I have to agree. There's very little need for a vendor with a good-working product to have to have that kind of anytime access into your network and servers. And with nebulous new legal requirements like HIPAA (for medical companies) and Sarbanes-Oxley (which the government doesn't even know what it means yet) giving such access to vendors could give you serious trouble in an audit, even with the requisite NDAs and various contracts.
So, my advice is also to not do it. A vendor needs access to repair/upgrade a system? Arrange for a once-off remote access solution (like WebEx or something for Windows boxes) in a situation where you have control of the access and can monitor them. We had a vendor one time get real whiney about not having on-demand remote access into our system, but we put out foot down and they dealt with it. The reality is that you're the customer, and it's their job to adapt to your situation.
I have to hand it to Microsoft. I remember all those virus hoaxes I used to get in my email. "Don't even open this email or you'll get a virus!" Don't look at this image, or your machine will get hacked!" "Don't visit this web page, or your drive will get formatted!" And I used to think, "Gee, why *can't* I hose my machine by doing those things? That sounds like it would be so cool to see!"
Well, thanks to Microsoft and their brilliant innovation, tireless effort, and boundless resources, they finally made all those mid-to-late-90s virus hoaxes a reality. I raise my glass to them.
I mourn the original couple of versions of Winamp. Back when it was simple, sleek, and had low-overhead. It did one thing, and it did it exceptionally well.
That was before the dark times. Before AOL. Now, it's just like every other feautre-bloated media app. Which is unfortunate.
CompUSA is just as bad as BestBuy with the needless service plans. I know someone who sold a printer service plan to a woman who didn't even buy a printer. Plus, their equipment tends to be slightly older.
BestBuy at least tends to have fairly new laptops and desktops. Don't know much about Circuit City. Haven't really bought much there.
I call blogging "Layer 3 Journalism". You have the reporters doing the work, getting the story and writing it. Then you have the editors making political decisions on the stories, and deciding what gets put out, and how it gets released. Those are the traditional two layers of journalism.
Bloggers are a new, third layer. They take what was already reported on by other sources, and put their own unique spin on it, with outside commentary. The problem is, the further you get from the first layer, the more distorted the original facts get. As people read the blogs, email others, and pass the commentary on, it starts to generate a buzz online, and the story gets distorted further.
It's important to remember that most bloggers do not report the news; they report ON the news. As such, it can be useful as a sort of "watchdog" on the media. But when people start taking blogs as well-researched fact and start passing it around, it can generate enormous numbers of misinformed people.
Wait.... Ballmer wants the OS to make up 66% of the price of a new PC? Let's see... the cost of mass-duplicating a CD compared to the cost of manufacturing a rather complicated collection of electronic parts. Yeah, that makes sense.
That was pretty common, these "family-owned" businesses appearing to compete against each other, but in fact working together to corner the local market.
I remember visiting a computer show some years ago, and seeing 4 different Korean-owned tables appear to compete with each other, with different flyers, different company names, even different prices. But watching them from a distance, you could see them share stock with each other. I realized that they were actually apparently from one extended family and that their "competition" was carefully arranged to give the appearance of shopping for the best deals.
Sounds like your cable company hasn't pushed the latest firmware to you. The latest firmware versions have an option to record all occurances of a program, or only in that one time slot.
I haven't had a lockup in a while. I do still have popping on the audio track, but that seems to only happen when I pause a show for a while and then resume. It seems to have a problem with spooling to disk and playing back at the same time. Overall it's leaps and bounds beyond what it was 2 years ago.
May not be true if you bought your phone from the carrier. Most US carriers completely defeat the concept behind GSM, and make it so the phone simply doesn't work apart from their service. I know, I've got three different GSM phones at home from two different carriers. Both GSM, but they won't recognize the other's SIMs.
