While true most MMORPG have problems, that shouldn't mean every future MMORPG should follow in their footsteps.
Blizzard have had years of free publicity as people have praised them for the slow alpha and beta testing, waiting till "it's ready" rather than when the beancounters tell them to launch.
Clearly it isn't ready. So people have the right to be annoyed at paying to sit in a queue. Especially if true that you can't post on the BB while waiting because you need to be logged into a server to post. They should have anticipated server capacity, people should be able to jump servers without loss of their character, it isn't just about planning a great game, it is about planning contingency should something unexpected cause things to go wrong.
They have sold 600,000 units. Assuming everyone is still playing - a safe assumption seeing as the novelty value will still be strong - then that means they are making over a quarter of a million dollars a day in subs.
With that kind of income, buying extra servers, hiring temps to manually transfer existing accounts to new servers (which should have been something the software should have been able to do automatically), and offering rebates shouldn't be too much to ask.
I haven't played yet, I'm waiting for the EU launch at the end of next month. Hopefully things will be better by then, this is the one time the regular US first, EU later policy on entertainment may see benefits!
Nothing, why, do you think I could get a few quid if I asked them nicely? I like the iPod, I like the Zen Xtra a little better. Hardly a big deal, it isn't a holy war you know.
Have you seen the giant piece of FUD the Creative CEO is trying to spread?
Apple have made a decision to go for larger flash storage than is currently normal (but will be normal within the year based on previous year's trends), but have chosen to have no screen.
Screenless flash based players are indeed tech that was abandoned by everyone else several years ago. How is that FUD?
If they don't know the CD they've ripped particularly well, most people I think would like to see what the name of the track they are currently enjoying is, something you can't do on a shuffle, but can on any alternative cheap flash player out there. With a gig of space, that is a lot of songs to memorise the name of.
I don't know, maybe it is a feature that people aren't bothered about and so it won't harm shuffle sales. Time will tell.
if Creative still *exists* in 18 months, I'll be surprised.
You are probably the only one who thinks that. Creative have been in the audio electronics business for 2 decades. They aren't going bust any time soon. They appear to be getting good press. The Zen Photo just took best audio to go at CES. Based on the last quarter's sales, they are estimating 45% growth this year. Hardly the estimates of a company about to go bust...
Creative models seem to have better battery life, either easily replacable with a spare without needing special tools (Zen Xtra) or extra long battery life (Zen Touch).
The iPod always seems to rely heavily on iTunes, not just the store, but the software itself. For example multiple playlist creation and on fly editing (you can see whay songs are coming up and remove them if you want to) can be done directly on the Zen, I believe the iPod will need synching with iTunes to do the same.
There is far more freedom to copy songs to and from the Zen, to multiple machines, something that is difficult if not impossible to do on the iPod.
Noone can deny iPod's market share but the design seemed to stick in 2002/3, the Zen has overtaken Apple with more features, and they easily beat them in price.
Firefox is taking IE share. Opera is doing very nicely amongst those of us who don't mind paying for top quality products - Opera just works, and works well, Firefox works after various extensions are added. All the cool features in the 'fox were copied from Opera including tabbed browsing and mouse gestures.
They also are doing very well in the PDA/mobile phone browser market. They really don't need to look for new sources of income.
Opera is also easier to deploy in a corporate enviroment. What is easy on one machine, isn't quite so much fun when publishing to 1000...
"Donlay said there are a few ways that sellers can hold auctions on eBay for charity donations. The first is through a tool called Givingworks, where the money never even reaches the sellers hands; it goes directly to the charity."
Anyone know why he was collecting the money himself rather than following ebay's procedure which would guarantee to all bidders that the money really would go to charity?
First: you're a fuckwit. No you are a troll, a foul mouthed one at that.
Second: I was talking about personal experience You stated you knew of no cases where CCTV had secured a conviction, yet the bbc is full of such cases, I personally know of no case of arson, it doesn't mean to say arson doesn't exist. You made a meaningless point and I pulled you up on it.
Third: in each of those stories you linked to, the CCTV images were at best used as supporting evidence
Hours of CCTV footage was checked until a known sex offender was seen, this lead was then followed up. The fact a sex offender was in the area at the time was suspicious, this fact was obtained from the video footage. CCTV directly led the police to the rapist, who was a known sex offender because CCTV had previously caught him indecently exposing himself, this previous footage directly leading to indecent exposure charge. It is all there in the BBC news story.
As for catching child killers, you can't be British if you don't know that the CCTV footage was extremely helpful in the Bulger case. Google on Nail Bomber Dave Copeland, the Police clearly stated CCTV footage provided the breakthrough.
Fourth: the references I was actually referring to was to support your statement: We now know it does reduce crime, and increases detection and conviction rates You quoted my comment about catching rapists then asked for evidence. When I produce evidence you deny what is in your face.
Cite or retract please. You've gone from trolling to being extraordinarily ignorant and rude. You are no position to demand anything, but here is quote from the Home Office for you, again found in seconds on google.
