> Though I wonder how close this comes to an actionable legal issue?
That would be foolish. Microsoft does NOT need to create more reasons for people to think of them as big bad bullies, whilst meanwhile transforming the discredited kook who criticized them into a victim and/or martyr in the eyes of (many of) the public and simultaneously directing more attention to his claims and lending them some apparent credibility that they don't otherwise have.
Even if you win the case quickly, you still lose.
The marketing department can handle this one just fine. I mean, the guy's already discredited, and they haven't even done anything yet. It's under control. No need to involve the legal department.
> Yes, on our 66mhz computers with 80mb hard drives.
You're kidding, right?
A 486 DX2/66 with an 80MB hard drive was, in its day, *plenty* powerful enough to run local applications. People did it all the time.
I'm not sure Win32 was available yet then; I think those numbers are more characteristic of the late DOS era (like, DOS 6.22, and possibly Windows 3.x).
But the computers that *were* current when Windows 95 came out were also, not surprisingly, totally capable of running locally installed Win32 applications.
> If ActiveX was designed to create lock-in, > why did Microsoft abandon it?
Did you SLEEP through the late nineties?
Microsoft very reluctantly abandoned ActiveX, after years of dragging their feet, only when it had long since become absolutely crystal clear that their sole other option was to claim, with a straight face, that when it comes to connecting your corporate assets to the internet, security totally doesn't matter at all. Even then they would have opted for that, if they could have come up with any kind of plan for making people believe it.
I'm not sure ActiveX was created for the purpose of generating lock-in. Perhaps they had something else in mind originally.
But I *am* reasonably sure that after it was created, Microsoft liked the fact that it created lock-in.
And EVERYONE in the industry saw how reluctant they were to abandon it, and how long it took them to finally give up and do so after every single security professional in the entire IT industry had written (often quite vehemently) about how grossly horribly irresponsible its design was.
> They have computers. The computers do what is > needed. They perceive that the IT industry is > creating expensive and poorly crafted junk that > is little, if any, better than what they have. > Change for the sake of change.
That's all well and good, as long as they don't need to use the internet. Hey, if the eight-year-old intranet thing still works, as long as that's all they need the web browser for, no problem. Heck, they can use an intranet thingy based on IE4, threed.vbx, and Windows 95 OSR2. If it's all about an internal company intranet, what do I care?
But if you need your employees to be able to use the world wide web, then you're going to have to maintain compatibility with the world wide web. That's going to mean upgrades. The web changes over time. (Have you tried to browse the web with IE5 lately, or Netscape 4? Seriously, whip out a VM and try it. It's good for a couple of laughs.)
Increasingly many webmasters are dropping support for IE6 (after, in most cases, years of wanting to and finally working up the courage to actually do it).
Even big companies like Google, who can afford to spend a lot more hours on backward-compatibility than the small guys, are now starting to drop full IE6 support, and this is a trend that isn't going to go away. On the contrary, when somebody as big as Google makes such a move, it emboldens others. Some smaller sites, like the public library where I work, started dropping full support for IE6 a couple of years ago. (Heck, at this point I don't test in IE7 anymore, either.) A lot of the sites that haven't actually dropped IE6 yet have *wanted* to for several years, and more and more of them are going to get tired of waiting and just go ahead and do it. Hey, Google dropped IE6, so why can't we? It's going to reach critical mass at some point, and my guess is soon, probably in the next few months.
So like I said, if you only need a web browser for your intranet, fine, use whatever you had when your intranet was deployed, even if it's NCSA Mosaic.
But if you need to actually browse the web, and you've been using IE6 until now, you're going to have to get serious about an upgrade. Soon.
Note, too, that it's possible to keep IE6 *and* also use a newer browser. Actually, it's pretty easy, as long as the newer browser isn't IE. Deploying two versions of IE at once is also theoretically possible, but it's significantly more work, and that's work you don't need to do. IE6 for the intranet and Opera 10 or Firefox 3.6 for the web is so easy to set up, you can practically do it before breakfast.
My recommendation, for security reasons, is to configure the security settings in IE6 so that your intranet is the only thing it trusts, and everything else gets no javascript, no plugins, no whistles, no bells... Heck, why not just go the whole way and lock it down? Have it refuse to load any other site at all. Put your intranet in the trusted zone, and the rest of the world in the no-way-Jose zone. Make the IE shortcut on the desktop say "FooCorp Intranet DooHickey", and then create a the "The Internet" shortcut that fires up a more modern browser, preferably one that was last updated some time *after* the discovery of the transistor.
Eventually you'll run into a problem where modern browsers won't run on an OS old enough to also run IE6. For the time being, however, new browsers are still supporting Windows XP, so you're okay for now. Actually, you can (tentatively) expect this situation to probably continue most likely until circa 2014 (when XP stops getting security updates from MS), and even then you'll have a few months to do something about it. I mean, a browser that's new in 2014 probably isn't going to stop working in 2014, is it? Also, by then, assuming Moore's Law continues to do more or less what it's been doing to prices and performance (and yes, I know it's technically transistor density, but that has implications), a "gently used" three-year-old off-lease computer
> Photoshop 1.0 actually ran on a B&W Mac? Seriously? > What's the point in that?
