I didn't believe they have ever suffered anything extremely major - especially submarine wise. FOr instance the two submarines currently sitting at hte bottom of the atlantic with intact reactors are just fine, as are any warheads on them.
Reading through that it doesn't look like any accidents at all have occurred in the last 20+ years and the ones that DID occur look to be pretty minor. Compare those accidents to the Soviet Union's track record...
The best example for nuclear power safety is the fact that after 50 years of operation of hundreds of Nuke power plants only 1 serious accident occurred - and that was at a poorly designed USSR station that would never have been allowed to be built in the US.
But, nowadays, we have some relaly, really, really fail safe designs that could be used like the Pebble Bed Reactor that can never ever melt down even assuming a complete and total failure of all safety backups, coolant etc (of course, it could still cause contamination if a break in the cooling or such occurred).
Now, OTOH, you have people like the US Navy who have a *perfect* record for Nuclear safety simply because if their was ever an accident the Navy knows that would likely be the end of all their Nuke powered boats (helluva a motivator eh?)
If you want to be a "global company"? Fine. Then relinquish your cushy benefits you get for supporting American interests.
Yeah, get out of the US dell! Take all that goddam money that flows back into the US OUT OF HERE! We don't want your taxes! And we want you to keep US employees no matter what! It worked for Western Europe so it'll work for us! Oh wait...
5.7 million customers. DO you have any idea what a freaking nightmare that would be?
I work at an isp with far less than that and we have to do 10-20 spam call's a week. Extrapolating the numbers they would have to do from 6,000-7,000 calls *a week* to get that stuff cleaned off. That's every week. You want to figure out that cost of doing that?
ISP's can do something about this. We currently call every customer we get a complaint about (almost always through spamcop) and have them run windows update and anti-virus scans. It's a 5-10 minute call and, luckily enough, not only does it get rid of viruses but the customers always thank you because their computer had - inevitably - been running slow.
Comcast, and the other mega-ISP's, simply don't want to bother with something like this unfortunately.
I, personally, wish to god somebody would write some sort of plugin that would sort mp3's in some sane way. iTunes is absolutely horrible at handling mp3's and their various tags (or lack thereof) something winamp perfected years ago.
I've had people who have bought them directly from dell (or hp, etc) and from best buy and both came unpatched. I know their business pc's come partially patched.
Working tech desk during Sasser outbreak is fun lemme tell you. God save microsoft if they actually were responsible for tech support costs during this thing.
I figure i've taken 40 some Sasser Calls. Each call takes about 7-10 minutes to clean it off and all that. So you figure, 320 minutes or 4 hours of my time. That comes to costing my company something like $40 odd dollars. Now multiply that 40 some by the thounsands of techs just like me who have to do the same thing.
I almost can't blame the customers for doing this. Ever try just updating windows xp over broadband? Takes forever. Now try pulling down 50 some megs of critical updates over a freaking dialup modem. Remember - not a *single* major PC manufacturer I know of installs ANY critical updates on their home pc's they sell to the end user. Nothing. Nada. Dell, HP, Compaq, etc. I've ranted about how irresponsible and stupid this is before and i'll continue to do so now:). I've had two people call recently who - literally - just bought a brand new computer from the local best buy, plugged it into the internet and with 5 minutes got either Sasser or Blaster.
I dearly, sincerly wish that Microsoft would actually build not only a real firewall into their products or/and shut off unneeded services to the internet. I also wish manufactures would actually ship their machines with all the critical updates installed. I also want a pony.
This outbreak isn't as bad as blaster was but still. I'm no MS hater, I understand their product code base is massive and keeping track of all that and bug fixes takes an enormous amount of money and time but they *seriously* need to work on security. I would estimate virus cleanup and spyware sucks up 10-15% of my time at work.
Knoppix won't even boot on my home system (vanilla hardware, red hate/mandrake/debian work fine on it) and won't work with our vanilla hardware omnitechs.
It's not flawles... and neither is hw detection in it.
Depends oh where you are at for DSl prices. Here in Nebraska with Qwest and us (inebraska) you can get 256k symmetrical for 28.95$/month. Not that much more expensive than dialup.
And, god I wish I wasn't stuck with alltel, for 48$/month you get 1.5/896.
