Actually, Windows 2000 does come with a built-in firewall. MSFT in their infinite wisdom just decided to not provide a good interface to it, or even a convenient shortcut. The interface is rough, even by MSFT standards, but with a little tinkering, it will do most of what you need it to.
When Company-A sends Company-B a C&D letter, I agree it is not the same. When multi-billion-dollar-global-organization-A sends penniless-student-B a threat to sue or be put asunder, it is indeed extremely intimidating. And we were talking about intimidation. The end result was exactly the same: the site was taken down. At least until public outcry at corporate bullying stepped in.
I have never heard of any of these behaviours. Typically, if you are a bad credit customer, they block ALL calls, not just premium and/or long-distance ones.
As for being a nuisance caller, that's a requested blacklist, which is quite different than what Vonage is complaining about.
Phone companies can block what numbers you can call or receive calls from
Please provide an example of this that isn't an explicit blacklist that you (or the other party) have requested. If my telco tells me I can't access a competitor's phone number, I'll be making a few calls to the CRTC (Canadian version of the FCC).
If you're practicing unsafe netting (no firewall) running an unpatched box, then there's a very good chance that you're box has been compromised and you don't know it. Not all exploits result in BSODs or crashes.
For all you know, you've been zombied and are sending out all those lovely penis-enlargement e-mails we all appreciate.
WHOOSH! You hear that? That was the point and you missed it.
If the BF dies, then BF-free tuner cards ain't worth much, are they? This isn't a case of what happened to all those old TVs with the v-chip/broadcast flag/windows OS/insert favorit evil technology here. This is a case of gp hedging bets against evil technology that never makes it to market (at least we hope).
Re:I have to Agree - PayPal need serious help
on
eBay Begins A Change
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I have no problem with the fees they charge. As you said, 2.9% is acceptable (and actually quite in line with what you would pay for a merchant account elsewhere anyways). What I have a problem with is them standing up and saying: "We certify this buyer/seller as being trustworthy, please do business with them." Then when it turns out that person is a thief they pull the ole duck & cover caveat emptor crap.
If they say nothing about the reliability of a vendor, then I agree (somewhat) with buyer beware, but they are still providing the forum for this transaction, and are in fact acting as the middle-man for the whole transaction now that they have acquired PP. They bear some responsibility for fraud protection because they are the clearing house, but they are intent to dodge that to the extreme. That's what I have a problem with.
Re:I have to Agree - PayPal need serious help
on
eBay Begins A Change
·
· Score: 1
Just when eBay was buying PayPal, the two actually had conflicting fraud policies. PayPal wouldn't do anything after 30 days, eBay wouldn't do anything until 30 days had passed. And each of their answers were: "Deal with PayPal/eBay first, then come to us."
I even had the PayPal rep tell me that essentially, there's nothing they can do if the seller never ships anything and I should contact the police. I'm sure the police give a rat's ass about the $150 I got ripped off from some loser thousands of miles away! If it weren't for my CC fraud policy, I would have been out the entire purchase. Of course, the seller was listed as a "TRUSTED SOURCE" on PayPal, which means diddly squat.
I wonder if there would be a way to get a large, essential service to effectively blacklist MCI customers. Something like Google. If they stood up and said "We're blocking all MCI traffic until they take action against their spammers", I wonder how long it would take for policy to change.
I'm not naive enough to think this would ever happen, but we can dream, can't we?
Actually, they don't. Microsoft have repeatedly threatened & upped the price on vendors who sell machines without the OS pre-installed. And they have also charged for a Windows license for every machine sold, regardless of what OS was actually on it. This was the meat of one of the many lawsuits pending against MSFT when W. took office (and then they went away...)
Go back over the news reports at the time, and note the wide international support for the idea that Iraq had WMDs.
The wide international support I saw for the claim that Saddam _HAD_ WMD was a quickly discredited British intelligence report. Even the UN weapons inspection team, lead by Hans Blix, was skeptical and they indicated just days before the invasion that Iraq was mostly complying with UN inspection teams. Of course, W and his ilk jumped on the "mostly" part and turned that into "not".