"along with the introduction of more CCTV cameras and better street lighting, have dramatically cut robbery in some areas of Bradford. There are currently 240 CCTV cameras across the district, along with cameras using automatic number plate recognition technology.
In May this year, the Partnership placed a series of cameras throughout the city centre to instantaneously check car registration numbers against police databases. This pioneering scheme the first in the UK means that officers are immediately alerted if a vehicle is wanted in connection with a crime. "
No doubt this isn't evidence to you, after all, the Home Office doesn't have you as an advisor, but I'm afraid I can't be bothered with you anymore. Post another rant if you like, I shan't be reading it.
That took 3 seconds on the beeb's newsearch. So I really can't take your comment "I know of no cases where the cameras actually secured a conviction." very seriously. Do you troll slashdot often?
I think other countries have to understand the British obsession with binge drinking and random physical drunken violence to appreciate why we don't really care about the amount of CCTV.
When it is just you and a bunch of drunken yobs on the street, you may still get the crap beaten out of you or mugged, but at least with CCTV you stand a good chance of getting them caught and convicted.
We now know it does reduce crime, and increases detection and conviction rates, all at the cost of some imagined "privacy" while in a PUBLIC place.
CCTV has caught child killers, rapists, drunk drivers and so forth, in return there is footage of me scratching my arse while waiting to cross the road , which will be kept for a month or so before being taped over.
Hardly a terrible price to pay all things considered.
When the government passes a law mandating all cameras have to be digital, all digital footage has to be kept forever, and connected to a government face recognition system, then I'll be concerned.
As it stands most footage is erased after a month, and is stored on hundreds of individual unconnected systems. Hardly Big Brother.
A rough and cheap example, but never the less a belief that Apache is somehow super secure is a nonsense.
The many eyes argument is a tired one - how many people actually check the code, how many of those people are experienced enough to find vulnerabilities?
Look at the DARPA funded Linux Security effort. It died because noone was contributing.
Open source is great because you can read the code, but a belief that someone else must be auditing that code leads to security through delusionment - unless YOU are auditing the code, and unless YOU are trained to know how to audit it well, don't assume anyone else is.
When google bowed down to Yahoo!/Overture, handing over a hefty portion of voting stock to Yahoo!, their IPO became a joke.
Without advertising tech, they are a search engine that can be superceded at any time. That means their stock is worth nothing. Their only income is adverts, and their advertising business is owned by Yahoo!.
The same kind of people who go to AMX for wired home solutions.
There are only 2 main players in the millionare home and lecture theatre/boardroom setup - AMX and Crestron . Both charge an arm and a leg for solutions.
AMX even have their own unique programming language which means lucrative engineer visits every time you add a new piece of kit. It is very Visual Basic like but the only way to learn the language and acquire the compilier is spend a fortune on an AMX programming course. A user programmable remote control for $700 is easily a better solution for homes and small offices.
This could be Sony's attempt to break into the market, there is a huge gap between the millionare home theatre system, and the consumer level home theatre setup, Sony could well be planning to target this untapped market.
The Dell is under warranty and I'm not opening it, so card based solutions are out
Dell do not invalidate warranties because users opened up the case and inserted a PCI card. In fact do any OEM's do this? - Because I seriously doubt it.
Adding cards to the PC is part of the normal every day use of the machine. Get a PCI based tuner. It is that simple.
While I like Firefly, I agree it was "shoehorned" into an American West in Space Scenario.
An 1870's setting, with some fantasy elements - perhaps a genuine fortune telling mystic, or good guys lost the civil war alternate reality, would have been just as interesting as the sci-fi setting.
More crucially, an 1870's setting would have been at least half a million bucks an episode cheaper, without all the CGI, which may well have saved it from the Beancounters.
There is a reason the companies especially the sci-fi channel don't do space-fi anymore. It is cheaper to do non CGI earth based dross. You can get away with a smaller audience share, if the cost of producing an episode is relatively cheap.
And CGI at the moment doesn't come cheap.
If Joss had created an alternate reality 1870's western, rather than create a contrived science fiction setting, we'd still be enjoying his work on TV, rather than having to wait years between movies.
HD sizes were a bit much... Shouldn't they limit them to 3GB or less so that they can't be downloading movies and music quite as much?
You're talking about a PC that is just used for word processing papers. But you are out badly of touch with today's modern world.
Student presentations these days don't involve standing in front of an OHP talking. A lot of students use PowerPoint, embedded sound and video clips, digital photographs and so forth.
Students use a full range of media when doing course work. At least they do in the UK, and I mean all courses not just media. IT and art based ones.
Which means they need far more than 3GB of drive space. And they need plenty of RAM for video editing and PhotoShop.
As for gigabit networks being unneccessary apart from trading warez. I assume you also aren't aware that many campuses offer streaming facilities for lectures, allowing you to watch lectures again, or catch up on ones you missed? A few dozen students streaming lectures during revision week will soon soak up that gigabit of bandwidth.