You are the best person ever for that link to the CoolWebSearch removal tool. I work at an ISP and we've had 4-5 people get that. We've been forced to tell them to "reinstall windows." Awesome man thanks.
No, of course not. And i'm not an enabler -- if you did the exact same thing these users did you'd also get these virus'.
At any rate, offering a discount to non-windows users would be futile. We get quite a few calls from mac/lun1x users (since we always try to fix stuff even if we don't support it) and some of those linux calls can take years. Yes sir, i'll stay on the line while you recompile your kernel on a PII 266...:)
You know what boggles my mind in regards to spyware/virus'?
I work tech support at a local isp. We have... a fair number of customers (stupid NDA's). And I would say around 10-15% of our calls are virus/spyware related in at least some way.
But what is really upsetting is this - how can users (somehow) manage to get 225 pieces of spyware and 42 virus' and then NOT be able to install a anti-virus program or spybot? Jesus Christ. It just... fucks with my head. I can't figure out who's to blame in this one.
The other thing that is extremely upsetting is the utter lack of responsibility taken on by the computer manufactures in regards to spyware/virus'. Here's the deal. User X gets a new PC with their tax refund. User X puts computer on intarweb. 15 minutes later they get blaster, call me and tell me that "the internet broke their computer, can't be anything wrong with it just bought it blah blah blah blah." And then I go to look and, I'll be dammed, the brand spanking new dell they just bought contains 0 patches. No service pack 1, nothing.
I'm not sure if it's just dell (I think hewlett packard is the same) but both of these manufactures, for home pc's, ship them 100% unpatched. And, of course, they don't have to deal with the tech support of cleaning off spyware/blaster. It's not like it is even the user's fault. If any of you put winxp on a machine (even with the firewall in xp enabled) that wasn't behind NAT/firewall it will get blaster/wachi/nachi in 10 minutes. There's litterally nothing you can do.
Can we really blame Microsoft for this one? Or even ther user?
Indeed, i've found (working at an isp) that 99.5% of people with broadband use less than 500 meg a month. Ah well, they got to make their money somehow.
Of course, what area of england do you want to be the "original"? You want a london accent? Posh southerner? Northern English? Glaswegian?
The accents across england, imo, are extremely varied -- as much as the differneces between american and australian for example. Of course, this is coming from an american who only spent 4 months over there but take it as you will.
if you think about it, 2-10mbps is fine for certain application (also note it's 802.11g, which is roughly 60some mbps iirc). For example, if you want to stream music or video to a pc in your living room that much bandwith is plenty. Not everybody wants to run wires all over the place:).
The point of buying an iSeries isn't just for speed. You're also buying IBM's corporate support, you're buying some of the best goddam hardware money can buy, and you're buying some of the best intelligent healing hardware ever.
And yes, IBM stuff really works that good. If something fails hardware wise the box will do everything in it's (programming) to fix it or work around the problem. Have an OPT drive fail in the middle of a backup? The iSeries will automagically switch over to the next one over and begin the backup. Things like that, across the board redundancy, etc, etc.
You're also getting IBM's support:). My brother had a SCSI Cd-rom drive fail today on his iSeries, he called ibm today and they offered to fly somebody down from minnesota (we live in nebraska) to fix it *today*.
It's ibm man! You aren't just buying it for the hardware.
It's odd this outage lasted for so many hours. Hotmail is spread across multiple clusters at multiple geographic locations. Presumably, so is passport (which is what was br0xx0red). You would *think* MS would keep a complete backup of the last known passport config somewhere, like 1 day - 1 week, etc.
In theory it should only take a matter of minutes to rollback the entire thing... and you would've thought they'd test it before deploying any changes.
Sounds like somebody screwed the pooch on this one.
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I didn't believe they have ever suffered anything extremely major - especially submarine wise. FOr instance the two submarines currently sitting at hte bottom of the atlantic with intact reactors are just fine, as are any warheads on them.
Reading through that it doesn't look like any accidents at all have occurred in the last 20+ years and the ones that DID occur look to be pretty minor. Compare those accidents to the Soviet Union's track record...
By serious I meant large loss of life.
Sadly enough you are probably right.
The best example for nuclear power safety is the fact that after 50 years of operation of hundreds of Nuke power plants only 1 serious accident occurred - and that was at a poorly designed USSR station that would never have been allowed to be built in the US.
