I also backup my %root%/Documents and Settings/%username%/Application Data/Thunderbird folder to keep my email settings the same as they were pre-reformat if I'm doing a backup before I reinstall windows every ~3 months or so.
What does reinstalling Windows every three months do for you? Even back in the bad old days of DOS-based Windows 98SE, once a year sufficed. With updated, patched, current XP SP2, I haven't had to reinstall once since I bought this laptop in spring '04.
The software basically does a check to see if it's on XP, and if it's not it will bail. What's wrong with not putting the check in the software, and telling anyone who wants to try running on Windows 2000 that they are on their own?
The product for which I'm currently designing the installer is officially supported on XP, and unofficially supported on 2000. If you're using 2000, the installer pops a message saying "${PRODUCT_NAME} runs best under Windows XP Service Pack 1 or greater (Service Pack 2 strongly recommended). ${PRODUCT_NAME} will work under Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 or greater, but no support is offered." and you are then given a chance to exit gracefully. It's nice writing the spec for the installer as I'm designing it.
Besides, this limit may end up hurting them if it also detects Vista as not-XP and refuses to run on that too.
This is just bad design, considering that you can get the numeric version and check greater-than-or-equal-to. The textual version ("Windows XP") should never be a criteria for installing or running. As long as the numeric version of Vista is greater than 5.1.2600, my installers will cope.
Also, take a look at this movie from websense: http://www.websensesecuritylabs.com/images/alerts/ wmf-movie.wmv it shows step-by-step what happens to a clean machine as it gets exploited by this new menace.
Somehow I'd be a little more reasured if the exploit movie was in a different file format than the exploit. Quicktime maybe?
WMV = Windows Media Video WMF = Windows Metafile They are not the same format. Which is not to say that there may not be vulnerabilities in WMV.
The men reported similar pressures: cranky users of Web browsers with tiny market shares demanding that their browsers be supported, while not appreciating how much work is involved.
How about just coding to standards? Why is that so hard to get? I use a Web browser (Opera) which conforms to those same standards in what it will accept and how it renders; all you (email chiefs/chefs) need to do is send me standards-compliant data. I'll take it from there. Leave the proprietary browser-specific workaround crap back in 1999 where it belongs.
Sadly, a trend I have noticed recently is adverts at the start of DVDs that can't be skipped. I wonder if the studio's realise this kind of thing encourages people to get their entertainment through more flexible channels?
Or just pop the DVD in, go get a drink or use the bathroom, and come back to find the ads done and the player waiting at the title menu. That said, Bruce Almighty was the first DVD I bought that had non-optional ads and it pissed me off.
These people were perfectly capable of going to the Gap, looking at what was on the rack, and saying, "You know, upon reflection, I believe that these garments aren't really 'hip' and 'happening,' as the youth culture of today is wont to say. In fact, I'm afraid that they look like they were stitched together out of remnants from a carpet sale. I believe I'll go purchase my clothes at Old Navy, whose fashions are better representative of my upbeat, individualistic lifestyle!"
The Gap and Old Navy are owned by the same company. Not that it really matters--your example could have just as easily gone from The Gap to Limited or something--but it's amusing that the "better representative" store is actually part of the same group.
I mean sure, they can do no evil./me waits to see if there's censorship @ blogger. Oh, I don't see any censorship. Maybe it was censored out?
"Censorship" is inaccurate in that the term as usually used only applies to government. However Google/Blogger definitely exerts control--inappropriate control--over content on Blogger. See my/. Journal for more.
I'm surprised that space sports haven't really made it into mainstream sci-fi - short of Kirk prancing around arenas and the like. I have a vague feeling Arthur C Clarke touched on it once, but I can't recall the book title.
Not Clarke, as far as I can recall, but definitely Steven Barnes with _Streetlethal_ from 1983. It prominently features zero-G wrestling.
Does anyone actually pronounce it that way? I've never heard it pronounced as a word, just always with the letters spelled out, and I've been doing website design and management since '96.
Sadly, yes. The guy in the next cube. He also slurps his coffee. It's maddening.
P.S. I'd just like to say that Firefox without the SessionSaver extension is painful. Why on earth isn't SessionSaver included by default? "You have 9 tabs open that took you many hours to arrange. Close them all forever: yes/no?". And if something crashes, you don't even get the annoying dialog...
Opera does this by default without the need for an extension. When you close it or it crashes (which has happened with distressing frequency over the last couple of days) all windows and tabs are re-created just as they were.
It had been their intention to keep him for the two weeks, however once they notified him that he was in the hole on his vacation time and they'd be docking his paycheck, he started going from cube to cube complaining to everyone about the unfair treatment.
Not only unfair, but (in California at least) illegal.
Q. My employer allows its employees to take their vacation before it is actually earned or accrued. Last month I took my three weeks vacation before I had actually earned all of it. I quit my job this month and my employer deducted all of the unearned vacation days that I had taken from my final paycheck. Can he do this?
A. No, your employer cannot deduct "advanced" vacation (i.e., vacation that is taken before it is earned or accrued) from your final paycheck. Because of work schedules and the wishes of employees, many employers allow employees to take their vacation before it is actually earned. Under California law, vacation benefits are a form of wages, and an employer's practice of allowing employees to take their vacation before it is actually earned or accrued is in effect an advance on wages. Thus, if an employee takes an advance on vacation and then quits or is discharged before all of that advanced vacation is earned or accrued, the effect is that there has been an overpayment of wages which is a debt owed to the employer.