What DID have wide internation support was the belief that Saddam was _TRYING_ to develop weapons. And just like I'm _TRYING_ to talk my wife into a threesome with my hot neighbour, there ain't no chance in hell of it actually happening.
Frankly, if you had asked me (and unfortunately nobody did but all that will change once I take over the world!) the UN inspection team should have been the one to make the call. They were on the front lines, looking at the material directly in front of them. They were the ones that we entrusted with the job because of their expertise in the matter. They were the ones who could honestly answer "What's going on in Iraq?" and in the last few days they were relegated to the back burner.
The wide international support you mention was fabricated and under suspicion even at that time, and as far as I remember, it was only being held up as proof by US and British news media. If you have links to disprove my memory, I will retract, but my memory of the world back then seems to be quite different than yours.
There's nothing about OSS that inherantly protects you. This is espically true since I'm guessing indeed you have NOT done the audit I described. Few people have the programming skills necessary to do so in a useful way and even fewer have the mountain of free time it takes.
I love this argument. Of course the vast majority of people haven't pored over the source to find every detail. Similarly, few have opened their car engine's manual and pored over the specs to see if the Ford engineers got it right. But guess what, I can go to my mechanic and ask him: "What does this alternator thingy do?" and he can tell me. Not only that, but he can tell me how it does that. Not so with closed source.
I sincerely doubt many people have even looked at the gcc source (I'm guessing under 1%). But you _CAN_ look at it. That says a lot, both about the people who wrote it and about the people who package it. Writing code that you know people will see is a lot different than writing code that will forever reside in some closet somewhere in the bowels of Redmond...uhh...Sydney.
Do open-source bugs exist? Sure. Do open-source deliberate exploits exist? Unlikely. For one thing the exploit would have to be as you descibed, split over multiple calls & deliberately obfuscated to avoid casual detection. This level of complexity reduces the probability that such a thing exists and has avoided detection. It's not impossible, just unlikely. And that's good enough for me, cuz it's more than those closed source derivatives can say.
Why does there seem to be so much confusion on the matter?
Because of the coverage from most media outlets on the justification for the war in Iraq; most notably, Fox News. It was statements like this that helped confuse the nation:
"Sept 11 was the worst terrorist attack in the history of the world. We are going to war because Iraq helps terrorists and we don't want them to repeat 9-11. Are you behind us?"
While never stating outright that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attacks, the implication is pretty obvious, and I'm not the least bit surprised that so many Americans believe Saddam was the mastermind behind 9-11. I remember scratching my head and going "Huh?" often whenever Donny Rummy would make the most elegant jumps over the chasm between the truth and what the administration said was the truth.
This is a chicken-and-egg effect. Developers will stop writing IE only pages when critical mass demands it. Until then, install the IEView extension & complain to your bank/post office/office supply store/whoever is writing non-standard html.
I have personally converted both my wife (fairly tech-savvy but resistent to change) and mother-in-law (pretty low-tech), and both prefer Firefox hands down. The trick is:
Install Firefox.
Set it default and hide IE icon.
Install a small handful of useful extensions.
Give them the 10 second rundown.
Everybody Profits!
On the converting bad corporate citizens front, I am pleased to say that the last IE Only site I regularly visit (epost.ca) has re-coded to be standards compliant and now works fine in Firefox. When I complained to them 6 months ago, their initial response was "We code IE cuz 97% of our traffic uses it", but they eventually saw the light.
I don't know if I'm alone here, but I found the first season to be really rough. Sinclair just didn't do it for me, Sheridan was much better IMHO. I only picked up B5 in season 2 and watched season 1 after the fact. And while I enjoyed how they tied the plot lines together in Seasons 3 & 4, I still found the acting too stuffy & forced to be called good.
Neither does the current system, where brownnoses and incompetent fools get the raises, while good programmers with poor social skills get the shaft. Plus, programmers who are paid well enough WILL produce their best code out of sheer pride (or peer pressure).
I love this example. At what point in life did social skills become irrelevant? It's a reality that appearance & how well you play with others plays just as large a role as the quality of your work; accept it.