Yeah. They should have made it for the PC, and had it require CGA. Then people could have edited four-color pictures in any of three available palettes, with one of the four colors being freely selectable from the full range of sixteen! That would have been so much better.
Okay, so CGA was pretty well dead by 1990. (Is Photoshop really that young?) Nonetheless, people *did* use image editing software back when CGA was the current state of the art. It didn't seem so ridiculous at the time, because, you know, people hadn't been looking at 32-bit displays for as long as they could remember.
> Here in the US, we've had entire industries do this to their > workers. It's called "free-market capitalism" writ large.
Umm, except for the part about never paying them a dime for hours they already worked. The DOL would be all over them if they tried that one.
Moving the business overseas on short notice and leaving them all out of a job with no warning? Yeah, that part's totally legal, assuming the workers were employed in the standard at-will fashion. (Some workers do have contracts with their employers that disallow this, but that's a special case.)
But you do have to pay them for the hours they already worked.
Depending on which list of continents you go by, there are a lot of variations. The geographers, geologists, and sociologists can't seem to agree on a single definition, so it can be a bit confusing. How many continents are there, anyway? Five? Six? Seven? More?
For instance, there are variously considered to be one, two, or three continents in the western hemisphere. Two is the most common figure, but it's not universal.
Europe may or may not be part of the same continent as Asia. I even saw one list that makes Africa part of the same continent as Eurasia, since they're connected.
Some lists omit Antarctica entirely, since it has no permanent inhabitants.
But for all that, I have never seen a list that made Australia part of Asia. Usually it's a continent all by itself. Frequently it's part of a "continent" called "Oceania", which also includes most of the islands in the Pacific (but not the ones that are very close to another continent, such as Taiwan or Vancouver Island). Sometimes only a few islands are included as part of Australia -- Tasmania, New Guinea, etc. I've even seen definitions that include New Zealand as part of Australia but NOT New Guinea (which was listed as part of Asia).
I have even seen occasional claims that Australia is an island, not part of any continent at all. (These claims generally come from laypersons and usually involve comparison to Greenland; typically the person making the assertion has been looking at Mercator-projection maps.)
But this is the first time I have EVER seen anyone list Australia as part of Asia. That's totally unprecedented.
The major caveat is, you have to start a couple of hours before you want to eat, because the dough needs time to rise. This is fine on, say, a Saturday, because you can just mix up the dough at three in the afternoon, then go do something else for a while and have supper at five or six.
But it doesn't work so well if you get home from work at six and are already hungry. On those days, I don't make homemade pizza for supper.
If it were legal, he wouldn't have been doing it in the middle of the night. The company could have just locked the employees out and done whatever they wanted in broad daylight. Plenty of companies have been known to do that sort of thing when shutting down a location.
I mean, this is a CEO we're talking about. Those guys normally work 9-5, officially, on paper, and in practice this turns into more like 10-4, except on days when they're out of the office for "meetings" with other CEOs on the golf course. Working in the middle of the night is NOT part of the general modus operandi.
So yeah, if he was slipping in during the wee hours, there's a reason.
That doesn't belong on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a venue for that sort of thing. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and people like you are polluting it with all kinds of unencyclopedic content that doesn't belong there. Stop it.
If you want to post definitions, you should put them on Wiktionary.
> Apple designed their RS-422 serial ports from > the beginning to be compatible with RS-232 > through RS-423 provided you have the right cable..
Yeah? Try to actually use PC serial peripherals with a Mac from the pre-USB era. The cable adaptor, as a rule, can only be counted on to work if the devices *comes with* said adaptor and is labeled as supporting the Mac as well as the PC. Otherwise, forget about it.
(In fairness, a lot of Mac peripherals don't work with the PC either.)
Granted, I don't know the technical details of the Mac serial port, so as far as I know it's possible that the problem isn't the serial port itself (other than the obvious need for an adaptor because the the physical plug is obviously dissimilar), but something else. (Drivers seem like a likely possibility.) All I know is, you couldn't use PC serial devices on Macs; it never worked.
He didn't demand anything of the kind. He only suggested it, if anything in a way that implied it would be an unreasonable expectation. Which it would be, because, frankly, once you become aware that a system has a rootkit installed, the only sane thing to do is a complete format and reinstall.
Well, you can do some forensics first if you want, and maybe copy off some data (if you're careful about how you do it so as not to infect any system you copy it to). But you're going to boot from known-clean (and, preferably, read-only) media to do those things, NOT from the known-infected system. (A LiveCD is what I would recommend for such post-mortem activities.) If you want to actually boot from and use the infected system again, it needs a clean reinstall first, period. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Booting from the infected system is highly inadvisable and much worse than useless, because the system is compromised. Only someone who doesn't know any better due to a complete lack of understanding of security issues would even consider doing that.