I play a little bit of Star Wars: Galaxies, and it's facinating to watch the online bully mentality, and how it develeops. On our server, there's an entire guild who prides themselves on ruining everyone elses fun. They are the self-declared alpha-bullies of the game. Recently, someone (either a disgruntled former "insider" or a victim who had had enough of the harassment... no one knows for sure) got ahold of account logins and passwords of several of their members and started deleting their characters. It's now escalated into full-blown harassment, posting personal information (including SS#s) in live chat, and threats of violence in real life. All over a series of tables and fields in a database somewhere.
Some say that online life is a mask people can wear to be someone else. I'm more inclined to believe it's a magnifying glass which can amplify the worst qualities in someone.
Yeah, I know he caused our company a lot of cost. We have over 200 remote users with laptops, and the effort alone to disinfect, patch and verify each of these out in the field cost easily into the thousands of dollars, not to mention wasted time, downtime for users (ie. NOT making the company money), etc.
I agree that most of the "damages" touted by companies in these hacking cases are pie-in-the-sky pipe dreams designed to make things look worse than they really were (and a convenient way to have a scapegoat for your next earnings statement) but there ARE real damages inflicted by morons like this guy. 10-15 highly-paid IT professionals tracking down, patching and cleaning a few hundered machines spread all over the country over the course of a few days will really start to add up.
After a miss-typed URL sent me to one of those wonderful cyber-squatting "search" sites, which then proceeded to automatically install all sorts of nasty spyware and SMTP zombie malware, I banned IE from my house and removed all shortcuts and Program Menu options from all PCs. I made the decision to go with Firefox, and I can honestly tell you I haven't missed IE one bit, and there's not been one reason that I've had to open up IE again. My wife's been happy with it as well. It's clean, fast, renders pages great, much more informative about page loading status, and best of all it doesn't attempt to install software without my permission. I've encouraged everyone I know to give it a try.
They were still extremely shifty as to how much exactly that deal is worth. Darl spouts off a claim that it's still 6-figures, but less than 250k. Didn't EV1 already deny that the amount was 6 figures? Maybe Darl's including decimal places.
The dependency nightmare is the single biggest thing keeping me from being able to attempt a total switch to Linux. I remember some time ago trying to install a simple messaging client. It took on the order of 4 hours of downloading package after package, each with their own dependencies to a seemingly endless level, downloading source and trying to complile, only to discover that the version of GCC wasn't correct, and then off to download x number of packages and dependencies just for that version of GCC.
More recently I ended up doing the pretty much the same thing trying to install Evolution 1.4 with the Exchange connector when wget wouldn't work. I finally gave up after around 6 hours of trying.
Too many Linux developers appear to have plenty of time on their hands to hunt down, download, compile and configure 347309763096 different packages to install a simple text editor. Either that, or they just happen to have every single library ever compiled installed on their distros. Well, that's fine and dandy for them, but that just isn't going to cut it in the real world. Windows may have security holes up the wazoo, but at least I can download an installer for an app, and it actually works the first time. Until the Open Source community finds a reasonable way to deal with the dependency-nightmare of Linux (and no, wget is not acceptable. What if your internet connection is down? What if the site you're trying to wget from is down?), it can never have true desktop acceptance outside of hobbiests and software developers.
The FCC is the only thing that has prevented some monkey from making a 500 watt amp and shoving it into a high gain antenna next door to you. The results of that would be disastrous and probably kill you and your family in a few short days or weeks (maybe hours).
I use The Proxomitron, and I get no popups on that site, and it doesn't redirect me to some anti-ad-blocker-complaining page, either. Strangely, though, it doesn't block the banner ads on the site, which Proxomitron is usually great about.
I absolutely love The Proxomitron. I have an Excite portal page, that started redirecting me towards a whine/moan screen because I was blocking certain JavaScripts. Easily solved: found the redirect tag in the source of the portal page, and added a rule in Proxomitron to replace it with HTML comments. Poof! No more annoying anti-popup-blocker redirect! Any time I come across a new ad method, I just have to track it down and add a new rule to remove it.
m-Commerce? Did we really need another x-Commerce variant? I swear, the marketing heads that come up with these buzzwords need to be taken to the woodshed.