Cost of a new Dell at Educational discount prices - 200 - $400. These will come with your custom built image pre installed and 3 years next day on site repair.
Cost of old keyboards to be sterilised (health and safety) plus technician hours installing and configuring OS, plus technician hours repairing that dodgy hard drive on PC #6 and the bent RGB pin on PC # 17 and replacing that failed PAT power supply on PC # 19, and replaced monitor on image burnt CRT #12 and...and... and.... well you hopefully get the picture.
Just because it is cheaper for you to have a dozen 486's lying around that you canabilise whenever the PII that you only run SSH on, has a problem, does not mean it is cheaper for everyone to do the same.
The cost over 3 years of a cheap bulk purchased Optiplex can easily be less than that box you pulled out of the trash last week. Especially when you have 20 - 60 machines in a class to keep working.
The "secret deal with Dell" is a polite way of telling you to mind your own business. The course secretary will tell you the same thing about Xerox when you inquire how much she is paying for toner.
Yes, in an ideal world, old PCs would be turned into dumb terminals, or tools for ancient compliers. In the real world, where replacing that failed 10 year old harddrive is going to cost 1/3 of the cost of a new Dell, and you know statisically AT LEAST 1/2 of your machines will lose their hardrive or something similar due to old age in the next 3 years, it's easier and cheaper to go for new, even if the CPU on the new box never reaches 0.05% utilisation.
Cost isn't just box price, it is maintainance costs, maintainance labor, admin arranging purchases orders for that labour and replacement parts, academic cost for machines out of order during a critical class and so on.
"I didn't know about the Who's Who book and even if I did, I might not have one handy. "
I find it slightly disconcerting that we may be producing a generation that has no research skills bar Google.
When I went to school we were taught library skills, is that still the case, or do teachers assume you are all going to hit google?
Google does not trawl the entire internet, it barely touches it in fact, relying on it for your information, is like relying on the Discovery channels for your education or one station only for your news.
Besides, half the fun of researching in the library is the irrelevant but interesting information you stumble across as you browse!
The number of services ON by default is an issue in Windows. I'd like to see most things turned off in the new Service Pack.
A new PC should come with most of the patches preinstalled - Dell slipstream patches into the build as they are released.
Other box builders should at least provide a CD with SP1 slipstreamed onto the disk.
The size of patches is an issue, even on fast LANs. But if you are on dial up you can get a free patch CD from MS.
As for the firewall - they were damned whatever they did. It wasn't activated by default because they knew the press would claim they were exploiting their monopoly to destroy the firewall market like they have done to various markets in the past. Now, following the variety of worm attacks, the press hammer them for not having it active by default, and so SP2 will activate it automatically as well as turning AutoUpdate on.
This may be true of the local widget factory, but the coast guard are an emergency service - I would expect them to employ a full time professional systems administrator.
Installing a more difficult system won't fix the problem if the interviewers don't know how to ask the right questions. And if they do know how to ask the right questions, they should be able to identify a fake admin, whether it is Joe who did a Windows for dummies course at night school, or Charlie who is a l33t h4x0r because they managed to install Mandrake once.
Because hiring Charlie to admin a Linux system is just as bad as asking the company secretary to admin the AD server during her lunch breaks.
"Naturally, this event raises even more doubts over the reliability of Microsoft software in critical systems."
Well no, this brings into question the reliability of the Coast Guards Admins.
Coast Guard PCs one assumes are a standard build - all the software on the machines are the same. So testing new patches should only take a couple of days. The admins had 21 days.
Assuming the patch broke something critical and so couldn't be applied. Well the admins could have sat down and cried about it, or they could have done their job, read the security bulletin which details work arounds if the patch can't be applied.
These include activating the local firewall on each machine, blocking a variety of ports on the outer wall, or creating read only dummy files (echo dcpromo >%systemroot%\debug\dcpromo.log & attrib +r %systemroot%\debug\dcpromo.log)
Some of these workarounds could cause you pain - for instance the advice to Block LDAP TCP ports 389, 636, 3268, and 3269 at your firewall. means that if you have an AD structure over a WAN it is going to break, unless you block those ports except for the specific IP addresses of your controllers, or you have a backup controller locally (which you should have anyway) that can take the strain while you work on getting the patch installed.
All this is work, more work than setting up SUS on the LAN and going to the pub. But as admins, this is what you are paid to do.
MS had a patch for this, as soon as the exploit was used they had a clean up tool available, they offer various free patch management systems for admins to use.
Bugs and exploits occur in ALL software. It was the admins who dropped the ball on this one, not MS. There was a patch, there were workarounds available if you couldn't use the patch and XP has a piece of inbuilt software that would have prevented the worm if you had it enabled. 3 ways to fix this, and 3 weeks to do the fix in. I don't see what else MS could be expected to do.
Tiny 5 is excellent. Applications are MD5'd on full path plus file size, it contains a full sandbox mode, as well as registry protection. ("Spyware.exe is trying to write to HKLM.SYSTEM do you want to allow this?")