So personally I don't see how this way of finding out is any more brutal than any other way of finding out. Continuing to use the system, even though it has a rootkit, wouldn't be a reasonable course of action anyway. Nobody who understands security would do that, and nobody else *should* either.
(Unless you're operating some kind of firewalled-garden virtualized honeypot network for the express purpose of studying how infections spread, but in that case you wouldn't be deploying the patch. I suppose if you were doing a controlled study on the effectiveness of the patch... but we're now DEEP into the realm of purely hypothetical problems with no real-world impact whatsoever.)
If we were going to criticize Microsoft here, it would be for other things, such as how long it took them to deliver the patch once the issue was reported. (I don't happen to know how long it was in this instance, BTW; I wasn't following this particular vulnerability very closely.)
Assuming it's true that the patch only causes problems on already-rootkitted systems (and I haven't seen anyone claim the contrary), then that's not really a meaningful flaw in the patch, IMO. Those systems were already toast anyway. How well does the patch work on systems that hadn't been infected? That's what matters.
> Anyone else with me that just suggests to use wireless instead?
He said the house is pretty big, though. When you start getting multiple floors and a lot of walls and things in the way, wireless performance (with affordable gear) starts to suck pretty hard.
On top of that, you have to worry about encryption and data security.
Don't get me wrong, wireless has its uses. But there are also VERY GOOD reasons to want a wired network.
I totally agree with you about the conduit. If you're building a new house, absolutely you want conduit, with accessible faceplate-covered junction boxes wherever it turns corners. Conduit seems expensive at the time, but it's *WAY* cheaper than ripping the walls apart later and then paying drywall guys and painters to come in and fix it up, and it's WAY worth it for the convenience of being able to run new cabling later for whatever purpose you happen to need it for.
Thirty years ago, would you have predicted the need for CAT6 cable? How awesome would it be to be able to put it in now just by taking the faceplates off a couple of junctions and threading it through the conduit? That kind of flexibility is *worth* the cost of the conduit, several times over, if you use it even once in the entire lifetime of the building.
I didn't get the impression that the article submitter was building a new place, though. Why would there be only coax and no cat5/6 in a place that was just built? The way I read it, he bought an existing house. In which case, retrofitting conduit would be a hassle.
As best I can tell, at least 95% of "Windows 7" PCs actually have Windows XP installed (typically through the OEM downgrade option and/or volume licensing, although some users just get out their old XP disks and install that way).
Are there computers out there that actually *run* Windows 7, on a day-to-day basis? I haven't seen them.
> As explosives age, they become less stable, and thus more likely to explode.
Theoretically, that depends somewhat on the exact type of explosives. There are some that would potentially leak out over time and dissipate to the point of harmlessness, or gradually corrode chemically into something less explosive.
But yeah, many explosives are more likely to become unstable and dangerous than harmless. Furthermore, this is especially likely to be true of "high" explosives, i.e., the kind that have to be detonated (like C4), rather than simply ignited (like black powder) or looked at funny (like chalcogen polyazides). As a rule the high explosives are the ones that tend to be used militarily. So, in the context of mines, increased instability over time is definitely the way to bet.
> Anyone have some suggestions for a more secure PDF reader?
Sure. First use pdf2ps to convert it to PostScript, then use other software (e.g., PStill) to convert it to eps, then use Inkscape to convert that to SVG, use Gimp or ImageMagick to rasterize it (e.g., to PNG) and open the result in IrfanView for viewing and printing. Each step of this operation can be done in a separate virtual machine...
> The web plugin should be retired and just force the > pdf to open in the full reader. One can dream, right?
You can actually do this, in the Firefox prefs, under the Applications tab. (Doing this is on my standard deployment checklist, mainly because it's less confusing for the users. With the embedded reader plugin, the user doesn't realize they've left the web and doesn't understand why browser features, such as the Print and Print Preview commands, don't work. When Adobe Reader opens in a separate window, it's somewhat more evident to the untrained eye what's going on.)
However, if you ever upgrade or reinstall Adobe Reader, it changes the pref back, and you have to fix it again.
IMO, opening the Reader in a separate window *ought* to be the default setting. But apparently Adobe feels differently.
Yeah. In addition to the P4, they should have thrown in a couple of additional historically-significant data points, like the Pentium//, the 486 DX, and the 8088.
Like I said, all the new computers here have serial and parallel ports. Well, some of the laptops don't, but some do, and *all* of the regular computers do. I'm in central Ohio.
Yeah, I heard that too, in the nineties. I also heard, around the same time, that Iomega drives were doing to be the floppy disk killer. They were starting to come out with internal models, see, and all new computers were going to come with the Iomega drives, and nobody would need floppies anymore. It never happened.