It would be nice to see "businesses" like this shut down and the scam artist in handcuffs, but more often than not, people like him are VERY good at disappearing, relocating, and starting up the whole scam again.
I had a run-in with a retailer at a computer show some years ago who was substituting sub-standard parts and pre-loading Windows 98 on his boxes, advertising them as having Windows 98 included, and then not including the Win98 CD. When I purchased a computer from him for someone else, and then came across a problem with that PC that required the CD, I called to get a copy sent to me, and the retailer refused, said I had to pay $50 to get the CD. I realized quickly that this was a scam he was running, and no matter what, he would not give me the CD. I actually called the Microsoft Piracy Hotline (I've never done that since, and normally I would have just dropped it, but he made me irritated enough with his attitude) and they thanked me, and promised to go after him.
Next computer show a couple months later, same retailer is there, same scam, different "company" name and different location & phone number. These guys thrive on being mobile. They're like cockroaches. Shine the light on them, and they disappear for a little while, but they still come back.
As long as the attorneys arguing the case played no part in the theft of proprietary and/or trade secret documents, nor encouraged anyone else to do the same, they are admissible as evidence in court (in most states). Then again, IANAL and may just be talking out of my ass...
Or you could just be quoting the movie version of The Rainmaker...
Because it would put them directly in the hot seat. The SEC would come sniffing around again if they bought SCO, because it would be an obvious attempt to destroy competition and illegally extend their monopoly. But, by quietly purchasing "licences" to fund SCO's warchest, they can fight a proxy war against Linux, and keep their hands clean from any anti-trust investigations. After all, they were just in good faith paying fair licencing costs to SCO, like any good corporate citizen should do, right? Never mind the vagueness of what exactly Microsoft is "licencing".
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I have to agree. There's very little need for a vendor with a good-working product to have to have that kind of anytime access into your network and servers. And with nebulous new legal requirements like HIPAA (for medical companies) and Sarbanes-Oxley (which the government doesn't even know what it means yet) giving such access to vendors could give you serious trouble in an audit, even with the requisite NDAs and various contracts.
So, my advice is also to not do it. A vendor needs access to repair/upgrade a system? Arrange for a once-off remote access solution (like WebEx or something for Windows boxes) in a situation where you have control of the access and can monitor them. We had a vendor one time get real whiney about not having on-demand remote access into our system, but we put out foot down and they dealt with it. The reality is that you're the customer, and it's their job to adapt to your situation.
I have to hand it to Microsoft. I remember all those virus hoaxes I used to get in my email. "Don't even open this email or you'll get a virus!" Don't look at this image, or your machine will get hacked!" "Don't visit this web page, or your drive will get formatted!" And I used to think, "Gee, why *can't* I hose my machine by doing those things? That sounds like it would be so cool to see!"
Well, thanks to Microsoft and their brilliant innovation, tireless effort, and boundless resources, they finally made all those mid-to-late-90s virus hoaxes a reality. I raise my glass to them.
I mourn the original couple of versions of Winamp. Back when it was simple, sleek, and had low-overhead. It did one thing, and it did it exceptionally well.
That was before the dark times. Before AOL. Now, it's just like every other feautre-bloated media app. Which is unfortunate.
CompUSA is just as bad as BestBuy with the needless service plans. I know someone who sold a printer service plan to a woman who didn't even buy a printer. Plus, their equipment tends to be slightly older.
BestBuy at least tends to have fairly new laptops and desktops. Don't know much about Circuit City. Haven't really bought much there.
I call blogging "Layer 3 Journalism". You have the reporters doing the work, getting the story and writing it. Then you have the editors making political decisions on the stories, and deciding what gets put out, and how it gets released. Those are the traditional two layers of journalism.
Bloggers are a new, third layer. They take what was already reported on by other sources, and put their own unique spin on it, with outside commentary. The problem is, the further you get from the first layer, the more distorted the original facts get. As people read the blogs, email others, and pass the commentary on, it starts to generate a buzz online, and the story gets distorted further.