I'm sure there are remote examples of coders there working in closets pumping out reams of code built to specs provided by some abstract concept called a "customer", but I have yet to see it. I have worked in pure development shops, consultancy companies, product companies, oil & gas, government, etc, etc, and I have yet to see a SINGLE example of a coder sitting in a basement all day long.
Tell me how can a programmer "endanger people or projects".
There are lots of ways a coder can "endanger a project". Bad code = broken product that people don't buy or extra cycles spent debugging. As for endangering people, that will depend on the nature of the project. Of course, it is quite possible that the code may do something unexpected. I worked on one system that tracked every life (pets included) in a 50 km vicinity of a sour gas well in case of a break out. Tell me that a failure of that system wouldn't endanger lives (for those that don't know, a sour gas well means that there's sulfur in the gas, usually in the form of H2S, highly toxic in even small amounts).
This would be a good point... except it's crap. No programmer gets extra hours anyway.
My last job was as a Senior Consultant for one of the largest IT consultants in north america (15,000 plus consultants), and trust me, extra hours came with the territory (especially billable hours). But there was always a tradeoff. It was never in straight pay, but I was rewarded after a project was delivered, be it a token gift or extra time off or bonus package. If you do great work for a company, don't be afraid to stand up for yourself. 'No' is not a swear word if you phrase it properly.
I realize that there are complete morons out there, and I have encountered the stupid '9:00 - 5:00 presence even if you were up to 3:00 am fixing a problem' policy. From the article it sounds like this guy hit an extreme example of this, but the truth is, we've gotta stop being cows. If you are in the top 10% of your company, you should have an easy job of proving your worth to the company, and you have to exact some career management on your hugher-ups. Don't assume that your supervisor or boss is looking out for you. They're looking out for the company ('Ask yourself: is this good for the company?') because that is their job requirement. But profits and employee happiness are not mutually exclusive, and we, collectively, have to present this to management in a positive way.
You remember them, right? They were the country that stood shoulder to shoulder with you in Afghanistan. They patrolled the Persian Gulf with you. They provided safe harbour to thousands of people trapped on planes on Sept 11. They lost lives in Afghanistan.
They looked at the "evidence" presented in justifying Iraq and said "Sorry, not convincing enough" and were promptly villified in the media. They're your No 2 trading partner. Their military is also very closely aligned with yours, including soldier exchange programs and cross-border training missions. (Virtually every elite sniper in the US military is trained in Canada)
The concerns over W's presidency in Canada are pretty strong. Our Prime Minister (Jean Chretien at the time) stopped short of gloating over the WMD fiasco, but it is clear that Canada and the US have not seen such a drastic rift in foreign policy since the nuclear proliferation way back during the cold war.
Personally, if my best friend and neighbour who has supported me time and time again, and was there in my time of need, and was the first to sign up for an extended mission in Afghanistan to weed out the Taliban's protection of Al Quaeda, balks at invading this other country just on my say-so, well, I may want to re-check my facts.
While nobody can argue that Canada is a military powerhouse (far from it), convincing us to step up where needed, in our limited capacity, has never been difficult. If you can't sell your best friend on something, how far down have you pulled that wool over your own eyes?
It's not about putting world opinion above your interests, it's about listening to your best friends tell you their concerns. When the vast majority of your closest and strongest allies are all shouting the same thing, maybe there's a reason to pay attention.
This administration has mislead, deceived and outright lied more blatantly and successfully than any other in recent memory, and yet the popuace seems content to forget (or ignore) that and base their voting on 5 second sound bites.
I'm sorry, are you actually comparing an extortion scheme with negotiation? There's a huge difference to the "we'll beat any price" mentality of open competition, than "buy this or else we'll cause you pain" which is exactly what his "offer" provides.
I infect your PC then sell you the tool to remove the infection. I can see how you would confuse that with a company willing to make a deal to keep an existing customer.
28% of time spent on messaging/Internet, 2% in Excel
A study commissioned by Acadys and Microcost measured usage of computer tools
by employees in Europe. It revealed that the failure rate of a Windows system
is 8%, and the paperless office is still a long ways off.
What do workers do with their computers? It's this thorny question that
a study commissioned by Microcost, in collaboration with Acadys, tries to answer.
The investigation is aimed not at watching users, but rather it hopes to focus
attention on the materials cost of managing IT assets.