Instead, USB eventually turned out to be the floppy disk killer. CD-R made a decent start on killing floppies, but it couldn't quite finish the job (though it *did* kill off Iomega drives fairly effectively). Now, though, I'm seeing fewer and fewer floppies with every passing year, and I've seen more than a few new computers (*desktop* computers, not laptops) with no floppy drive. And it's not because of Iomega. It's because of flash-EEPROM-based USB 2.0 mass storage devices, the smaller capacity ones of which have become so cheap you basically get them in specially marked boxes of breakfast cereal these days. They cost less than PCI 10/100 ethernet cards or, more to the point, less than a small box of floppies. Apparently people must be using them, because I find more of them laying around (left behind by mistake) than I ever did floppy disks.
But as far as USB peripherals that formerly would have used the serial port, the only ones I've seen are digital cameras (and serial was never a good fit for them in the first place; SCSI would have made more sense, except that most computers didn't have it). I've seen devices that formerly would have been parallel and are USB, of course (printers mainly). And I've seen USB mice and keyboards occasionally. But peripherals that traditionally used a serial port, for the most part, still use a serial port. The camera is the only exception I know of.
> It is actually very hard to find an RS-232 port on newer computers now.
Huh. That's... odd.
It's been years since I've seen a computer, new or otherwise, (other than laptops, as I noted earlier, and Macs) that doesn't have the serial and parallel ports.
> neither my Lenovo T61P nor my wife's HP laptop
Laptops, right. I already mentioned those as an exception, didn't I?
You don't get as many ports on a laptop, because nobody would use them anyhow, because nobody uses peripherals with a laptop anyway, because carrying them around everywhere would kind of defeat the whole portability thing, which is the main point of a laptop.
And Macs also don't have printer and serial ports -- even when they did, they weren't the same as the ones on PCs and so weren't compatible with non-Mac peripherals anyway, so no real change there.
But RS232 isn't going away at all. PCs (other than laptops, do I really have to keep saying that) all still have parallel and serial ports. And a lot of peripherals still use them (we just bought such a peripheral a6t work, so recently that we haven't even installed it yet).
> but isn't that "everything including the kitchen sink" > approach what many FOSS users refer to as bloat?
Good point. There are two schools of thought on that. When you see people complaining about bloat and arguing that no extra features should be included in anything, you're seeing the opinion of a percentage of the open-source community. The most extreme of these people will argue with a straight face that the base OS install shouldn't include even basic utilities that many of us take for granted (e.g., egrep, bzip2), and furthermore that only very basic versions of essential utilities should be installed: ash or somesuch instead of bash, more instead of less, and so on. In fact, FreeBSD doesn't include bash, so if you do install it (via ports) it goes in/usr/local/bin instead of/bin.
To most Linux users, this extreme approach is unexpected and weird. Most of us expect such things as bash and bzip2 and egrep -- and perl and screen and make for that matter -- to be installed on all computers as a matter of course.
The other school of thought is, I don't want to fool with it, just install everything. Most Linux distributions offer you the option, at install time, to check and handful of boxes for broad categories (like Gnome, KDE, server stuff, and so on) and have a whole bunch of packages from those categories installed automatically. Just install it all, so I don't have to fool with selecting eight hundred packages individually. This point of view is just as common, if not more so. And this side of things also gets taken to extremes sometimes (e.g., there are people who literally install the ENTIRE contents of the CPAN on their computers).
Most of us are somewhere in between. I generally install all the major categories (Gnome, KDE, etc), because modern hard drives are big enough that I can, and it saves time selecting the individual packages I want. But yeah, there are still things that don't get installed, and so you have to select those for installation individually.
You can, however, get practically everything from the distro's repositories, so it's seldom necessary to hunt down anything from a third party, unless you insist on installing proprietary software (like Opera), or something so specialized or obscure that it's not packaged (like Evergreen/OpenILS).
> RS-232 might be absent from a lot of consumer motherboards
Yeah? Can you actually name a recent non-Apple desktop or workstation motherboard that doesn't have it? (Netbooks, yeah, sure, but those are supplemental portable devices, not intended to replace a desktop computer.)
Compaq experimented with selling "legacy-free" systems for a few months circa 1999. Their "iPaq" model of mini-tower system, for instance, was available in a USB-only "legacy-free" version, and then there was a "standard-ports" version for just a couple bucks more. When they discontinued the iPaq line in favor of the Evo a few months later, guess which way they went with it? Then HP bought them out and the whole thing become an obscure footnote for the computer history books.
I predict RS232 will outlast USB 2.0, because subsequent USB versions will replace 2.0, but RS232 isn't going anywhere.
While we're at it, PS/2 keyboards and mice don't seem to be going anywhere either (although a lot of them have become de-facto hot-pluggable, which may be at least partly due to the influence of USB).
In fact, the last major computer component interface I can think of that died out is ISA.
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> Though I wonder how close this comes to an actionable legal issue?
That would be foolish. Microsoft does NOT need to create more reasons for people to think of them as big bad bullies, whilst meanwhile transforming the discredited kook who criticized them into a victim and/or martyr in the eyes of (many of) the public and simultaneously directing more attention to his claims and lending them some apparent credibility that they don't otherwise have.