The application level firewall is completely configurable, you can control which TCP & UDP ports each individual application can use and which it can't.
It can be complicated if you want to dig into it, but the default setup is perfectly acceptable if you just want to install and forget about it.
ZoneAlarm trashed the TCP/IP stack on my home network, preventing Internet Connection Sharing, which is inexcusable. Disabling or uninstalling ZA does not resolve the problem you have to hack the registry and reset the stack (NETSH IP RESET) to recover the damage.
If you google you'll find hundreds of people with hosed machines thanks to ZA. Firewalls and virus scanners are products I do expect to behave 100% reliably and when you lose that trust you are going to have a hard time winning me back. So despite a few quality versions in the early days, ZA have more than likely lost me as a customer for life.
If Comcast is selling INTERNET CONNECTIVITY then they shouldn't interfere when users start sending out RPC blaster packets, or tons of data on port 25. Once you decide that mail server = OK, trojaned spambot = blocked, then you aren't just selling connectivity, you have crossed the line and are diagnosing individual machines on your network, and by monitoring them are offering a limited form of support.
All ISPs offer some OS support anyway, how do most people figure out how to connect to the pop3 or news servers for example if they don't?
If you decide to start blocking people who appear to have a virus, then it takes far less time and money to send out a CD with basic free tools and a FAQ sheet, or lock them into a walled off subnet with only a free AV tools ftp server for company than it does to field the thousands of irate calls which you will get and which will have people demanding your help to clean the PC.
You may as well be proactive and help, because it is going to cost you money and time even if you don't.
Rates will only go up if you annoy enough virus infected users that they leave, economies of scale will slowly reduce and prices will rise. If paying for support bothers you so much, you shouldn't be with a generic ISP like comcast/AOL and so on anyway. Find a more tech friendly provider that presumably has reduced rates due to the limited number of "lusers" subscribing.
That's great, now how am I supposed to diagnose the problem? It wouldn't be that difficult if the machine were in front of me, but how to I walk Mary End User through complicated tasks over the phone while she's already frustrated?
Well when Comcast issued the warning about the trojan and before they cut the user off, you could have ssh'd or used remote desktop to access the users PC.
After the cut off, you could have used a dial up ISP to do the same.
If you really are the sys admin for a large number of remote employees, then you need to re-evaluate your policies.
You need to be able to offer some form of remote assistance, either via remote desktop, ssh or whatever.
You need to have decent virus and spyware tools installed on all laptops to make sure your network isn't exposed to trojans when remote users attach.
If you have large numbers of remote employees, then having a dial up number in emergencies seems prudent.
You need some kind of fed-ex overnight policy for last resort return to base fixes, either to repair hardware or to reinstall a hosed system.
I don't think you can blame Comcast for your problems, your company needs a long hard look at the remote user policy.
However your point about lack of support is well made. If comcast are going to cut people off they need to offer people a CD with the fixes on it. Informing someone they have a virus and then cutting them off from the means of downloading a new signature file is irresponsible.
Microsoft appear to have a patch for this problem, I don't know if that will fix it for you.
Other ideas include giving "Gamers" full access to the "Program Files" directory in case it's trying to write there rather than your games directory.
If that doesn't work then perhaps mail the CD back and ask for a refund. There is no reason any application, least of all a game should require admin rights for normal operation, and if it does, the software is not fit for the purpose it was sold for.
The company you worked for was BT, and the selfish users who were tying up modems included the disabled, the housebound and lonely who were online 12-16 hours a day because they had nothing else in their lives. No, this didn't include me, but the BBC researchers who did several stories about this subject, found some wonderful examples of the people BT hated, none of whom were geeks, but were instead "normal" people who relied on the internet for a major part of their life.
The product was BT Anytime, clearly advertised as 24 hours a day internet access.
To keep within the law, the TOS had to change before pulling any dirty tricks. First they went for the reasonable 16 hours a day, then 12, then 150 a month.
The switch to a new number for heavy users was heavily featured in the BBC consumer rights program "Watchdog", because offering a secretly crippled service for some customers breaks British trading standards rules.
It was a shameful underhand way of dealing with customers BT didn't want anymore, and guaranteed that thousands who slowly migrated to ADSL would never consider BT when deciding on a broadband ISP.
I object to the description of the housebound who were left without net connections while BT screwed with the dial up numbers, as being "selfish idle connection loving kindred". The main reason for choosing the expensive Anytime package rather than the far cheaper 6pm-8am service was for heavy use. BT knew, or should have known that, and should have had TOS and advertising that dealt with "problem" users in the first place.
As for the "idle connection" claim, it's quite easy to appear idle if you are blind and your screen reader takes 10 minutes to read a page, or you're sitting chatting occasionally on ICQ.