During one month, 1, 285, 500 workstations were scanned at 1 million companies
in 7 European countries (France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, England
and Italy).
It was calculated that each user spends, on average, 2:15 per day on their
computer. More than a quarter of that time (28%) was dedicated to surfing the
Internet and e-mail. The remainder of the time is spent using general office
applications (17%), work-related applications (14%) and Windows Explorer (9%).
The 17% of time spent using general office applications can be broken down
to 15% spent in word processing, and 2% in Excel.
Companies may be interested in modifying their policies on software licensing
to avoid paying for an entire office suite if the main tool used is a word
processor. According to the study, 10 software applications occupy 67% of users
time. This number rises to 89% in the industrial sector, but is limited to
42% in the services sector.
In addition to the statistics on software usage, the AMI software enables
us to extract statistics on the reliability on Windows systems from the data
collected. The average failure rate requiring a reboot is found to be around
8% per session. The number fluctuates largely around the version of Windows.
Windows 2000 achieves a failure rate of 4%, NT4 a rate of 3% and Windows XP
approaches 12%.
Furthermore, the study reveals how workers are using printing materials. The
paperless office has not yet arrived, since employees print an average of 10
pages per day. This is broken down into 3-4 print jobs, half of which are directed
to local printers, and half to network printers. Due to the cost breakdown
of consumables, the cost of printing to a network printer approaches pennies
per page, but this cost is multiplied by a factor of 5 for local print jobs.
It is not surprising to note that 95% of sites used Windows environments,
with Windows 2000 dominating the workplace. At 42% of sites, Windows 2000 replaced
NT 4, which is now used by a mere 16%. Windows XP appears to be having trouble
finding a market, especially with manufacturing companies, 83% of whom opted
for Windows 2000. The average deployment of Windows XP was around 2%, with
only the service industry having an above-average usage of Windows XP at 5%.
The story behind all these figures is several recommendations to IT managers
for optimizing their equipment management efforts. Among companies studied
were successful results using thin clients, open source software and improved
software license management resulting in longer life spans for IT assets, both
hardware and software.
I don't do it for everything, but I have done it in the past on a CD I really liked. Especially if I was bringing it into my car. I've also lost a few CDs and a DVD to a scratch. Cat knocked over the PS2 while the movie was playing...not good.
I also occasionally back up a PC game or two, especially if it's one of those "must have this CD and only this CD in the drive to install/run" type games.
Actually, I would suggest that the reason more and more people are violating the law is that the law is getting more and more out of what with the current state of affairs. Cars have improved in the past 40 years, tires have improved in the last 40 years, driver training has improved drastically over the past 40 years, why haven't speed limits?
I was working at McGill University in Montreal when an entire lab of computers was stolen during renovations over the weekend. We're talking about 40 PCs and 2 network printers.
Police came, looked around, took a statement and checked with campus security. That was it. No fingerprinting, no CSI magic. Didn't even get to see them pull out the yellow crime scene tape.
YMMV, but if no-one gets hurt and there's no sign of violence, it's unlikely they'll pull out the dust.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a good link http://homepages.wmich.edu/~mchugha/w2kfirewall.ht m to walk you through setting it up.
When Company-A sends Company-B a C&D letter, I agree it is not the same. When multi-billion-dollar-global-organization-A sends penniless-student-B a threat to sue or be put asunder, it is indeed extremely intimidating. And we were talking about intimidation. The end result was exactly the same: the site was taken down. At least until public outcry at corporate bullying stepped in.
How 'bout Mike Rowe? Not a lawsuit, but threatening a penniless student with a lawsuit has the same effect.
As for being a nuisance caller, that's a requested blacklist, which is quite different than what Vonage is complaining about.
Please provide an example of this that isn't an explicit blacklist that you (or the other party) have requested. If my telco tells me I can't access a competitor's phone number, I'll be making a few calls to the CRTC (Canadian version of the FCC).
For all you know, you've been zombied and are sending out all those lovely penis-enlargement e-mails we all appreciate.