Even if you win the case quickly, you still lose.
The marketing department can handle this one just fine. I mean, the guy's already discredited, and they haven't even done anything yet. It's under control. No need to involve the legal department.
> Is the author suggesting that we try to solve
> the problem by killing anyone who still uses IE6?
Personally, I think that would be unnecessarily harsh. All we really need to do is revoke their internet privileges.
> Yes, on our 66mhz computers with 80mb hard drives.
You're kidding, right?
A 486 DX2/66 with an 80MB hard drive was, in its day, *plenty* powerful enough to run local applications. People did it all the time.
I'm not sure Win32 was available yet then; I think those numbers are more characteristic of the late DOS era (like, DOS 6.22, and possibly Windows 3.x).
But the computers that *were* current when Windows 95 came out were also, not surprisingly, totally capable of running locally installed Win32 applications.
> If ActiveX was designed to create lock-in,
> why did Microsoft abandon it?
Did you SLEEP through the late nineties?
Microsoft very reluctantly abandoned ActiveX, after years of dragging their feet, only when it had long since become absolutely crystal clear that their sole other option was to claim, with a straight face, that when it comes to connecting your corporate assets to the internet, security totally doesn't matter at all. Even then they would have opted for that, if they could have come up with any kind of plan for making people believe it.
I'm not sure ActiveX was created for the purpose of generating lock-in. Perhaps they had something else in mind originally.
But I *am* reasonably sure that after it was created, Microsoft liked the fact that it created lock-in.
And EVERYONE in the industry saw how reluctant they were to abandon it, and how long it took them to finally give up and do so after every single security professional in the entire IT industry had written (often quite vehemently) about how grossly horribly irresponsible its design was.
> They have computers. The computers do what is
> needed. They perceive that the IT industry is
> creating expensive and poorly crafted junk that
> is little, if any, better than what they have.
> Change for the sake of change.
That's all well and good, as long as they don't need to use the internet. Hey, if the eight-year-old intranet thing still works, as long as that's all they need the web browser for, no problem. Heck, they can use an intranet thingy based on IE4, threed.vbx, and Windows 95 OSR2. If it's all about an internal company intranet, what do I care?
But if you need your employees to be able to use the world wide web, then you're going to have to maintain compatibility with the world wide web. That's going to mean upgrades. The web changes over time. (Have you tried to browse the web with IE5 lately, or Netscape 4? Seriously, whip out a VM and try it. It's good for a couple of laughs.)
Increasingly many webmasters are dropping support for IE6 (after, in most cases, years of wanting to and finally working up the courage to actually do it).
Even big companies like Google, who can afford to spend a lot more hours on backward-compatibility than the small guys, are now starting to drop full IE6 support, and this is a trend that isn't going to go away. On the contrary, when somebody as big as Google makes such a move, it emboldens others. Some smaller sites, like the public library where I work, started dropping full support for IE6 a couple of years ago. (Heck, at this point I don't test in IE7 anymore, either.) A lot of the sites that haven't actually dropped IE6 yet have *wanted* to for several years, and more and more of them are going to get tired of waiting and just go ahead and do it. Hey, Google dropped IE6, so why can't we? It's going to reach critical mass at some point, and my guess is soon, probably in the next few months.
So like I said, if you only need a web browser for your intranet, fine, use whatever you had when your intranet was deployed, even if it's NCSA Mosaic.
But if you need to actually browse the web, and you've been using IE6 until now, you're going to have to get serious about an upgrade. Soon.
Note, too, that it's possible to keep IE6 *and* also use a newer browser. Actually, it's pretty easy, as long as the newer browser isn't IE. Deploying two versions of IE at once is also theoretically possible, but it's significantly more work, and that's work you don't need to do. IE6 for the intranet and Opera 10 or Firefox 3.6 for the web is so easy to set up, you can practically do it before breakfast.
My recommendation, for security reasons, is to configure the security settings in IE6 so that your intranet is the only thing it trusts, and everything else gets no javascript, no plugins, no whistles, no bells... Heck, why not just go the whole way and lock it down? Have it refuse to load any other site at all. Put your intranet in the trusted zone, and the rest of the world in the no-way-Jose zone. Make the IE shortcut on the desktop say "FooCorp Intranet DooHickey", and then create a the "The Internet" shortcut that fires up a more modern browser, preferably one that was last updated some time *after* the discovery of the transistor.
Eventually you'll run into a problem where modern browsers won't run on an OS old enough to also run IE6. For the time being, however, new browsers are still supporting Windows XP, so you're okay for now. Actually, you can (tentatively) expect this situation to probably continue most likely until circa 2014 (when XP stops getting security updates from MS), and even then you'll have a few months to do something about it. I mean, a browser that's new in 2014 probably isn't going to stop working in 2014, is it? Also, by then, assuming Moore's Law continues to do more or less what it's been doing to prices and performance (and yes, I know it's technically transistor density, but that has implications), a "gently used" three-year-old off-lease computer
> Photoshop 1.0 actually ran on a B&W Mac? Seriously?