It's important to remember that most bloggers do not report the news; they report ON the news. As such, it can be useful as a sort of "watchdog" on the media. But when people start taking blogs as well-researched fact and start passing it around, it can generate enormous numbers of misinformed people.
Not that people aren't already misinformed...
We might even end up with politicians who know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland.
Hey, I can't fault that mistake. They probably got their information off of the Internets.
Wait.... Ballmer wants the OS to make up 66% of the price of a new PC? Let's see... the cost of mass-duplicating a CD compared to the cost of manufacturing a rather complicated collection of electronic parts. Yeah, that makes sense.
So, where does Ballmer score his blow?
That was pretty common, these "family-owned" businesses appearing to compete against each other, but in fact working together to corner the local market.
I remember visiting a computer show some years ago, and seeing 4 different Korean-owned tables appear to compete with each other, with different flyers, different company names, even different prices. But watching them from a distance, you could see them share stock with each other. I realized that they were actually apparently from one extended family and that their "competition" was carefully arranged to give the appearance of shopping for the best deals.
Sounds like your cable company hasn't pushed the latest firmware to you. The latest firmware versions have an option to record all occurances of a program, or only in that one time slot.
I haven't had a lockup in a while. I do still have popping on the audio track, but that seems to only happen when I pause a show for a while and then resume. It seems to have a problem with spooling to disk and playing back at the same time. Overall it's leaps and bounds beyond what it was 2 years ago.
May not be true if you bought your phone from the carrier. Most US carriers completely defeat the concept behind GSM, and make it so the phone simply doesn't work apart from their service. I know, I've got three different GSM phones at home from two different carriers. Both GSM, but they won't recognize the other's SIMs.
I play a little bit of Star Wars: Galaxies, and it's facinating to watch the online bully mentality, and how it develeops. On our server, there's an entire guild who prides themselves on ruining everyone elses fun. They are the self-declared alpha-bullies of the game. Recently, someone (either a disgruntled former "insider" or a victim who had had enough of the harassment... no one knows for sure) got ahold of account logins and passwords of several of their members and started deleting their characters. It's now escalated into full-blown harassment, posting personal information (including SS#s) in live chat, and threats of violence in real life. All over a series of tables and fields in a database somewhere.
Some say that online life is a mask people can wear to be someone else. I'm more inclined to believe it's a magnifying glass which can amplify the worst qualities in someone.
Yeah, I know he caused our company a lot of cost. We have over 200 remote users with laptops, and the effort alone to disinfect, patch and verify each of these out in the field cost easily into the thousands of dollars, not to mention wasted time, downtime for users (ie. NOT making the company money), etc.
I agree that most of the "damages" touted by companies in these hacking cases are pie-in-the-sky pipe dreams designed to make things look worse than they really were (and a convenient way to have a scapegoat for your next earnings statement) but there ARE real damages inflicted by morons like this guy. 10-15 highly-paid IT professionals tracking down, patching and cleaning a few hundered machines spread all over the country over the course of a few days will really start to add up.
Hey, the CAN-SPAN act isn't ineffective! It performs exactly as it's name would indicate.
After a miss-typed URL sent me to one of those wonderful cyber-squatting "search" sites, which then proceeded to automatically install all sorts of nasty spyware and SMTP zombie malware, I banned IE from my house and removed all shortcuts and Program Menu options from all PCs. I made the decision to go with Firefox, and I can honestly tell you I haven't missed IE one bit, and there's not been one reason that I've had to open up IE again. My wife's been happy with it as well. It's clean, fast, renders pages great, much more informative about page loading status, and best of all it doesn't attempt to install software without my permission. I've encouraged everyone I know to give it a try.
They were still extremely shifty as to how much exactly that deal is worth. Darl spouts off a claim that it's still 6-figures, but less than 250k. Didn't EV1 already deny that the amount was 6 figures? Maybe Darl's including decimal places.
Yeah, except when nature calls I'm not running around looking for a hotspot.