If the BF dies, then BF-free tuner cards ain't worth much, are they? This isn't a case of what happened to all those old TVs with the v-chip/broadcast flag/windows OS/insert favorit evil technology here. This is a case of gp hedging bets against evil technology that never makes it to market (at least we hope).
If they say nothing about the reliability of a vendor, then I agree (somewhat) with buyer beware, but they are still providing the forum for this transaction, and are in fact acting as the middle-man for the whole transaction now that they have acquired PP. They bear some responsibility for fraud protection because they are the clearing house, but they are intent to dodge that to the extreme. That's what I have a problem with.
I even had the PayPal rep tell me that essentially, there's nothing they can do if the seller never ships anything and I should contact the police. I'm sure the police give a rat's ass about the $150 I got ripped off from some loser thousands of miles away! If it weren't for my CC fraud policy, I would have been out the entire purchase. Of course, the seller was listed as a "TRUSTED SOURCE" on PayPal, which means diddly squat.
May PayPal & eBay both rot in hell...
I'm not naive enough to think this would ever happen, but we can dream, can't we?
Actually, they don't. Microsoft have repeatedly threatened & upped the price on vendors who sell machines without the OS pre-installed. And they have also charged for a Windows license for every machine sold, regardless of what OS was actually on it. This was the meat of one of the many lawsuits pending against MSFT when W. took office (and then they went away...)
The wide international support I saw for the claim that Saddam _HAD_ WMD was a quickly discredited British intelligence report. Even the UN weapons inspection team, lead by Hans Blix, was skeptical and they indicated just days before the invasion that Iraq was mostly complying with UN inspection teams. Of course, W and his ilk jumped on the "mostly" part and turned that into "not".
What DID have wide internation support was the belief that Saddam was _TRYING_ to develop weapons. And just like I'm _TRYING_ to talk my wife into a threesome with my hot neighbour, there ain't no chance in hell of it actually happening.
Frankly, if you had asked me (and unfortunately nobody did but all that will change once I take over the world!) the UN inspection team should have been the one to make the call. They were on the front lines, looking at the material directly in front of them. They were the ones that we entrusted with the job because of their expertise in the matter. They were the ones who could honestly answer "What's going on in Iraq?" and in the last few days they were relegated to the back burner.
The wide international support you mention was fabricated and under suspicion even at that time, and as far as I remember, it was only being held up as proof by US and British news media. If you have links to disprove my memory, I will retract, but my memory of the world back then seems to be quite different than yours.
I love this argument. Of course the vast majority of people haven't pored over the source to find every detail. Similarly, few have opened their car engine's manual and pored over the specs to see if the Ford engineers got it right. But guess what, I can go to my mechanic and ask him: "What does this alternator thingy do?" and he can tell me. Not only that, but he can tell me how it does that. Not so with closed source.
I sincerely doubt many people have even looked at the gcc source (I'm guessing under 1%). But you _CAN_ look at it. That says a lot, both about the people who wrote it and about the people who package it. Writing code that you know people will see is a lot different than writing code that will forever reside in some closet somewhere in the bowels of Redmond...uhh...Sydney.
Do open-source bugs exist? Sure. Do open-source deliberate exploits exist? Unlikely. For one thing the exploit would have to be as you descibed, split over multiple calls & deliberately obfuscated to avoid casual detection. This level of complexity reduces the probability that such a thing exists and has avoided detection. It's not impossible, just unlikely. And that's good enough for me, cuz it's more than those closed source derivatives can say.
Because of the coverage from most media outlets on the justification for the war in Iraq; most notably, Fox News. It was statements like this that helped confuse the nation:
"Sept 11 was the worst terrorist attack in the history of the world. We are going to war because Iraq helps terrorists and we don't want them to repeat 9-11. Are you behind us?"
While never stating outright that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attacks, the implication is pretty obvious, and I'm not the least bit surprised that so many Americans believe Saddam was the mastermind behind 9-11. I remember scratching my head and going "Huh?" often whenever Donny Rummy would make the most elegant jumps over the chasm between the truth and what the administration said was the truth.