BT never allowed you to connect for more than 2 hours - disconnecting remotely after 1 hour 59 minutes.They clearly barred the use of auto reconnection in the TOS, so they could easily have banned those that were online all day and were reconnecting every 2 hours within 5 seconds, but instead they behaved like idiots playing silly beggars with the phone numbers, upset and angered thousands, and were featured heavily on prime time TV as a big bad nasty mean company. A total PR disaster.
I'm glad you're so proud of what they did, I figured someone on an island of 60 million had to be on their side...
Slashdot Mirror
While true most MMORPG have problems, that shouldn't mean every future MMORPG should follow in their footsteps.
Blizzard have had years of free publicity as people have praised them for the slow alpha and beta testing, waiting till "it's ready" rather than when the beancounters tell them to launch.
Clearly it isn't ready. So people have the right to be annoyed at paying to sit in a queue. Especially if true that you can't post on the BB while waiting because you need to be logged into a server to post. They should have anticipated server capacity, people should be able to jump servers without loss of their character, it isn't just about planning a great game, it is about planning contingency should something unexpected cause things to go wrong.
They have sold 600,000 units. Assuming everyone is still playing - a safe assumption seeing as the novelty value will still be strong - then that means they are making over a quarter of a million dollars a day in subs.
With that kind of income, buying extra servers, hiring temps to manually transfer existing accounts to new servers (which should have been something the software should have been able to do automatically), and offering rebates shouldn't be too much to ask.
I haven't played yet, I'm waiting for the EU launch at the end of next month. Hopefully things will be better by then, this is the one time the regular US first, EU later policy on entertainment may see benefits!
How much did Creative pay you to write that ad?
Nothing, why, do you think I could get a few quid if I asked them nicely? I like the iPod, I like the Zen Xtra a little better. Hardly a big deal, it isn't a holy war you know.
Have you seen the giant piece of FUD the Creative CEO is trying to spread?
Apple have made a decision to go for larger flash storage than is currently normal (but will be normal within the year based on previous year's trends), but have chosen to have no screen.
Screenless flash based players are indeed tech that was abandoned by everyone else several years ago. How is that FUD?
If they don't know the CD they've ripped particularly well, most people I think would like to see what the name of the track they are currently enjoying is, something you can't do on a shuffle, but can on any alternative cheap flash player out there. With a gig of space, that is a lot of songs to memorise the name of.
I don't know, maybe it is a feature that people aren't bothered about and so it won't harm shuffle sales. Time will tell.
if Creative still *exists* in 18 months, I'll be surprised.
You are probably the only one who thinks that. Creative have been in the audio electronics business for 2 decades. They aren't going bust any time soon. They appear to be getting good press. The Zen Photo just took best audio to go at CES. Based on the last quarter's sales, they are estimating 45% growth this year. Hardly the estimates of a company about to go bust...
Creative models seem to have better battery life, either easily replacable with a spare without needing special tools (Zen Xtra) or extra long battery life (Zen Touch).
The iPod always seems to rely heavily on iTunes, not just the store, but the software itself. For example multiple playlist creation and on fly editing (you can see whay songs are coming up and remove them if you want to) can be done directly on the Zen, I believe the iPod will need synching with iTunes to do the same.
There is far more freedom to copy songs to and from the Zen, to multiple machines, something that is difficult if not impossible to do on the iPod.
Noone can deny iPod's market share but the design seemed to stick in 2002/3, the Zen has overtaken Apple with more features, and they easily beat them in price.
Firefox is taking IE share. Opera is doing very nicely amongst those of us who don't mind paying for top quality products - Opera just works, and works well, Firefox works after various extensions are added. All the cool features in the 'fox were copied from Opera including tabbed browsing and mouse gestures.
They also are doing very well in the PDA/mobile phone browser market. They really don't need to look for new sources of income.
Opera is also easier to deploy in a corporate enviroment. What is easy on one machine, isn't quite so much fun when publishing to 1000...
Dells without floppy drives can boot from USB, either USB floppy ( ironically enough,) or USB dongle, or USB external hard drive (such as Lacie)
I would assume any OEM that was scrapping floppy support would have a BIOS that could handle USB boot.
The sooner slow, unreliable, huge 3.5 inch floppies are completely scrapped the better.
Post USB they have become an archiac format long past their use by date.
No you are a troll, a foul mouthed one at that.
Second: I was talking about personal experience
You stated you knew of no cases where CCTV had secured a conviction, yet the bbc is full of such cases, I personally know of no case of arson, it doesn't mean to say arson doesn't exist. You made a meaningless point and I pulled you up on it.
Third: in each of those stories you linked to, the CCTV images were at best used as supporting evidence
Hours of CCTV footage was checked until a known sex offender was seen, this lead was then followed up. The fact a sex offender was in the area at the time was suspicious, this fact was obtained from the video footage. CCTV directly led the police to the rapist, who was a known sex offender because CCTV had previously caught him indecently exposing himself, this previous footage directly leading to indecent exposure charge. It is all there in the BBC news story.
As for catching child killers, you can't be British if you don't know that the CCTV footage was extremely helpful in the Bulger case.