The dependency nightmare is the single biggest thing keeping me from being able to attempt a total switch to Linux. I remember some time ago trying to install a simple messaging client. It took on the order of 4 hours of downloading package after package, each with their own dependencies to a seemingly endless level, downloading source and trying to complile, only to discover that the version of GCC wasn't correct, and then off to download x number of packages and dependencies just for that version of GCC.
More recently I ended up doing the pretty much the same thing trying to install Evolution 1.4 with the Exchange connector when wget wouldn't work. I finally gave up after around 6 hours of trying.
Too many Linux developers appear to have plenty of time on their hands to hunt down, download, compile and configure 347309763096 different packages to install a simple text editor. Either that, or they just happen to have every single library ever compiled installed on their distros. Well, that's fine and dandy for them, but that just isn't going to cut it in the real world. Windows may have security holes up the wazoo, but at least I can download an installer for an app, and it actually works the first time. Until the Open Source community finds a reasonable way to deal with the dependency-nightmare of Linux (and no, wget is not acceptable. What if your internet connection is down? What if the site you're trying to wget from is down?), it can never have true desktop acceptance outside of hobbiests and software developers.
The FCC is the only thing that has prevented some monkey from making a 500 watt amp and shoving it into a high gain antenna next door to you. The results of that would be disastrous and probably kill you and your family in a few short days or weeks (maybe hours).
Um, what exactly is stopping him now?
I use The Proxomitron, and I get no popups on that site, and it doesn't redirect me to some anti-ad-blocker-complaining page, either. Strangely, though, it doesn't block the banner ads on the site, which Proxomitron is usually great about.
I absolutely love The Proxomitron. I have an Excite portal page, that started redirecting me towards a whine/moan screen because I was blocking certain JavaScripts. Easily solved: found the redirect tag in the source of the portal page, and added a rule in Proxomitron to replace it with HTML comments. Poof! No more annoying anti-popup-blocker redirect! Any time I come across a new ad method, I just have to track it down and add a new rule to remove it.
It's gonna have rocket launchers, and fly.
m-Commerce? Did we really need another x-Commerce variant? I swear, the marketing heads that come up with these buzzwords need to be taken to the woodshed.
It would be nice to see "businesses" like this shut down and the scam artist in handcuffs, but more often than not, people like him are VERY good at disappearing, relocating, and starting up the whole scam again.
I had a run-in with a retailer at a computer show some years ago who was substituting sub-standard parts and pre-loading Windows 98 on his boxes, advertising them as having Windows 98 included, and then not including the Win98 CD. When I purchased a computer from him for someone else, and then came across a problem with that PC that required the CD, I called to get a copy sent to me, and the retailer refused, said I had to pay $50 to get the CD. I realized quickly that this was a scam he was running, and no matter what, he would not give me the CD. I actually called the Microsoft Piracy Hotline (I've never done that since, and normally I would have just dropped it, but he made me irritated enough with his attitude) and they thanked me, and promised to go after him.
Next computer show a couple months later, same retailer is there, same scam, different "company" name and different location & phone number. These guys thrive on being mobile. They're like cockroaches. Shine the light on them, and they disappear for a little while, but they still come back.
As long as the attorneys arguing the case played no part in the theft of proprietary and/or trade secret documents, nor encouraged anyone else to do the same, they are admissible as evidence in court (in most states). Then again, IANAL and may just be talking out of my ass...
Or you could just be quoting the movie version of The Rainmaker...
Why should a bulb cost so much anyway??
Because they can. Seriously, that's about all there is to it.
Because it would put them directly in the hot seat. The SEC would come sniffing around again if they bought SCO, because it would be an obvious attempt to destroy competition and illegally extend their monopoly. But, by quietly purchasing "licences" to fund SCO's warchest, they can fight a proxy war against Linux, and keep their hands clean from any anti-trust investigations. After all, they were just in good faith paying fair licencing costs to SCO, like any good corporate citizen should do, right? Never mind the vagueness of what exactly Microsoft is "licencing".