I have personally converted both my wife (fairly tech-savvy but resistent to change) and mother-in-law (pretty low-tech), and both prefer Firefox hands down. The trick is:
On the converting bad corporate citizens front, I am pleased to say that the last IE Only site I regularly visit (epost.ca) has re-coded to be standards compliant and now works fine in Firefox. When I complained to them 6 months ago, their initial response was "We code IE cuz 97% of our traffic uses it", but they eventually saw the light.
I don't know if I'm alone here, but I found the first season to be really rough. Sinclair just didn't do it for me, Sheridan was much better IMHO. I only picked up B5 in season 2 and watched season 1 after the fact. And while I enjoyed how they tied the plot lines together in Seasons 3 & 4, I still found the acting too stuffy & forced to be called good.
Neither does the current system, where brownnoses and incompetent fools get the raises, while good programmers with poor social skills get the shaft. Plus, programmers who are paid well enough WILL produce their best code out of sheer pride (or peer pressure).
I love this example. At what point in life did social skills become irrelevant? It's a reality that appearance & how well you play with others plays just as large a role as the quality of your work; accept it.
I'm sure there are remote examples of coders there working in closets pumping out reams of code built to specs provided by some abstract concept called a "customer", but I have yet to see it. I have worked in pure development shops, consultancy companies, product companies, oil & gas, government, etc, etc, and I have yet to see a SINGLE example of a coder sitting in a basement all day long.
Tell me how can a programmer "endanger people or projects".
There are lots of ways a coder can "endanger a project". Bad code = broken product that people don't buy or extra cycles spent debugging. As for endangering people, that will depend on the nature of the project. Of course, it is quite possible that the code may do something unexpected. I worked on one system that tracked every life (pets included) in a 50 km vicinity of a sour gas well in case of a break out. Tell me that a failure of that system wouldn't endanger lives (for those that don't know, a sour gas well means that there's sulfur in the gas, usually in the form of H2S, highly toxic in even small amounts).
This would be a good point... except it's crap. No programmer gets extra hours anyway.
My last job was as a Senior Consultant for one of the largest IT consultants in north america (15,000 plus consultants), and trust me, extra hours came with the territory (especially billable hours). But there was always a tradeoff. It was never in straight pay, but I was rewarded after a project was delivered, be it a token gift or extra time off or bonus package. If you do great work for a company, don't be afraid to stand up for yourself. 'No' is not a swear word if you phrase it properly.
I realize that there are complete morons out there, and I have encountered the stupid '9:00 - 5:00 presence even if you were up to 3:00 am fixing a problem' policy. From the article it sounds like this guy hit an extreme example of this, but the truth is, we've gotta stop being cows. If you are in the top 10% of your company, you should have an easy job of proving your worth to the company, and you have to exact some career management on your hugher-ups. Don't assume that your supervisor or boss is looking out for you. They're looking out for the company ('Ask yourself: is this good for the company?') because that is their job requirement. But profits and employee happiness are not mutually exclusive, and we, collectively, have to present this to management in a positive way.
I was referring mainly to Canada.
You remember them, right? They were the country that stood shoulder to shoulder with you in Afghanistan. They patrolled the Persian Gulf with you. They provided safe harbour to thousands of people trapped on planes on Sept 11. They lost lives in Afghanistan.
They looked at the "evidence" presented in justifying Iraq and said "Sorry, not convincing enough" and were promptly villified in the media. They're your No 2 trading partner. Their military is also very closely aligned with yours, including soldier exchange programs and cross-border training missions. (Virtually every elite sniper in the US military is trained in Canada)
The concerns over W's presidency in Canada are pretty strong. Our Prime Minister (Jean Chretien at the time) stopped short of gloating over the WMD fiasco, but it is clear that Canada and the US have not seen such a drastic rift in foreign policy since the nuclear proliferation way back during the cold war.
Personally, if my best friend and neighbour who has supported me time and time again, and was there in my time of need, and was the first to sign up for an extended mission in Afghanistan to weed out the Taliban's protection of Al Quaeda, balks at invading this other country just on my say-so, well, I may want to re-check my facts.
While nobody can argue that Canada is a military powerhouse (far from it), convincing us to step up where needed, in our limited capacity, has never been difficult. If you can't sell your best friend on something, how far down have you pulled that wool over your own eyes?