> What's the point in that?
Yeah. They should have made it for the PC, and had it require CGA. Then people could have edited four-color pictures in any of three available palettes, with one of the four colors being freely selectable from the full range of sixteen! That would have been so much better.
Okay, so CGA was pretty well dead by 1990. (Is Photoshop really that young?) Nonetheless, people *did* use image editing software back when CGA was the current state of the art. It didn't seem so ridiculous at the time, because, you know, people hadn't been looking at 32-bit displays for as long as they could remember.
> Here in the US, we've had entire industries do this to their
> workers. It's called "free-market capitalism" writ large.
Umm, except for the part about never paying them a dime for hours they already worked. The DOL would be all over them if they tried that one.
Moving the business overseas on short notice and leaving them all out of a job with no warning? Yeah, that part's totally legal, assuming the workers were employed in the standard at-will fashion. (Some workers do have contracts with their employers that disallow this, but that's a special case.)
But you do have to pay them for the hours they already worked.
> Australia is part of Asia.
Depending on which list of continents you go by, there are a lot of variations. The geographers, geologists, and sociologists can't seem to agree on a single definition, so it can be a bit confusing. How many continents are there, anyway? Five? Six? Seven? More?
For instance, there are variously considered to be one, two, or three continents in the western hemisphere. Two is the most common figure, but it's not universal.
Europe may or may not be part of the same continent as Asia. I even saw one list that makes Africa part of the same continent as Eurasia, since they're connected.
Some lists omit Antarctica entirely, since it has no permanent inhabitants.
But for all that, I have never seen a list that made Australia part of Asia. Usually it's a continent all by itself. Frequently it's part of a "continent" called "Oceania", which also includes most of the islands in the Pacific (but not the ones that are very close to another continent, such as Taiwan or Vancouver Island). Sometimes only a few islands are included as part of Australia -- Tasmania, New Guinea, etc. I've even seen definitions that include New Zealand as part of Australia but NOT New Guinea (which was listed as part of Asia).
I have even seen occasional claims that Australia is an island, not part of any continent at all. (These claims generally come from laypersons and usually involve comparison to Greenland; typically the person making the assertion has been looking at Mercator-projection maps.)
But this is the first time I have EVER seen anyone list Australia as part of Asia. That's totally unprecedented.
> I love my pizzas to be as cheap as possible.
I like homemade pizza. Good *and* cheap.
The major caveat is, you have to start a couple of hours before you want to eat, because the dough needs time to rise. This is fine on, say, a Saturday, because you can just mix up the dough at three in the afternoon, then go do something else for a while and have supper at five or six.
But it doesn't work so well if you get home from work at six and are already hungry. On those days, I don't make homemade pizza for supper.
If it were legal, he wouldn't have been doing it in the middle of the night. The company could have just locked the employees out and done whatever they wanted in broad daylight. Plenty of companies have been known to do that sort of thing when shutting down a location.
I mean, this is a CEO we're talking about. Those guys normally work 9-5, officially, on paper, and in practice this turns into more like 10-4, except on days when they're out of the office for "meetings" with other CEOs on the golf course. Working in the middle of the night is NOT part of the general modus operandi.
So yeah, if he was slipping in during the wee hours, there's a reason.
That doesn't belong on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a venue for that sort of thing. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and people like you are polluting it with all kinds of unencyclopedic content that doesn't belong there. Stop it.
If you want to post definitions, you should put them on Wiktionary.
> Apple designed their RS-422 serial ports from
> the beginning to be compatible with RS-232
> through RS-423 provided you have the right cable..
Yeah? Try to actually use PC serial peripherals with a Mac from the pre-USB era. The cable adaptor, as a rule, can only be counted on to work if the devices *comes with* said adaptor and is labeled as supporting the Mac as well as the PC. Otherwise, forget about it.
(In fairness, a lot of Mac peripherals don't work with the PC either.)
Granted, I don't know the technical details of the Mac serial port, so as far as I know it's possible that the problem isn't the serial port itself (other than the obvious need for an adaptor because the the physical plug is obviously dissimilar), but something else. (Drivers seem like a likely possibility.) All I know is, you couldn't use PC serial devices on Macs; it never worked.
He didn't demand anything of the kind. He only suggested it, if anything in a way that implied it would be an unreasonable expectation. Which it would be, because, frankly, once you become aware that a system has a rootkit installed, the only sane thing to do is a complete format and reinstall.
Well, you can do some forensics first if you want, and maybe copy off some data (if you're careful about how you do it so as not to infect any system you copy it to). But you're going to boot from known-clean (and, preferably, read-only) media to do those things, NOT from the known-infected system. (A LiveCD is what I would recommend for such post-mortem activities.) If you want to actually boot from and use the infected system again, it needs a clean reinstall first, period. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Booting from the infected system is highly inadvisable and much worse than useless, because the system is compromised. Only someone who doesn't know any better due to a complete lack of understanding of security issues would even consider doing that.