But, nowadays, we have some relaly, really, really fail safe designs that could be used like the Pebble Bed Reactor that can never ever melt down even assuming a complete and total failure of all safety backups, coolant etc (of course, it could still cause contamination if a break in the cooling or such occurred).
Now, OTOH, you have people like the US Navy who have a *perfect* record for Nuclear safety simply because if their was ever an accident the Navy knows that would likely be the end of all their Nuke powered boats (helluva a motivator eh?)
If you want to be a "global company"? Fine. Then relinquish your cushy benefits you get for supporting American interests.
Yeah, get out of the US dell! Take all that goddam money that flows back into the US OUT OF HERE! We don't want your taxes! And we want you to keep US employees no matter what! It worked for Western Europe so it'll work for us! Oh wait...
Globalization is rarely so cut and dried.
5.7 million customers. DO you have any idea what a freaking nightmare that would be?
I work at an isp with far less than that and we have to do 10-20 spam call's a week. Extrapolating the numbers they would have to do from 6,000-7,000 calls *a week* to get that stuff cleaned off. That's every week. You want to figure out that cost of doing that?
ISP's can do something about this. We currently call every customer we get a complaint about (almost always through spamcop) and have them run windows update and anti-virus scans. It's a 5-10 minute call and, luckily enough, not only does it get rid of viruses but the customers always thank you because their computer had - inevitably - been running slow.
Comcast, and the other mega-ISP's, simply don't want to bother with something like this unfortunately.
There is an ogg control that works double plus good for playing Ogg vorbis files under iTunes (at least on the mac and with 4.5).
Clicky.
I, personally, wish to god somebody would write some sort of plugin that would sort mp3's in some sane way. iTunes is absolutely horrible at handling mp3's and their various tags (or lack thereof) something winamp perfected years ago.
Unlike all these others, the people who build these viruses aren't 15 year old kids with a feeble understanding of VB and the latest virus kit. :)
I've had people who have bought them directly from dell (or hp, etc) and from best buy and both came unpatched. I know their business pc's come partially patched.
Man I lived in britian last semester! What the hell does buy a pony mean and how the heck did I miss out on that piece of slang?
Working tech desk during Sasser outbreak is fun lemme tell you. God save microsoft if they actually were responsible for tech support costs during this thing.
:). I've had two people call recently who - literally - just bought a brand new computer from the local best buy, plugged it into the internet and with 5 minutes got either Sasser or Blaster.
I figure i've taken 40 some Sasser Calls. Each call takes about 7-10 minutes to clean it off and all that. So you figure, 320 minutes or 4 hours of my time. That comes to costing my company something like $40 odd dollars. Now multiply that 40 some by the thounsands of techs just like me who have to do the same thing.
I almost can't blame the customers for doing this. Ever try just updating windows xp over broadband? Takes forever. Now try pulling down 50 some megs of critical updates over a freaking dialup modem. Remember - not a *single* major PC manufacturer I know of installs ANY critical updates on their home pc's they sell to the end user. Nothing. Nada. Dell, HP, Compaq, etc. I've ranted about how irresponsible and stupid this is before and i'll continue to do so now
I dearly, sincerly wish that Microsoft would actually build not only a real firewall into their products or/and shut off unneeded services to the internet. I also wish manufactures would actually ship their machines with all the critical updates installed. I also want a pony.
This outbreak isn't as bad as blaster was but still. I'm no MS hater, I understand their product code base is massive and keeping track of all that and bug fixes takes an enormous amount of money and time but they *seriously* need to work on security. I would estimate virus cleanup and spyware sucks up 10-15% of my time at work.
Knoppix won't even boot on my home system (vanilla hardware, red hate/mandrake/debian work fine on it) and won't work with our vanilla hardware omnitechs.
It's not flawles... and neither is hw detection in it.
Odd. In my neck of the woods phone + unlimited intenet access is more expenisve (bout 10$) than you 256k symmetrical dsl connection.
Depends oh where you are at for DSl prices. Here in Nebraska with Qwest and us (inebraska) you can get 256k symmetrical for 28.95$/month. Not that much more expensive than dialup.
