written justification to the IT standards committee and obtain their approval. That is rare.
This is mainly because we use several different web-based applications developed in-house for submitting travel claims and interfacing with our purchasing department's back-end databases, all built years ago on non-standards-compliant IE6 code. The team of contractors who developed these apps are long gone, and updating them would require finding a new contractor and paying them to re-build all the apps from scratch, a difficult sell to management in today's economy. It ain't broke, they say, so why fix it?
As is becoming more common with foreclosure cases these days, a homeowner can fight the action if they can have the bank prove that they hold the note and all the paperwork on the property. In many, many cases, the bank may well have bundled the mortgage into a security with dozens or even hundreds of other mortgages and sold it to another entity. That entity may well have sold it in a different bundled security to another bank and so on and on and on. I do recall reading about a case in, yes, Florida, where a homeowner has actually forced the bank to re-negotiate her mortgage because they have not been able to prove that they hold her mortgage! They sold it off years ago in such a deal, but now cannot trace the labyrinth of transactions to find the original promissory note, because it has been sold and re-sold multiple times since then.
I have another horror story about Wells Fargo. I serve as treasurer for a non-profit organization which leased a high-speed multifunction copier/printer/scanner/fax machine in 2001 to print our newsletter. The lease was for five years and administered through Wells Fargo Financial Leasing. At the end of the five years, after paying thousands of dollars in lease payments at $300/month, they told us that to close the lease, we could either purchase the machine outright for $360, or pay $500 to have it shipped to a recycling/salvage facility in Texarkana, Arkansas. The non-profit, of course, decided to pay the $360 and contract with a local printer company to service the machine, which still worked well, even though it was no longer under warranty.
Everything seemed fine until Wells Fargo started sending us bills about six months later. Since the lease had ended and the non-profit owned the machine, I ignored the bills and just threw them away. Then I got a call from Wells Fargo demanding another paymnet of $249, saying the account was never closed and the $249 represented accrued interest. I faxed Wells Fargo all the paperwork and copies of the cancelled checks to prove that the lease had ended and that we owned the machine outright. I even used the very same multifunction machine in question to fax the paperwork back to them.
Wells Fargo insisted that the money was still owed, and continued to send invoices and made threatening phone calls. They finally turned it over to a collection agency, which made more threatening phone calls. Not wishing to harm our credit standing, I asked the board of the non-profit for authorization to pay the bogus bill and they agreed just so we could close the matter.
Then, six months later, we received a refund check from Wells Fargo for $95. Wells Fargo apparently figured out they over-charged us for some reason, but there was no explanation for the refund check nor any detailed accounting of what was being refunded or why. It was just an envelope with a check enclosed.
The board of the non-profit has now passed a resolution that we will never do any business with Wells Fargo ever again, nor will we maintain a bank account with Bank of America or any other bank that accepted TARP funds. My current task as treasurer is to move all our money out of BofA (which has been our bank since the organization was founded in 1974) and into a different bank that has not taken any taxpayer bailout money. Believe it or not, there still are a few around (e.g., Union Bank, USBank, Mechanics Bank and Pacific National Bank are four that we are considering).
That's what Enterprise Agreements are supposed to address. If you have a Microsoft Enterprise License or Software Assurance for your OS and applications, you pay a lot less than you would if you purchased individual or OEM licenses to upgrade these components. Hardware is another matter, of course, but we replace that as our warranties expire, and all our current desktops are Vista Ready (even though we're running XP Pro). Transitioning from XP to Vista isn't all that hard, and most of my users have Vista on their home computers now, so they wouldn't have any problem at all. Office 2007 does pose some training issues, and there is some significant costs there, but nothing on the order of what Manchester paid to clean up Conficker.
Believe me, I've butted heads with management over these issues since Vista came out, and they're very reluctant to upgrade, despite all the advantages offered by the new releases. I'm also conducting a proof of concept test to persuade them to let us install a Linux enterprise application server on our VMWare cluster to save money on a major application that has a rock solid Open Source alternative, and I'm going to be bruised and bloody by the time it's over, but my IT philosophy has always been pretty agnostic when it comes to the underlying OS. The right tool for the right job, and if the best tool is free, I'm going to push for that. Times are tough, and we have to be careful with every penny we spend on IT resources.
This is a good point that I hoped someone would make. What is not explained in the article is that "Windows" isn't exactly the cause of the problem, but "Windows XP." If systems were maintained and upgraded per Microsoft's recommendations, Conficker would not have been anywhere near as big a problem. Say what you will about Windows Vista, if Manchester had upgraded their systems to Vista on the client side (or at the very least, not allowed users to run XP under Admin credentials), Conficker would never have been able to install itself.
I'm a big promoter of Open Source, but I work in a Microsoft shop where we still have all our desktops standardized on WindowsXP, but we never allow standard users to run as Admin, and we never had any problem with Conficker.
Migrating to Open Source would help a lot, but Manchester just needs better IT support (or more likely, better IT management) all the way around.
Apologies for a double-post, but my earlier reply was to an Anonymous Coward, who probably will not see this messages.
Your statement is not true at all. A newspaper has an obligation to know who is contributing its content, even on the editorial page. Every Letter to the Editor I have had published was preceded by a phone call from the newspaper confirming that I was the author. At least in the four or five local papers in my area (San Francisco), the editorial pages are quite clear that this is their policy. They do not publish anonymous letters or letters ghost-written by someone under a false name. They clearly indicate that you must include your full (real) name and a phone number where you can be reached for confirmation. If you send in an LTE and they don't call you, it probably means they don't intend to publish your letter; if they do call you, then you can be pretty sure they're going to publish the letter (but they sometimes apologize for editing it down to meet space limitations). A good letter will fall within their standard lengths (no more than 300-500 words) so if you can say what you want to say in that space, they are more likely to publish it. If your letter exceeds the standard length, but they feel they want to publish it in full, they may call you and ask if they can publish the letter as an editorial opinion column, rather than an LTE. I've been happy to oblige them, and even added more text to fill a column requirement (usually a paragraph I earlier edited out for length).
Not true at all. Every Letter to the Editor I have had published was preceded by a phone call from the newspaper confirming that I was the author. At least in the four or five local papers in my area (San Francisco), the editorial pages are quite clear that this is their policy. They do not publish anonymous letters or letters ghost-written by someone under a false name. They clearly indicate that you must include your full (real) name and a phone number where you can be reached for confirmation. If you send in an LTE and they don't call you, it probably means they don't intend to publish your letter; if they do call you, then you can be pretty sure they're going to publish the letter (but they sometimes apologize for editing it down to meet space limitations). A good letter will fall within their standard lengths (no more than 300-500 words) so if you can say what you want to say in that space, they are more likely to publish it. If your letter exceeds the standard length, but they feel they want to publish it in full, they may call you and ask if they can publish the letter as an editorial opinion column, rather than an LTE. I've been happy to oblige them, and even added more text to fill a column requirement (usually a paragraph I earlier edited out for length).
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't seen anyone in this thread mention SymForm http://www.symform.com/, which may well be an ideal solution for your situation. This is a fairly new startup operation founded by former Microsoft and Amazon engineers that manages a cooperative cloud backup platform. You'll need to do some reading of the whitepapers on their website to wrap your brain around the concept, but the gist of the idea is that you configure your spare storage device (like your Drobo box) to form a node that connects to the cooperative cloud, which is comprised of free disk space on the spare storage devices (SAN, NAS, external SATA drives, etc.) of the other members of the cloud. With 5,000-10,000 other nodes sharing exabytes of free disk space, there is plenty of capacity for all the members of the cooperative, and as the cloud is distributed worldwide, there is no single point of failure to worry about. The data is fragmented in such a way that it is distributed randomly across multiple nodes (in a system they call RAID-96) so that no single node in the network contains a complete copy of your data. You pay a flat monthly fee to join the cloud, and your data is encrypted by your node and backed up incrementally over your network connection. It may take a while to get your first full backup transmitted, but after that, the bandwidth is used only for deltas. It's kind of a brilliant idea that blew me away the first time I heard about it.
How do you know he is not a member of any of these categories?
Did you even read that security policy? It covers both personal account passwords AND system passwords (e.g. Page 32, Paragraph 4.1 "root" "enable" "NT Admin" "Application Administrator Accounts" ..."user-level passwords" AND "system-level passwords"). It is in many ways quite similar to the security policy I have to follow (and enforce) as a LAN admin across the Bay from San Francisco.
But I agree with you, Terry Childs is the victim here, and the whole case is crazy.
It is the public employee unions that keep the incompetent civil service managers--such as the ones who started this whole fiasco--in power. Terry Childs is a contractor, and thus is not represented by a union, and from what I observe of unions and their tactics, they are far more likely to commit criminal acts than he would ever be.
Public employee unions are driving cities, counties and states into bankruptcy with benefits packages and retirement plans that are so wildly out of proportion to anything offered in the private sector that it is not sustainable in our current economic crisis. Indeed, there are economists who claim labor unions are the primary cause of these problems. Before it filed for bankruptcy, General Motors was paying more money to their retired workforce than they paid to their active employees on the assembly lines. The City of Vallejo, California filed for bankruptcy in 2008 when a dozen of its senior police officers and fire chiefs all retired at once, and their benefits packages were so lucrative that the city treasurer regretfully informed the mayor that they could not pay the benefits and the salaries of current staff at the same time they paid their obligations to the retirees. The County of San Diego is in a similar predicament, and is trying to re-negotiate all their union contracts to avoid the same fate. For an even more egregious example, see what's happening with the newly-retired fire chief in Contra Costa County http://www.contracostatimes.com/opinion/ci_13030932.
Unions are not the answer, they are a huge part of the problem.
I'm not big fan of InfoWorld's webpage design, but I've been following this story since it broke (because it resonates with my own experience).
The easiest way is to just subscribe to the RSS feed of Paul Venizia's blog here: http://www.infoworld.com/blogs/paul-venezia. Click on the subscribe link and you'll get the whole story from a guy who has followed it more closely than anyone else, and with far greater detail than any other journalist. Paul knows his stuff, which is why he is probably the only one who's met with Childs who can speak with him as a peer (so of course, he'd be disqualified from any jury called for this case). Fortunately, all charges will probably be dropped before it ever gets that far.
Next, switch CISSP with CCIE.
Childs is not a security professional, but a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert, a much more exclusive technical club. Childs was highly paid for his work because it takes years of study and experience to earn that kind of certification (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Career_Certifications). As of June 2009, there were only 20,000 CCIE holders in the entire world, and they are in great demand. According to Global Knowledge, I could pass the CISSP test in two weeks if I take their boot camp training, which costs a fraction of the tuition for the Cisco classes that Childs had to take.
Want to bet that the newly-promoted San Francisco "IT Security Officer" who caused this whole fiasco probably doesn't hold a single certification? I know the one in my department isn't certified, and he got the job only because he was friends with the ISO who took early retirement due to a Departmental re-organization.
I would hire him in a heartbeat. This is exactly the kind of person I would want designing and securing my network. I'm a DBA, and we're all over the place. You can't spit ten feet on the sidewalk without hitting one without even trying. Terry Childs is a CCIE, a very exclusive certification (there are only 20,000 holders of the CCIE certification worldwide). If only there were more CCIE holders in the job market, I'd try to hire at least three of them, just in case one get's "hit by a bus." Most organizations are lucky to be able to afford even one.
Childs went above and beyond the call of duty to protect a network he was well-paid to administer. And he performed that job admirably. For what the City and County of San Francisco has done to him and his reputation, he deserves a generous legal settlement when (not if) all charges are dropped and he is released.
When I hosted a conference a couple of years ago, I opened a merchant account at my bank to help me handle credit card transactions for the registration fees. That's when I found out how much Visa, Mastercard, Discover and AMEX charge their real customers (merchants). It's just the cost of doing business, and the more transactions you have, the less it costs. But that didn't help me process payments over my website, so I ended up using both PayPal and Click and Pledge http://www.clickandpledge.com/, which was a perfect solution. Most of the people registering for the conference preferred using their own credit cards, and I only had two people use PayPal. While I didn't have any serious problems with PayPal, I was very impressed by Click and Pledge. Their fees were reasonable, their online technical assistance made implementing a payment button/link a snap, and they were extremely prompt in forwarding payment to me every month I used it (and they didn't charge me a dime after the conference was over and I wasn't taking any additional transactions). I closed the Merchant Account at the bank as soon as possible after the conference, because they were going to continue to charge me fees even when I had no more transactions to process.
Like PayPal, Mastercard and Visa are still just transaction brokers (very lucrative business, by the way), but late last year, American Express became a bank almost overnight. Ever since Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), otherwise known as the Great Bank Bailout of 2008, any institution that wanted a chunk of bailout money had to be a bank (or an insurance company, like AIG, that insured banks and their worthless securities). In November 2008, after the government started handing out billions of federal reserve notes to failing institutions that were "too big to fail," American Express filed all the forms necessary to re-organize itself as a bank, and then recieved $3.4 billion (see http://bailout.propublica.org/entities/15-american-express). Fortunately, they just re-paid the entire loan--with interest--back to the U.S. Treasury Department, but they are now a bank, and will probably continue to be one as long as it benefits them.
Sorry to disagree with you, but I would have no problem at all living in a world where OS/2 was the rival OS to Apple and Amiga. OS/2 Warp 3.0 was my first deeply personal experience with x86 computers, the platform I installed on my first home-brewed 486-class PC that ran a BBS out of my home (well, second, if you count the years I used an Atari ST). It was a great system and gave me the tools I needed to find a job in the tech industry. I still have (and frequently wear) my old Team OS/2 tee shirt.
That's awesome! I'm jealous. Your office makes my clone-like cubicle seem really mass-produced and depressing. Which it is. Every fucking day.
Technet gives you the ability to download all of Microsoft's products, even old releases of Windows 3.1 and DOS 6 and earlier. Good for testing things in virtual environments. You also get two free Technical Support Incident calls with your subscription (which would normally cost >$200 each). But note that none of the Technet downloads are licensed for production use, so you can't run your business on them, or sell them to anyone else. You would need the Action Pack for that, which costs more, but allows you to support the products and install them as a re-seller. You also have to really, really learn just about everything about the whole range of products to provide a competent level of support to your small business customers. Action Pack subscribers who don't know what they're doing are wasting their money and the money their downstream customers pay them. They won't have those customers for very long.
I got my initial TechNet subscription through a User Group discount for the renewal price of $249, and now I pay $249 annually to continue the subscription. Yes, I consider it a bargain, but it also allows me to keep my skills up to date. Don't forget about the online training portal that you get with TechNet, another little bonus that is rarely discussed. MS Training can be really expensive, but the self-paced modules available through TechNet are a great investment.
At least until the RC install starts re-booting every 2 hours begining in March 2010. If you can live with that little problem, it should continue to work fine until June 2010. Or you can just re-set your system date in the BIOS to stay at 2009 for a while, if that doesn't screw up some of your applicationss (if you're using it primarily as a gaming box, then that shouldn't be a problem).
But I expect some clever coder will figure out a way to hack around this timebomb by then.
I had some initial problems with the first Longhorn beta and the Vista CTP (both obtained from my good friend who works at MS). One system had frequent BSOD problems while the other did not. Eventually, NVidia managed to provide working Vista drivers, and afterward, the BSOD problem was resolved and has never returned. Both systems are now running on Vista SP2 and doing quite well.
The Windows 7 Beta and now the RC (Build 7100) have both run completely stable on all four systems I've installed. Never had any BSOD problems, and the OS never hung up on me once(though some applications, notably Quicken, have had some issues running under Win7). I'm a TechNet subscriber, so I'll be putting the RTM on all these next month when the final code is available to download. Of course, I'll still dual-boot with Ubuntu.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the markets are completely rational. Now, this is not to imply that the markets are at all predictable. That's where risk comes into play. The "irrational exhuberance" of recent years has been severely punished and the market is just correcting itself. You may not like what it's doing, or how the government is responding, but it is doing exactly what Hayek and Friedman and Krugman and decades of economic models all predicted it should do.
I believe you're thinking of the original pilot episode "Where is Everybody?" written by Rod Serling that helped sell the series concpet to CBS. Astronaut (played by Earl Holliman) flips out after 484 days of an isolation experiment.
"Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is the sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars, waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting... in The Twilight Zone."
-- Serling's final narration at the end of the episode.
Tell your IT foiks that IE8 has a "compatibility mode" tab that launches the IE6 rendering engine in an isolated/sandboxed tab, so that any web page coded for IE6 can be displayed in IE8 if you can train your users to click on the Compabitility tab. I think it is rather like the IETab extension you can install in Firefox, which will open a Firefox tab using the IE6 engine. I use it to play NetFlix "Watch Now" videos in Firefox, which normally only play in IE.
Many businesses still run Win2K, but Microsoft no longer supports it. End of life for that product was announced three years ago. It may be "stable, well-known & well-documented" but Microsoft does not support it any longer and does not issue any new security updates for it. If you still run Win2K Server, you'd better be using it for a honeypot, because it's probably already compromised and part of a botnet.
This is the case in my office, where IE6 is the approved standard, and no one is allowed to use FireFox or Opera or Chrome unless they can submit a written justification to the IT standards committee and obtain their approval. That is rare.
This is mainly because we use several different web-based applications developed in-house for submitting travel claims and interfacing with our purchasing department's back-end databases, all built years ago on non-standards-compliant IE6 code. The team of contractors who developed these apps are long gone, and updating them would require finding a new contractor and paying them to re-build all the apps from scratch, a difficult sell to management in today's economy. It ain't broke, they say, so why fix it?
As is becoming more common with foreclosure cases these days, a homeowner can fight the action if they can have the bank prove that they hold the note and all the paperwork on the property. In many, many cases, the bank may well have bundled the mortgage into a security with dozens or even hundreds of other mortgages and sold it to another entity. That entity may well have sold it in a different bundled security to another bank and so on and on and on. I do recall reading about a case in, yes, Florida, where a homeowner has actually forced the bank to re-negotiate her mortgage because they have not been able to prove that they hold her mortgage! They sold it off years ago in such a deal, but now cannot trace the labyrinth of transactions to find the original promissory note, because it has been sold and re-sold multiple times since then.
I have another horror story about Wells Fargo. I serve as treasurer for a non-profit organization which leased a high-speed multifunction copier/printer/scanner/fax machine in 2001 to print our newsletter. The lease was for five years and administered through Wells Fargo Financial Leasing. At the end of the five years, after paying thousands of dollars in lease payments at $300/month, they told us that to close the lease, we could either purchase the machine outright for $360, or pay $500 to have it shipped to a recycling/salvage facility in Texarkana, Arkansas. The non-profit, of course, decided to pay the $360 and contract with a local printer company to service the machine, which still worked well, even though it was no longer under warranty.
Everything seemed fine until Wells Fargo started sending us bills about six months later. Since the lease had ended and the non-profit owned the machine, I ignored the bills and just threw them away. Then I got a call from Wells Fargo demanding another paymnet of $249, saying the account was never closed and the $249 represented accrued interest. I faxed Wells Fargo all the paperwork and copies of the cancelled checks to prove that the lease had ended and that we owned the machine outright. I even used the very same multifunction machine in question to fax the paperwork back to them.
Wells Fargo insisted that the money was still owed, and continued to send invoices and made threatening phone calls. They finally turned it over to a collection agency, which made more threatening phone calls. Not wishing to harm our credit standing, I asked the board of the non-profit for authorization to pay the bogus bill and they agreed just so we could close the matter.
Then, six months later, we received a refund check from Wells Fargo for $95. Wells Fargo apparently figured out they over-charged us for some reason, but there was no explanation for the refund check nor any detailed accounting of what was being refunded or why. It was just an envelope with a check enclosed.
The board of the non-profit has now passed a resolution that we will never do any business with Wells Fargo ever again, nor will we maintain a bank account with Bank of America or any other bank that accepted TARP funds. My current task as treasurer is to move all our money out of BofA (which has been our bank since the organization was founded in 1974) and into a different bank that has not taken any taxpayer bailout money. Believe it or not, there still are a few around (e.g., Union Bank, USBank, Mechanics Bank and Pacific National Bank are four that we are considering).
That's what Enterprise Agreements are supposed to address. If you have a Microsoft Enterprise License or Software Assurance for your OS and applications, you pay a lot less than you would if you purchased individual or OEM licenses to upgrade these components. Hardware is another matter, of course, but we replace that as our warranties expire, and all our current desktops are Vista Ready (even though we're running XP Pro). Transitioning from XP to Vista isn't all that hard, and most of my users have Vista on their home computers now, so they wouldn't have any problem at all. Office 2007 does pose some training issues, and there is some significant costs there, but nothing on the order of what Manchester paid to clean up Conficker.
Believe me, I've butted heads with management over these issues since Vista came out, and they're very reluctant to upgrade, despite all the advantages offered by the new releases. I'm also conducting a proof of concept test to persuade them to let us install a Linux enterprise application server on our VMWare cluster to save money on a major application that has a rock solid Open Source alternative, and I'm going to be bruised and bloody by the time it's over, but my IT philosophy has always been pretty agnostic when it comes to the underlying OS. The right tool for the right job, and if the best tool is free, I'm going to push for that. Times are tough, and we have to be careful with every penny we spend on IT resources.
This is a good point that I hoped someone would make. What is not explained in the article is that "Windows" isn't exactly the cause of the problem, but "Windows XP." If systems were maintained and upgraded per Microsoft's recommendations, Conficker would not have been anywhere near as big a problem. Say what you will about Windows Vista, if Manchester had upgraded their systems to Vista on the client side (or at the very least, not allowed users to run XP under Admin credentials), Conficker would never have been able to install itself.
I'm a big promoter of Open Source, but I work in a Microsoft shop where we still have all our desktops standardized on WindowsXP, but we never allow standard users to run as Admin, and we never had any problem with Conficker.
Migrating to Open Source would help a lot, but Manchester just needs better IT support (or more likely, better IT management) all the way around.
Apologies for a double-post, but my earlier reply was to an Anonymous Coward, who probably will not see this messages.
Your statement is not true at all. A newspaper has an obligation to know who is contributing its content, even on the editorial page. Every Letter to the Editor I have had published was preceded by a phone call from the newspaper confirming that I was the author. At least in the four or five local papers in my area (San Francisco), the editorial pages are quite clear that this is their policy. They do not publish anonymous letters or letters ghost-written by someone under a false name. They clearly indicate that you must include your full (real) name and a phone number where you can be reached for confirmation. If you send in an LTE and they don't call you, it probably means they don't intend to publish your letter; if they do call you, then you can be pretty sure they're going to publish the letter (but they sometimes apologize for editing it down to meet space limitations). A good letter will fall within their standard lengths (no more than 300-500 words) so if you can say what you want to say in that space, they are more likely to publish it. If your letter exceeds the standard length, but they feel they want to publish it in full, they may call you and ask if they can publish the letter as an editorial opinion column, rather than an LTE. I've been happy to oblige them, and even added more text to fill a column requirement (usually a paragraph I earlier edited out for length).
Not true at all. Every Letter to the Editor I have had published was preceded by a phone call from the newspaper confirming that I was the author. At least in the four or five local papers in my area (San Francisco), the editorial pages are quite clear that this is their policy. They do not publish anonymous letters or letters ghost-written by someone under a false name. They clearly indicate that you must include your full (real) name and a phone number where you can be reached for confirmation. If you send in an LTE and they don't call you, it probably means they don't intend to publish your letter; if they do call you, then you can be pretty sure they're going to publish the letter (but they sometimes apologize for editing it down to meet space limitations). A good letter will fall within their standard lengths (no more than 300-500 words) so if you can say what you want to say in that space, they are more likely to publish it. If your letter exceeds the standard length, but they feel they want to publish it in full, they may call you and ask if they can publish the letter as an editorial opinion column, rather than an LTE. I've been happy to oblige them, and even added more text to fill a column requirement (usually a paragraph I earlier edited out for length).