So personally I don't see how this way of finding out is any more brutal than any other way of finding out. Continuing to use the system, even though it has a rootkit, wouldn't be a reasonable course of action anyway. Nobody who understands security would do that, and nobody else *should* either.
(Unless you're operating some kind of firewalled-garden virtualized honeypot network for the express purpose of studying how infections spread, but in that case you wouldn't be deploying the patch. I suppose if you were doing a controlled study on the effectiveness of the patch... but we're now DEEP into the realm of purely hypothetical problems with no real-world impact whatsoever.)
If we were going to criticize Microsoft here, it would be for other things, such as how long it took them to deliver the patch once the issue was reported. (I don't happen to know how long it was in this instance, BTW; I wasn't following this particular vulnerability very closely.)
Assuming it's true that the patch only causes problems on already-rootkitted systems (and I haven't seen anyone claim the contrary), then that's not really a meaningful flaw in the patch, IMO. Those systems were already toast anyway. How well does the patch work on systems that hadn't been infected? That's what matters.
> This punishment is grossly excessive and therefore cruel.
Yes, but is it cruel AND unusual, or is it in fact cruel and commonplace, something they've been doing to people for a good while now?
(However, I think it ought to qualify as an "excessive fine", though IANAL.)
> Anyone else with me that just suggests to use wireless instead?
He said the house is pretty big, though. When you start getting multiple floors and a lot of walls and things in the way, wireless performance (with affordable gear) starts to suck pretty hard.
On top of that, you have to worry about encryption and data security.
Don't get me wrong, wireless has its uses. But there are also VERY GOOD reasons to want a wired network.
I totally agree with you about the conduit. If you're building a new house, absolutely you want conduit, with accessible faceplate-covered junction boxes wherever it turns corners. Conduit seems expensive at the time, but it's *WAY* cheaper than ripping the walls apart later and then paying drywall guys and painters to come in and fix it up, and it's WAY worth it for the convenience of being able to run new cabling later for whatever purpose you happen to need it for.
Thirty years ago, would you have predicted the need for CAT6 cable? How awesome would it be to be able to put it in now just by taking the faceplates off a couple of junctions and threading it through the conduit? That kind of flexibility is *worth* the cost of the conduit, several times over, if you use it even once in the entire lifetime of the building.
I didn't get the impression that the article submitter was building a new place, though. Why would there be only coax and no cat5/6 in a place that was just built? The way I read it, he bought an existing house. In which case, retrofitting conduit would be a hassle.
As best I can tell, at least 95% of "Windows 7" PCs actually have Windows XP installed (typically through the OEM downgrade option and/or volume licensing, although some users just get out their old XP disks and install that way).
Are there computers out there that actually *run* Windows 7, on a day-to-day basis? I haven't seen them.
> As explosives age, they become less stable, and thus more likely to explode.
Theoretically, that depends somewhat on the exact type of explosives. There are some that would potentially leak out over time and dissipate to the point of harmlessness, or gradually corrode chemically into something less explosive.
But yeah, many explosives are more likely to become unstable and dangerous than harmless. Furthermore, this is especially likely to be true of "high" explosives, i.e., the kind that have to be detonated (like C4), rather than simply ignited (like black powder) or looked at funny (like chalcogen polyazides). As a rule the high explosives are the ones that tend to be used militarily. So, in the context of mines, increased instability over time is definitely the way to bet.
> Anyone have some suggestions for a more secure PDF reader?
Sure. First use pdf2ps to convert it to PostScript, then use other software (e.g., PStill) to convert it to eps, then use Inkscape to convert that to SVG, use Gimp or ImageMagick to rasterize it (e.g., to PNG) and open the result in IrfanView for viewing and printing. Each step of this operation can be done in a separate virtual machine...
> The web plugin should be retired and just force the
> pdf to open in the full reader. One can dream, right?
You can actually do this, in the Firefox prefs, under the Applications tab. (Doing this is on my standard deployment checklist, mainly because it's less confusing for the users. With the embedded reader plugin, the user doesn't realize they've left the web and doesn't understand why browser features, such as the Print and Print Preview commands, don't work. When Adobe Reader opens in a separate window, it's somewhat more evident to the untrained eye what's going on.)
However, if you ever upgrade or reinstall Adobe Reader, it changes the pref back, and you have to fix it again.
IMO, opening the Reader in a separate window *ought* to be the default setting. But apparently Adobe feels differently.
Yeah. In addition to the P4, they should have thrown in a couple of additional historically-significant data points, like the Pentium //, the 486 DX, and the 8088.
What? Why are you looking at me like that?
Where do you live, out of curiosity?
Like I said, all the new computers here have serial and parallel ports. Well, some of the laptops don't, but some do, and *all* of the regular computers do. I'm in central Ohio.
> USB was suppose to be the serial port killer
Yeah, I heard that too, in the nineties. I also heard, around the same time, that Iomega drives were doing to be the floppy disk killer. They were starting to come out with internal models, see, and all new computers were going to come with the Iomega drives, and nobody would need floppies anymore. It never happened.