The California courts have noted on a number of occasions that an advance on wages, as with any other debt owed (either to the employer or a third party), is subject to the provisions of the attachment law. However, since wages are exempt from prejudgment attachment, neither the employer nor any third party can recover the debt by way of attachment of the employee's final pay, as to do so would violate the public policy considerations underlying the wage exemption statutes. Thus, in California since the wage garnishment law provides the exclusive judicial procedure by which a judgment creditor can execute against the wages of a judgment debtor, an employer may not resort to self-help to recover debts owed to the employer by an employee from the wages then due to the employee.
I was a netadmin/sysadmin and had all the keys to the kingdom: key-locks, cipher-locks, mag-locks, passwords, you name it. Backed up what I needed, dropped my letter off, left on good terms, doing real work till the last day. They could have locked me out, but they needed me to be able to finish what I was working on, and the boss was hypercool, so it worked out. Disabled my own account on the last day.
Me three.
At my last company, I was the "Configuration Manager", which also meant I was the de facto IT guy. I gave two weeks notice and worked up until the afternoon of the last day of those two weeks, trained my replacement and gave him all my passwords and whatnot. Aside from a few dirty looks from my soon-to-be ex-boss, it couldn't have gone more smoothly.
The place before that was a different story; half the engineers were in one conference room being told they'd get to stay on for two or three months to wind down operations, and the other half (including me) were in another room being told to pack up and get out. Severance was generous, to be sure, but it wasn't pleasant. I had absolutely no compunction about grabbing all the source code I'd worked on in the last four years before I left; they'd not turned off accounts during the layoff meeting, as seems to be common.
Ethical? (Re:Sort of good they fixed it...)
on
Google Fixes IE Bug
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This really goes to show really how much of an ethical company google really is.
I've been as much a Google fanboy as anyone--Gmail, Google search on my Web sites and built in to my Web browser, AdSense, Blogger. Except that Blogger, owned by Google, has deleted my account with no discussion and no appeal.
I think the "not evil" ethical standards may be slipping just a bit.
As an aside, Annalee Newitz first came to my attention in the entertainment paper Metro distributed here in the South Bay area. I'm not sure if she's syndicated, but I like to think of her as a local. She's pretty sharp.
And her other chosen topics are interesting, as well. From TA's author credit:
Contributing editor Annalee Newitz (brainsploitation@yahoo.com) wrote about the female orgasm in issue 13.07.
Slashdot Mirror
What does reinstalling Windows every three months do for you? Even back in the bad old days of DOS-based Windows 98SE, once a year sufficed. With updated, patched, current XP SP2, I haven't had to reinstall once since I bought this laptop in spring '04.
The product for which I'm currently designing the installer is officially supported on XP, and unofficially supported on 2000. If you're using 2000, the installer pops a message saying "${PRODUCT_NAME} runs best under Windows XP Service Pack 1 or greater (Service Pack 2 strongly recommended). ${PRODUCT_NAME} will work under Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 or greater, but no support is offered." and you are then given a chance to exit gracefully. It's nice writing the spec for the installer as I'm designing it.
This is just bad design, considering that you can get the numeric version and check greater-than-or-equal-to. The textual version ("Windows XP") should never be a criteria for installing or running. As long as the numeric version of Vista is greater than 5.1.2600, my installers will cope.
(my emphasis)
I think it's a terrific idea. It's not, however, a new one.
DwarfGoanna said:
To be fair, that sounded more like Ballmer than Jobs.
WMV = Windows Media Video
WMF = Windows Metafile
They are not the same format. Which is not to say that there may not be vulnerabilities in WMV.
Monkeydo: "Google!"
"Merchantability and...
liability."
How about just coding to standards? Why is that so hard to get? I use a Web browser (Opera) which conforms to those same standards in what it will accept and how it renders; all you (email chiefs/chefs) need to do is send me standards-compliant data. I'll take it from there. Leave the proprietary browser-specific workaround crap back in 1999 where it belongs.
Looks a lot like the Osborne my dad rented (!) one summer. It must have been 1980 because we got one of the first IBM 5150 PCs not too much later.
The Gap and Old Navy are owned by the same company. Not that it really matters--your example could have just as easily gone from The Gap to Limited or something--but it's amusing that the "better representative" store is actually part of the same group.
Me three.
At my last company, I was the "Configuration Manager", which also meant I was the de facto IT guy. I gave two weeks notice and worked up until the afternoon of the last day of those two weeks, trained my replacement and gave him all my passwords and whatnot. Aside from a few dirty looks from my soon-to-be ex-boss, it couldn't have gone more smoothly.
The place before that was a different story; half the engineers were in one conference room being told they'd get to stay on for two or three months to wind down operations, and the other half (including me) were in another room being told to pack up and get out. Severance was generous, to be sure, but it wasn't pleasant. I had absolutely no compunction about grabbing all the source code I'd worked on in the last four years before I left; they'd not turned off accounts during the layoff meeting, as seems to be common.
I've been as much a Google fanboy as anyone--Gmail, Google search on my Web sites and built in to my Web browser, AdSense, Blogger. Except that Blogger, owned by Google, has deleted my account with no discussion and no appeal.
I think the "not evil" ethical standards may be slipping just a bit.
False, I'm afraid. That's Doha, Kuwait.
The ActiveX, The? No one who speaks German could be an evil man.