Google on Nail Bomber Dave Copeland, the Police clearly stated CCTV footage provided the breakthrough.
Fourth: the references I was actually referring to was to support your statement: We now know it does reduce crime, and increases detection and conviction rates
You quoted my comment about catching rapists then asked for evidence. When I produce evidence you deny what is in your face.
Cite or retract please.
You've gone from trolling to being extraordinarily ignorant and rude. You are no position to demand anything, but here is quote from the Home Office for you, again found in seconds on google. No doubt this isn't evidence to you, after all, the Home Office doesn't have you as an advisor, but I'm afraid I can't be bothered with you anymore. Post another rant if you like, I shan't be reading it.
Come on then. References please.
CCTV scores 1685 arrests in one town alone
Arsonist caught by CCTV
7 Jailed for violent assault on a shop owner thanks to CCTV
rapist and indecent exposer caught due to CCTV footage
12 years for rapist caught by CCTV
Gang member jailed after murder is caught on CCTV
McDonalds killer caught on CCTV
That took 3 seconds on the beeb's newsearch. So I really can't take your comment "I know of no cases where the cameras actually secured a conviction." very seriously. Do you troll slashdot often?
I think other countries have to understand the British obsession with binge drinking and random physical drunken violence to appreciate why we don't really care about the amount of CCTV.
When it is just you and a bunch of drunken yobs on the street, you may still get the crap beaten out of you or mugged, but at least with CCTV you stand a good chance of getting them caught and convicted.
We now know it does reduce crime, and increases detection and conviction rates, all at the cost of some imagined "privacy" while in a PUBLIC place.
CCTV has caught child killers, rapists, drunk drivers and so forth, in return there is footage of me scratching my arse while waiting to cross the road , which will be kept for a month or so before being taped over.
Hardly a terrible price to pay all things considered.
When the government passes a law mandating all cameras have to be digital, all digital footage has to be kept forever, and connected to a government face recognition system, then I'll be concerned.
As it stands most footage is erased after a month, and is stored on hundreds of individual unconnected systems. Hardly Big Brother.
By that logic Apache should have more exploits than Microsoft's web server
It possibly does.
361 Apache Advisories on Buqtraq VS 141 IIS advisories
A rough and cheap example, but never the less a belief that Apache is somehow super secure is a nonsense.
The many eyes argument is a tired one - how many people actually check the code, how many of those people are experienced enough to find vulnerabilities?
Look at the DARPA funded Linux Security effort. It died because noone was contributing.
Open source is great because you can read the code, but a belief that someone else must be auditing that code leads to security through delusionment - unless YOU are auditing the code, and unless YOU are trained to know how to audit it well, don't assume anyone else is.
Pity contextual advertising has been accepted to be Overtures's AKA YAHOO! realm, not googles.
Link
When google bowed down to Yahoo!/Overture, handing over a hefty portion of voting stock to Yahoo!, their IPO became a joke.
Without advertising tech, they are a search engine that can be superceded at any time. That means their stock is worth nothing. Their only income is adverts, and their advertising business is owned by Yahoo!.
The same kind of people who go to AMX for wired home solutions.
There are only 2 main players in the millionare home and lecture theatre/boardroom setup - AMX and Crestron . Both charge an arm and a leg for solutions.
AMX even have their own unique programming language which means lucrative engineer visits every time you add a new piece of kit. It is very Visual Basic like but the only way to learn the language and acquire the compilier is spend a fortune on an AMX programming course. A user programmable remote control for $700 is easily a better solution for homes and small offices.
This could be Sony's attempt to break into the market, there is a huge gap between the millionare home theatre system, and the consumer level home theatre setup, Sony could well be planning to target this untapped market.
Adding cards to the PC is part of the normal every day use of the machine. Get a PCI based tuner. It is that simple.
While I like Firefly, I agree it was "shoehorned" into an American West in Space Scenario.
An 1870's setting, with some fantasy elements - perhaps a genuine fortune telling mystic, or good guys lost the civil war alternate reality, would have been just as interesting as the sci-fi setting.
More crucially, an 1870's setting would have been at least half a million bucks an episode cheaper, without all the CGI, which may well have saved it from the Beancounters.
There is a reason the companies especially the sci-fi channel don't do space-fi anymore. It is cheaper to do non CGI earth based dross. You can get away with a smaller audience share, if the cost of producing an episode is relatively cheap.
And CGI at the moment doesn't come cheap.
If Joss had created an alternate reality 1870's western, rather than create a contrived science fiction setting, we'd still be enjoying his work on TV, rather than having to wait years between movies.
Student presentations these days don't involve standing in front of an OHP talking. A lot of students use PowerPoint, embedded sound and video clips, digital photographs and so forth.
Students use a full range of media when doing course work. At least they do in the UK, and I mean all courses not just media. IT and art based ones.
Which means they need far more than 3GB of drive space. And they need plenty of RAM for video editing and PhotoShop.
As for gigabit networks being unneccessary apart from trading warez. I assume you also aren't aware that many campuses offer streaming facilities for lectures, allowing you to watch lectures again, or catch up on ones you missed? A few dozen students streaming lectures during revision week will soon soak up that gigabit of bandwidth.
Cost of a new Dell at Educational discount prices - 200 - $400. These will come with your custom built image pre installed and 3 years next day on site repair.
... and.... well you hopefully get the picture.
Cost of old keyboards to be sterilised (health and safety) plus technician hours installing and configuring OS, plus technician hours repairing that dodgy hard drive on PC #6 and the bent RGB pin on PC # 17 and replacing that failed PAT power supply on PC # 19, and replaced monitor on image burnt CRT #12 and...and
Just because it is cheaper for you to have a dozen 486's lying around that you canabilise whenever the PII that you only run SSH on, has a problem, does not mean it is cheaper for everyone to do the same.
The cost over 3 years of a cheap bulk purchased Optiplex can easily be less than that box you pulled out of the trash last week. Especially when you have 20 - 60 machines in a class to keep working.
The "secret deal with Dell" is a polite way of telling you to mind your own business. The course secretary will tell you the same thing about Xerox when you inquire how much she is paying for toner.
Yes, in an ideal world, old PCs would be turned into dumb terminals, or tools for ancient compliers. In the real world, where replacing that failed 10 year old harddrive is going to cost 1/3 of the cost of a new Dell, and you know statisically AT LEAST 1/2 of your machines will lose their hardrive or something similar due to old age in the next 3 years, it's easier and cheaper to go for new, even if the CPU on the new box never reaches 0.05% utilisation.
Cost isn't just box price, it is maintainance costs, maintainance labor, admin arranging purchases orders for that labour and replacement parts, academic cost for machines out of order during a critical class and so on.
When I went to school we were taught library skills, is that still the case, or do teachers assume you are all going to hit google?
Google does not trawl the entire internet, it barely touches it in fact, relying on it for your information, is like relying on the Discovery channels for your education or one station only for your news.
Besides, half the fun of researching in the library is the irrelevant but interesting information you stumble across as you browse!
The number of services ON by default is an issue in Windows. I'd like to see most things turned off in the new Service Pack.
A new PC should come with most of the patches preinstalled - Dell slipstream patches into the build as they are released.
Other box builders should at least provide a CD with SP1 slipstreamed onto the disk.
The size of patches is an issue, even on fast LANs. But if you are on dial up you can get a free patch CD from MS.
As for the firewall - they were damned whatever they did. It wasn't activated by default because they knew the press would claim they were exploiting their monopoly to destroy the firewall market like they have done to various markets in the past. Now, following the variety of worm attacks, the press hammer them for not having it active by default, and so SP2 will activate it automatically as well as turning AutoUpdate on.
This may be true of the local widget factory, but the coast guard are an emergency service - I would expect them to employ a full time professional systems administrator.
Installing a more difficult system won't fix the problem if the interviewers don't know how to ask the right questions. And if they do know how to ask the right questions, they should be able to identify a fake admin, whether it is Joe who did a Windows for dummies course at night school, or Charlie who is a l33t h4x0r because they managed to install Mandrake once.
Because hiring Charlie to admin a Linux system is just as bad as asking the company secretary to admin the AD server during her lunch breaks.
Coast Guard PCs one assumes are a standard build - all the software on the machines are the same. So testing new patches should only take a couple of days. The admins had 21 days.
Assuming the patch broke something critical and so couldn't be applied. Well the admins could have sat down and cried about it, or they could have done their job, read the security bulletin which details work arounds if the patch can't be applied.
These include activating the local firewall on each machine, blocking a variety of ports on the outer wall, or creating read only dummy files (echo dcpromo >%systemroot%\debug\dcpromo.log & attrib +r %systemroot%\debug\dcpromo.log)
Some of these workarounds could cause you pain - for instance the advice to Block LDAP TCP ports 389, 636, 3268, and 3269 at your firewall. means that if you have an AD structure over a WAN it is going to break, unless you block those ports except for the specific IP addresses of your controllers, or you have a backup controller locally (which you should have anyway) that can take the strain while you work on getting the patch installed.
All this is work, more work than setting up SUS on the LAN and going to the pub. But as admins, this is what you are paid to do.
MS had a patch for this, as soon as the exploit was used they had a clean up tool available, they offer various free patch management systems for admins to use.
Bugs and exploits occur in ALL software. It was the admins who dropped the ball on this one, not MS. There was a patch, there were workarounds available if you couldn't use the patch and XP has a piece of inbuilt software that would have prevented the worm if you had it enabled. 3 ways to fix this, and 3 weeks to do the fix in. I don't see what else MS could be expected to do.
Tiny 5 is excellent. Applications are MD5'd on full path plus file size, it contains a full sandbox mode, as well as registry protection. ("Spyware.exe is trying to write to HKLM.SYSTEM do you want to allow this?")
The application level firewall is completely configurable, you can control which TCP & UDP ports each individual application can use and which it can't.
It can be complicated if you want to dig into it, but the default setup is perfectly acceptable if you just want to install and forget about it.
ZoneAlarm trashed the TCP/IP stack on my home network, preventing Internet Connection Sharing, which is inexcusable. Disabling or uninstalling ZA does not resolve the problem you have to hack the registry and reset the stack (NETSH IP RESET) to recover the damage.
If you google you'll find hundreds of people with hosed machines thanks to ZA. Firewalls and virus scanners are products I do expect to behave 100% reliably and when you lose that trust you are going to have a hard time winning me back. So despite a few quality versions in the early days, ZA have more than likely lost me as a customer for life.
If Comcast is selling INTERNET CONNECTIVITY then they shouldn't interfere when users start sending out RPC blaster packets, or tons of data on port 25. Once you decide that mail server = OK, trojaned spambot = blocked, then you aren't just selling connectivity, you have crossed the line and are diagnosing individual machines on your network, and by monitoring them are offering a limited form of support.
All ISPs offer some OS support anyway, how do most people figure out how to connect to the pop3 or news servers for example if they don't?
If you decide to start blocking people who appear to have a virus, then it takes far less time and money to send out a CD with basic free tools and a FAQ sheet, or lock them into a walled off subnet with only a free AV tools ftp server for company than it does to field the thousands of irate calls which you will get and which will have people demanding your help to clean the PC.
You may as well be proactive and help, because it is going to cost you money and time even if you don't.
Rates will only go up if you annoy enough virus infected users that they leave, economies of scale will slowly reduce and prices will rise. If paying for support bothers you so much, you shouldn't be with a generic ISP like comcast/AOL and so on anyway. Find a more tech friendly provider that presumably has reduced rates due to the limited number of "lusers" subscribing.
After the cut off, you could have used a dial up ISP to do the same.
If you really are the sys admin for a large number of remote employees, then you need to re-evaluate your policies.
You need to be able to offer some form of remote assistance, either via remote desktop, ssh or whatever.
You need to have decent virus and spyware tools installed on all laptops to make sure your network isn't exposed to trojans when remote users attach.
If you have large numbers of remote employees, then having a dial up number in emergencies seems prudent.
You need some kind of fed-ex overnight policy for last resort return to base fixes, either to repair hardware or to reinstall a hosed system.
I don't think you can blame Comcast for your problems, your company needs a long hard look at the remote user policy.
However your point about lack of support is well made. If comcast are going to cut people off they need to offer people a CD with the fixes on it. Informing someone they have a virus and then cutting them off from the means of downloading a new signature file is irresponsible.
Microsoft appear to have a patch for this problem, I don't know if that will fix it for you.
Other ideas include giving "Gamers" full access to the "Program Files" directory in case it's trying to write there rather than your games directory.
If that doesn't work then perhaps mail the CD back and ask for a refund. There is no reason any application, least of all a game should require admin rights for normal operation, and if it does, the software is not fit for the purpose it was sold for.
The company you worked for was BT, and the selfish users who were tying up modems included the disabled, the housebound and lonely who were online 12-16 hours a day because they had nothing else in their lives. No, this didn't include me, but the BBC researchers who did several stories about this subject, found some wonderful examples of the people BT hated, none of whom were geeks, but were instead "normal" people who relied on the internet for a major part of their life.
The product was BT Anytime, clearly advertised as 24 hours a day internet access.
To keep within the law, the TOS had to change before pulling any dirty tricks. First they went for the reasonable 16 hours a day, then 12, then 150 a month.
The switch to a new number for heavy users was heavily featured in the BBC consumer rights program "Watchdog", because offering a secretly crippled service for some customers breaks British trading standards rules.
It was a shameful underhand way of dealing with customers BT didn't want anymore, and guaranteed that thousands who slowly migrated to ADSL would never consider BT when deciding on a broadband ISP.
I object to the description of the housebound who were left without net connections while BT screwed with the dial up numbers, as being "selfish idle connection loving kindred". The main reason for choosing the expensive Anytime package rather than the far cheaper 6pm-8am service was for heavy use. BT knew, or should have known that, and should have had TOS and advertising that dealt with "problem" users in the first place.
As for the "idle connection" claim, it's quite easy to appear idle if you are blind and your screen reader takes 10 minutes to read a page, or you're sitting chatting occasionally on ICQ.
BT never allowed you to connect for more than 2 hours - disconnecting remotely after 1 hour 59 minutes.They clearly barred the use of auto reconnection in the TOS, so they could easily have banned those that were online all day and were reconnecting every 2 hours within 5 seconds, but instead they behaved like idiots playing silly beggars with the phone numbers, upset and angered thousands, and were featured heavily on prime time TV as a big bad nasty mean company. A total PR disaster.
I'm glad you're so proud of what they did, I figured someone on an island of 60 million had to be on their side...