And, god I wish I wasn't stuck with alltel, for 48$/month you get 1.5/896.
You are the best person ever for that link to the CoolWebSearch removal tool. I work at an ISP and we've had 4-5 people get that. We've been forced to tell them to "reinstall windows." Awesome man thanks.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9Ser ies/gettingstarted/personalization/cooldevices.asp
Well over 500+. At least. Far more than apple's 1. MS actually licenses their DRM you see...
kthnxbye.
No, of course not. And i'm not an enabler -- if you did the exact same thing these users did you'd also get these virus'.
:)
At any rate, offering a discount to non-windows users would be futile. We get quite a few calls from mac/lun1x users (since we always try to fix stuff even if we don't support it) and some of those linux calls can take years. Yes sir, i'll stay on the line while you recompile your kernel on a PII 266...
Yeah, but dell - at least - doesn't patc their home pc's at all (business pc's are different) which is freaking ridiculous.
You know what boggles my mind in regards to spyware/virus'?
;).
I work tech support at a local isp. We have... a fair number of customers (stupid NDA's). And I would say around 10-15% of our calls are virus/spyware related in at least some way.
But what is really upsetting is this - how can users (somehow) manage to get 225 pieces of spyware and 42 virus' and then NOT be able to install a anti-virus program or spybot? Jesus Christ. It just... fucks with my head. I can't figure out who's to blame in this one.
The other thing that is extremely upsetting is the utter lack of responsibility taken on by the computer manufactures in regards to spyware/virus'. Here's the deal. User X gets a new PC with their tax refund. User X puts computer on intarweb. 15 minutes later they get blaster, call me and tell me that "the internet broke their computer, can't be anything wrong with it just bought it blah blah blah blah." And then I go to look and, I'll be dammed, the brand spanking new dell they just bought contains 0 patches. No service pack 1, nothing.
I'm not sure if it's just dell (I think hewlett packard is the same) but both of these manufactures, for home pc's, ship them 100% unpatched. And, of course, they don't have to deal with the tech support of cleaning off spyware/blaster. It's not like it is even the user's fault. If any of you put winxp on a machine (even with the firewall in xp enabled) that wasn't behind NAT/firewall it will get blaster/wachi/nachi in 10 minutes. There's litterally nothing you can do.
Can we really blame Microsoft for this one? Or even ther user?
Allright, I think i'm done venting
Indeed, i've found (working at an isp) that 99.5% of people with broadband use less than 500 meg a month. Ah well, they got to make their money somehow.
Of course, what area of england do you want to be the "original"? You want a london accent? Posh southerner? Northern English? Glaswegian?
The accents across england, imo, are extremely varied -- as much as the differneces between american and australian for example. Of course, this is coming from an american who only spent 4 months over there but take it as you will.
if you think about it, 2-10mbps is fine for certain application (also note it's 802.11g, which is roughly 60some mbps iirc). For example, if you want to stream music or video to a pc in your living room that much bandwith is plenty. Not everybody wants to run wires all over the place :).
The point of buying an iSeries isn't just for speed. You're also buying IBM's corporate support, you're buying some of the best goddam hardware money can buy, and you're buying some of the best intelligent healing hardware ever.
:). My brother had a SCSI Cd-rom drive fail today on his iSeries, he called ibm today and they offered to fly somebody down from minnesota (we live in nebraska) to fix it *today*.
And yes, IBM stuff really works that good. If something fails hardware wise the box will do everything in it's (programming) to fix it or work around the problem. Have an OPT drive fail in the middle of a backup? The iSeries will automagically switch over to the next one over and begin the backup. Things like that, across the board redundancy, etc, etc.
You're also getting IBM's support
It's ibm man! You aren't just buying it for the hardware.
It's odd this outage lasted for so many hours. Hotmail is spread across multiple clusters at multiple geographic locations. Presumably, so is passport (which is what was br0xx0red). You would *think* MS would keep a complete backup of the last known passport config somewhere, like 1 day - 1 week, etc.
In theory it should only take a matter of minutes to rollback the entire thing... and you would've thought they'd test it before deploying any changes.
Sounds like somebody screwed the pooch on this one.
You think that's bad? Try working at an isp and have people yelling at you and blaming you for breaking hotmail ;).
ahh the joys of the internet.