Instead, USB eventually turned out to be the floppy disk killer. CD-R made a decent start on killing floppies, but it couldn't quite finish the job (though it *did* kill off Iomega drives fairly effectively). Now, though, I'm seeing fewer and fewer floppies with every passing year, and I've seen more than a few new computers (*desktop* computers, not laptops) with no floppy drive. And it's not because of Iomega. It's because of flash-EEPROM-based USB 2.0 mass storage devices, the smaller capacity ones of which have become so cheap you basically get them in specially marked boxes of breakfast cereal these days. They cost less than PCI 10/100 ethernet cards or, more to the point, less than a small box of floppies. Apparently people must be using them, because I find more of them laying around (left behind by mistake) than I ever did floppy disks.
But as far as USB peripherals that formerly would have used the serial port, the only ones I've seen are digital cameras (and serial was never a good fit for them in the first place; SCSI would have made more sense, except that most computers didn't have it). I've seen devices that formerly would have been parallel and are USB, of course (printers mainly). And I've seen USB mice and keyboards occasionally. But peripherals that traditionally used a serial port, for the most part, still use a serial port. The camera is the only exception I know of.
> It is actually very hard to find an RS-232 port on newer computers now.
Huh. That's... odd.
It's been years since I've seen a computer, new or otherwise, (other than laptops, as I noted earlier, and Macs) that doesn't have the serial and parallel ports.
> neither my Lenovo T61P nor my wife's HP laptop
Laptops, right. I already mentioned those as an exception, didn't I?
You don't get as many ports on a laptop, because nobody would use them anyhow, because nobody uses peripherals with a laptop anyway, because carrying them around everywhere would kind of defeat the whole portability thing, which is the main point of a laptop.
And Macs also don't have printer and serial ports -- even when they did, they weren't the same as the ones on PCs and so weren't compatible with non-Mac peripherals anyway, so no real change there.
But RS232 isn't going away at all. PCs (other than laptops, do I really have to keep saying that) all still have parallel and serial ports. And a lot of peripherals still use them (we just bought such a peripheral a6t work, so recently that we haven't even installed it yet).
> but isn't that "everything including the kitchen sink"
/usr/local/bin instead of /bin.
> approach what many FOSS users refer to as bloat?
Good point. There are two schools of thought on that. When you see people complaining about bloat and arguing that no extra features should be included in anything, you're seeing the opinion of a percentage of the open-source community. The most extreme of these people will argue with a straight face that the base OS install shouldn't include even basic utilities that many of us take for granted (e.g., egrep, bzip2), and furthermore that only very basic versions of essential utilities should be installed: ash or somesuch instead of bash, more instead of less, and so on. In fact, FreeBSD doesn't include bash, so if you do install it (via ports) it goes in
To most Linux users, this extreme approach is unexpected and weird. Most of us expect such things as bash and bzip2 and egrep -- and perl and screen and make for that matter -- to be installed on all computers as a matter of course.
The other school of thought is, I don't want to fool with it, just install everything. Most Linux distributions offer you the option, at install time, to check and handful of boxes for broad categories (like Gnome, KDE, server stuff, and so on) and have a whole bunch of packages from those categories installed automatically. Just install it all, so I don't have to fool with selecting eight hundred packages individually. This point of view is just as common, if not more so. And this side of things also gets taken to extremes sometimes (e.g., there are people who literally install the ENTIRE contents of the CPAN on their computers).
Most of us are somewhere in between. I generally install all the major categories (Gnome, KDE, etc), because modern hard drives are big enough that I can, and it saves time selecting the individual packages I want. But yeah, there are still things that don't get installed, and so you have to select those for installation individually.
You can, however, get practically everything from the distro's repositories, so it's seldom necessary to hunt down anything from a third party, unless you insist on installing proprietary software (like Opera), or something so specialized or obscure that it's not packaged (like Evergreen/OpenILS).
> RS-232 might be absent from a lot of consumer motherboards
Yeah? Can you actually name a recent non-Apple desktop or workstation motherboard that doesn't have it? (Netbooks, yeah, sure, but those are supplemental portable devices, not intended to replace a desktop computer.)
Compaq experimented with selling "legacy-free" systems for a few months circa 1999. Their "iPaq" model of mini-tower system, for instance, was available in a USB-only "legacy-free" version, and then there was a "standard-ports" version for just a couple bucks more. When they discontinued the iPaq line in favor of the Evo a few months later, guess which way they went with it? Then HP bought them out and the whole thing become an obscure footnote for the computer history books.
I predict RS232 will outlast USB 2.0, because subsequent USB versions will replace 2.0, but RS232 isn't going anywhere.
While we're at it, PS/2 keyboards and mice don't seem to be going anywhere either (although a lot of them have become de-facto hot-pluggable, which may be at least partly due to the influence of USB).
In fact, the last major computer component interface I can think of that died out is ISA.