Microsoft is composed of a bunch of lying sacks of shit. ANY public - or blog - statement made by ANY Microsoft employee is about as reliable as something coming out of the mouth of Bush. It's not only a falsehood, it's a deliberate lie made by people who don't give a damn what anybody else thinks about them or the messes they've made because they are personally profiting from those messes.
NO ONE at Microsoft gives a RAT'S ASS about security. Period.
Bill Gates has NEVER cared about ANYTHING except sucking as much money out of other people's pockets (since his poker days at Harvard) as he can. He learned this from his lawyer father (the same one that runs his "charitable foundation" which exists for the sole purpose of concentrating influence over various corporations through investments.)
The dweebs he has working (and speaking - including on/.) for him don't care about anything but their high salaries, stock options and bowing down to the richest guy in the world.
The CIOs who buy his crap aren't concerned about anything but covering their asses to their bosses. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM^H^H^HMicrosoft."
The/. trolls who praise Microsoft are incompetent punks who are indistinguishable from Microsoft employees - except they don't have the brains to even work for Microsoft (except for the actual Microsoft shills.)
The bottom line is this: you're either a free man working for yourself, or you're a punk working for Microsoft.
An ABC News article yesterday actually dared to raise the concept that Microsoft is dying. They have nothing left except a bloated, unfinishable OS called Longhorn - on which they're about to get shafted.
And it's about time, too.
Mod this troll, mod this flamebait! Is that all you got, huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
That said, YESTERDAY it was a great read to see the Judge say words like "complete lack thereof" (of evidence), etc.
What he meant was this: "I'm not gonna rule in IBM's favor TODAY, but if you don't come up with something that at least creates a DISPUTE by the end of the discovery phase, I'm kicking your ass to the curb!"
I can't wait to see how Rob Enderle and Maureen O'Gara and Laura Didio are gonna spin this one in the trade press...
With all the hoopla about Armstrong Williams and this fake White House news guy Gannon (who runs gay porn sites, no less - Bush must be thrilled given Kitty Kelly's accusations), one would expect these three (and Judith Miller at the NYT, whom the Times Public Editor has accused of spreading White House propaganda that has not been revealed even to her bosses at the Times) to be under investigation for taking Microsoft and SCO bribes. (Of course, the companies they work for take Microsoft bribes - only they call them "research contracts", but still...)
ANY criticism of the rightwing - or government in general, which is even worse - is now to be referred to as "Bush-bashing"...as though that means something...
What it means is that this idiot expects everyone to assume that Bush can do no wrong BECAUSE the Democrats do it, too.
Sorry, moron, I am neither a Republican NOR a Democrat (nor a Republicrat nor a Democan) and I don't give a rat's ass who's in the White House party-wise.
But Bush is STILL an asshole and the agenda of his administration is greed, power-lust, and fucking religious lunacy.
And anybody who supports this chimpanzee...is a chimpanzee.
Why don't you/. morons submit a list of questions to Bill directly? Why waste time with his flunkies?
This is less important than Whil Wheaton's questions...
Why not submit a list of questions to George Bush, while you're at it? Or maybe Karl Rove, since Bush needs a radio receiver to answer his own questions...
Why not submit a list of questions to Kim Polese at SpikeSource? She at least looks good and can talk the OSS game.
I live in a cheap room and get a Pell Grant to go to City College...:-)
But the Pell Grants run out this fall, so I have to get enough clients to justify raising my rates over the next six months or so. Shouldn't be too much of a problem, there's apparently plenty of business around, even in this area full of techies. Lot of techies, but they mostly charge a lot more than I do - and the low end doesn't want to pay $75/hour for home visits. Business will, though, so I want to move my client base from one-off home users to very small and small businesses. If I can pull down a half dozen clients paying me a monthly contract of $250-500/month plus a few hundred dollars more from home clients, I can survive all right in this town.
A lot of small businesses used WIndows 98 and didn't upgrade to either 2000 or XP.
Windows 2K was mostly for corporate use - home users didn't need it over Windows 98 (well, they did, but they didn't know it).
XP was supposed to be direct corporate upgrade from 2000 (with some eye candy for the home users in "Home" edition - which is irrelevant to my point.) But XP simply wasn't significantly better for CORPORATE use than 2000. That's why it took a long time to get corporations weaned off it. That's why MS came up with their license that guaranteed a new version every three years or so (and then screwed up with Longhorn which is pissing off a lot of corporations who paid for that license).
XP was released around October 2001. Your stats page shows it had only 30% in March 2004, two and a half years later. I'd say that was a lot slower upgrades than Microsoft wanted.
Even now, the latest stats show 2000 and 98 still have nearly 30% of the Microsoft installed base.
"If I feel bad its taking so damn long, and I could have done it quicker, I cut em a little slack and give em a half-hour off or something"
Yeah, I do that, too. I'm dealing with low-end clients who can't afford to pay me for as many hours as it will take to get rid of ALL the spyware, and I hate leaving a job half-done.
Or if I know I screwed up and wasn't as efficient as I should have been. Not that they'd know, but I'D know, which is enough for me.
Then I also lose money because I can't even calculate my half-hour rate properly half the time and undercharge the customer...I'd make a lousy Ferenghi...:-)
You could also probably set up Bart's PE (Windows XP bootable live CD) to do it.
Only problem would be where to put the downloaded updates - also whether you could be sure you had Internet access to get them in the first place.
If you could do all this from a USB key, it would be better than a CD. And there are Linux distros meant to run from a USB key, so it's certainly doable.
Actually I've checked Craigslist several times, and there are people on there all over the place.
There was a guy doing it "for fun" for IIRC $15/hour, and there are guys with nice HTML ads charging the usual $65 and up - and everybody in between. A lot of the ads are not very professionally done or very clear about their business policies. One guy had his wife run the ad, claiming he was really good with computers so you should hire him...:-)
And there's probably 100 ads or more a day. Which tells me there is a lot of business out there - which is not surprising since (quoting Woody Allen for the umpteenth time) "Nothing works and nobody cares."
I put out maybe thirty fliers over the course of two hours around my neighborhood last year and got at least fifteen calls over the next few weeks, and at least eight or nine one-off clients and one repeat client that's used me three or four times. Damn good rate of return for some fliers put up on laundromat bulletin boards and the like.
Carry an external CD or DVD burner around with you (along with a decent burner software package - which usually comes with the burner), hook it up, burn off X gig of files (don't do anything fancy like compression or image backups - they won't know how to restore it - just burn straight directories), give it to them in a jewel box (or holder if more than one). Charge by the gig or charge by the time it takes.
You could even use a Knoppix Live CD with K3b to do it...
"i suspect about 1 hour of work is all that is needed"
Don't count on that with spyware - just running a copy of Ad-Aware might take half an hour to an hour (or more) depending on how slow their machine is, how much stuff they have on it, how much spyware they have on it - and then it won't find everything, and the rest you have to clean off manually - which means checking spyware sites to identify where the DLLs and registry keys are hidden, editing the registry, rebooting a half dozen times, etc. