Every time, this happens; things move away from the client for "performance" and "flexibility" and "scalability" reasons and then everyone realises it's a pain because of the lack of control or reliability and by that point the client hardware's moved on to the point where it can do the job better anyway so everyone moves back to it.
An extradition treaty doesn't give you permission to grab people off the streets without formal approval of the government in question (and some actual evidence; unless it's with the UK in which case the evidence part is optional).
Sophos AV's heuristics scanning (HIPS) goes mental when you try and install Shockwave; it gets flagged as suspicious behaviour and a buffer overrun risk (Incidentally, Adobe Reader is the same).
It will supposedly mandate 3-strike disconnection laws in all signatory countries without any reasonable standard of evidence because any ISP who *fails* to disconnect you will become legally liable for anything you may have done.
The whole point is that there are precious few details about any of ACTA because nobody outside of the governments involved, their lawyers and a few high-paying lobby groups have been allowed to see any of its contents.
*Everything* about it is hearsay until either someone succeeds in getting an FOI request honoured or the thing gets ratified and it's too late to do anything about it.
Chrome would be my browser of choice were it not for the lack of Adblock, Noscript & IETab; I suspect a lot of other techies feel the same way, which is why Chrome has stayed with such a modest share despite early interest in it.
I can't speak for Safari as every time I've tried to use it (On Windows) I've ended up hating it.
As others have stated, Sysprep does more than just changing the SID (In fact you can tell Sysprep not to regenerate the SID if you want to). Just because duplicate SIDs aren't an issue doesn't mean that you won't have problems if you fail to Sysprep machines before deployment.
First plugin I install for SeaMonkey: Home button, toggles for colours, fonts, images, JavaScript, Java, Flash, pop-ups; drop downs for Proxy settings, User Agent, window size - couldn't live without it.
I've been running the Betas & RCs of SM 2.0 for the last couple of months on Windows 7 x64, Ubuntu 9.04 & Windows XP SP3, and while I got regular crashes on closing the browser if I'd been using Flash (Seems to be fixed in the final so far) I didn't have any non-Flash related crashes.
I don't know why Timothy felt the need to make the comment other than to put a negative spin on the release;
It wasn't railing against encryption, it was pointing out that both the police & the intelligence services have voiced their disapproval over the "Three Strikes" idea because it's likely to increase the use of encryption and therefore make their lives more difficult. i.e. It's not just a load of pirates that Mandy's ignored on this one.
For example: "I haven't had any problems at all with SSDs" is a completely worthless statement for anyone reading this discussion unless I include some context; which drive(s), what kind of usage, what OSs, how long have I been running them, etc.
As has already been pointed out, all the drives that the OP was referring to used the crappy JMicron controller that's been largely slated in all reviews for its poor performance and iffy wear-levelling - especially with older firmwares. This makes the information worthless to me because I have an Intel X25-M G2 drive which has a different controller altogether.
Defragging SSDs is not only mostly a waste of time (Seek time is the same regardless of where the data is physically on the drive so unless you're dealing with heavy fragmentation of large files it won't have any effect), but it reduces the lifespan by needlessly reading and re-writing data all over the place; there's a good reason Windows 7 automatically disables defragmentation for SSDs.
For the time being, however, you're stuck using the Microsoft Storage Controller drivers if you want TRIM support because Intel's don't support it (yet - they're supposed to have new drivers out "soon" that will).
It amazes me that people put up with that level of interest on student loans in the US. In the UK, my student loan is currently at 0% interest (Due to the current base interest rates) and it was only at 3.5% the last couple of years with base rates of ~5%. If you were lucky enough to take out a loan before 1998, then you're currently paying -0.4% because the interest is linked to the Retail Prices Index (RPI) and we're currently experiencing slight deflation by that measure.
Seriously, you'd upgrade 10s/100s/1000s of desktops from XP to 7 if you could rather than do a clean OS image? Are you insane? I wouldn't even contemplate it for a single machine because of the potential issues, let alone hundreds or thousands. If it takes you 40 hours to get your machines from blank to functional you really need to look at how you're doing it; 2 hours *maximum* to image a machine, get it online and install any additional software packages. 99% of config should be done on the image or via GPOs and anything extra should be minor and straightforward. This is all assuming you don't have any software deployment solution (SMS/LANDesk/Altiris/Zenworks/etc) that would allow you to automate the additional software installs and reduce the deployment time even further.
That was one of my biggest gripes about BSG in that it became the anti-Star Trek with its characters. Everyone was so flawed to such a ludicrous degree that it was just as hard to identify with any of them as with the Star Trek "everyone is a model of perfection" characters.
We're planning to start moving our entire XP estate (~2500 machines) to Windows 7 over the next 6 months; XP Mode (Well, MED-V) finally provides us with a good answer to the problem of some shitty MS-DOS app that finance have been running for 17 years, that won't run on Vista/7 and uses a proprietary database whose structures were known only to a single man who died in 1994 leaving no documentation. At least until XP goes out of extended support in 2014.
As for Netbooks, they're a waste of space in the office environment; let's spend as much as a new desktop on a portable with low specs, very limited peripheral connectivity and a tiny screen.
Slashdot Mirror
Shhhhh! You'll ruin the scam (of convincing uninformed people that an old idea is a new idea by renaming it).
Thin client -> fat client -> thin client -> fat client. *yawn*
Every time, this happens; things move away from the client for "performance" and "flexibility" and "scalability" reasons and then everyone realises it's a pain because of the lack of control or reliability and by that point the client hardware's moved on to the point where it can do the job better anyway so everyone moves back to it.
Which is great unless your phone *isn't* a DROID and costs substantially less than $560.
Just look at FARK. I can't read the artcle comments there any more because they're so amazingly depressing.
An extradition treaty doesn't give you permission to grab people off the streets without formal approval of the government in question (and some actual evidence; unless it's with the UK in which case the evidence part is optional).
Sophos AV's heuristics scanning (HIPS) goes mental when you try and install Shockwave; it gets flagged as suspicious behaviour and a buffer overrun risk (Incidentally, Adobe Reader is the same).
It will supposedly mandate 3-strike disconnection laws in all signatory countries without any reasonable standard of evidence because any ISP who *fails* to disconnect you will become legally liable for anything you may have done.
I call that a bad thing.
You all laughed at me
Yes...yes we did.
The whole point is that there are precious few details about any of ACTA because nobody outside of the governments involved, their lawyers and a few high-paying lobby groups have been allowed to see any of its contents.
*Everything* about it is hearsay until either someone succeeds in getting an FOI request honoured or the thing gets ratified and it's too late to do anything about it.
Chrome would be my browser of choice were it not for the lack of Adblock, Noscript & IETab; I suspect a lot of other techies feel the same way, which is why Chrome has stayed with such a modest share despite early interest in it.
I can't speak for Safari as every time I've tried to use it (On Windows) I've ended up hating it.
As others have stated, Sysprep does more than just changing the SID (In fact you can tell Sysprep not to regenerate the SID if you want to). Just because duplicate SIDs aren't an issue doesn't mean that you won't have problems if you fail to Sysprep machines before deployment.
Since Adobe invented the Flash plugin and Sun invented the Java plugin.
It crashed once on his computer; without any context it's just a dig.
I can guarantee you for *any* release of software that at least one person will have had it crash on them within a few hours.
http://prefbar.mozdev.org/
First plugin I install for SeaMonkey: Home button, toggles for colours, fonts, images, JavaScript, Java, Flash, pop-ups; drop downs for Proxy settings, User Agent, window size - couldn't live without it.
Bingo.
I thought I liked having my email & web browsing integrated, but apparently I've had it forced upon me without realising it...
I've been running the Betas & RCs of SM 2.0 for the last couple of months on Windows 7 x64, Ubuntu 9.04 & Windows XP SP3, and while I got regular crashes on closing the browser if I'd been using Flash (Seems to be fixed in the final so far) I didn't have any non-Flash related crashes.
I don't know why Timothy felt the need to make the comment other than to put a negative spin on the release;
It wasn't railing against encryption, it was pointing out that both the police & the intelligence services have voiced their disapproval over the "Three Strikes" idea because it's likely to increase the use of encryption and therefore make their lives more difficult. i.e. It's not just a load of pirates that Mandy's ignored on this one.
Not a good idea, it'd take 5 days to make a decision and probably end in a draw.
You do for it to be meaningful.
For example: "I haven't had any problems at all with SSDs" is a completely worthless statement for anyone reading this discussion unless I include some context; which drive(s), what kind of usage, what OSs, how long have I been running them, etc.
As has already been pointed out, all the drives that the OP was referring to used the crappy JMicron controller that's been largely slated in all reviews for its poor performance and iffy wear-levelling - especially with older firmwares. This makes the information worthless to me because I have an Intel X25-M G2 drive which has a different controller altogether.
Defragging SSDs is not only mostly a waste of time (Seek time is the same regardless of where the data is physically on the drive so unless you're dealing with heavy fragmentation of large files it won't have any effect), but it reduces the lifespan by needlessly reading and re-writing data all over the place; there's a good reason Windows 7 automatically disables defragmentation for SSDs.
For the time being, however, you're stuck using the Microsoft Storage Controller drivers if you want TRIM support because Intel's don't support it (yet - they're supposed to have new drivers out "soon" that will).
And for only 10x the price...
It amazes me that people put up with that level of interest on student loans in the US. In the UK, my student loan is currently at 0% interest (Due to the current base interest rates) and it was only at 3.5% the last couple of years with base rates of ~5%. If you were lucky enough to take out a loan before 1998, then you're currently paying -0.4% because the interest is linked to the Retail Prices Index (RPI) and we're currently experiencing slight deflation by that measure.
What?
Seriously, you'd upgrade 10s/100s/1000s of desktops from XP to 7 if you could rather than do a clean OS image? Are you insane? I wouldn't even contemplate it for a single machine because of the potential issues, let alone hundreds or thousands. If it takes you 40 hours to get your machines from blank to functional you really need to look at how you're doing it; 2 hours *maximum* to image a machine, get it online and install any additional software packages. 99% of config should be done on the image or via GPOs and anything extra should be minor and straightforward. This is all assuming you don't have any software deployment solution (SMS/LANDesk/Altiris/Zenworks/etc) that would allow you to automate the additional software installs and reduce the deployment time even further.
That was one of my biggest gripes about BSG in that it became the anti-Star Trek with its characters. Everyone was so flawed to such a ludicrous degree that it was just as hard to identify with any of them as with the Star Trek "everyone is a model of perfection" characters.
We're planning to start moving our entire XP estate (~2500 machines) to Windows 7 over the next 6 months; XP Mode (Well, MED-V) finally provides us with a good answer to the problem of some shitty MS-DOS app that finance have been running for 17 years, that won't run on Vista/7 and uses a proprietary database whose structures were known only to a single man who died in 1994 leaving no documentation. At least until XP goes out of extended support in 2014.
As for Netbooks, they're a waste of space in the office environment; let's spend as much as a new desktop on a portable with low specs, very limited peripheral connectivity and a tiny screen.