It's not about putting world opinion above your interests, it's about listening to your best friends tell you their concerns. When the vast majority of your closest and strongest allies are all shouting the same thing, maybe there's a reason to pay attention.
This administration has mislead, deceived and outright lied more blatantly and successfully than any other in recent memory, and yet the popuace seems content to forget (or ignore) that and base their voting on 5 second sound bites.
I'm sorry, are you actually comparing an extortion scheme with negotiation? There's a huge difference to the "we'll beat any price" mentality of open competition, than "buy this or else we'll cause you pain" which is exactly what his "offer" provides.
I infect your PC then sell you the tool to remove the infection. I can see how you would confuse that with a company willing to make a deal to keep an existing customer.
28% of time spent on messaging/Internet, 2% in Excel
A study commissioned by Acadys and Microcost measured usage of computer tools by employees in Europe. It revealed that the failure rate of a Windows system is 8%, and the paperless office is still a long ways off.
What do workers do with their computers? It's this thorny question that a study commissioned by Microcost, in collaboration with Acadys, tries to answer. The investigation is aimed not at watching users, but rather it hopes to focus attention on the materials cost of managing IT assets.
During one month, 1, 285, 500 workstations were scanned at 1 million companies in 7 European countries (France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, England and Italy).
It was calculated that each user spends, on average, 2:15 per day on their computer. More than a quarter of that time (28%) was dedicated to surfing the Internet and e-mail. The remainder of the time is spent using general office applications (17%), work-related applications (14%) and Windows Explorer (9%). The 17% of time spent using general office applications can be broken down to 15% spent in word processing, and 2% in Excel.
Companies may be interested in modifying their policies on software licensing to avoid paying for an entire office suite if the main tool used is a word processor. According to the study, 10 software applications occupy 67% of users time. This number rises to 89% in the industrial sector, but is limited to 42% in the services sector.
In addition to the statistics on software usage, the AMI software enables us to extract statistics on the reliability on Windows systems from the data collected. The average failure rate requiring a reboot is found to be around 8% per session. The number fluctuates largely around the version of Windows. Windows 2000 achieves a failure rate of 4%, NT4 a rate of 3% and Windows XP approaches 12%.
Furthermore, the study reveals how workers are using printing materials. The paperless office has not yet arrived, since employees print an average of 10 pages per day. This is broken down into 3-4 print jobs, half of which are directed to local printers, and half to network printers. Due to the cost breakdown of consumables, the cost of printing to a network printer approaches pennies per page, but this cost is multiplied by a factor of 5 for local print jobs.
It is not surprising to note that 95% of sites used Windows environments, with Windows 2000 dominating the workplace. At 42% of sites, Windows 2000 replaced NT 4, which is now used by a mere 16%. Windows XP appears to be having trouble finding a market, especially with manufacturing companies, 83% of whom opted for Windows 2000. The average deployment of Windows XP was around 2%, with only the service industry having an above-average usage of Windows XP at 5%.
The story behind all these figures is several recommendations to IT managers for optimizing their equipment management efforts. Among companies studied were successful results using thin clients, open source software and improved software license management resulting in longer life spans for IT assets, both hardware and software.
I don't do it for everything, but I have done it in the past on a CD I really liked. Especially if I was bringing it into my car. I've also lost a few CDs and a DVD to a scratch. Cat knocked over the PS2 while the movie was playing...not good.
I also occasionally back up a PC game or two, especially if it's one of those "must have this CD and only this CD in the drive to install/run" type games.
Actually, I would suggest that the reason more and more people are violating the law is that the law is getting more and more out of what with the current state of affairs. Cars have improved in the past 40 years, tires have improved in the last 40 years, driver training has improved drastically over the past 40 years, why haven't speed limits?
That sounds like fun. Eject a few bad drivers and it becomes a PPV event!
I was working at McGill University in Montreal when an entire lab of computers was stolen during renovations over the weekend. We're talking about 40 PCs and 2 network printers.
Police came, looked around, took a statement and checked with campus security. That was it. No fingerprinting, no CSI magic. Didn't even get to see them pull out the yellow crime scene tape.
YMMV, but if no-one gets hurt and there's no sign of violence, it's unlikely they'll pull out the dust.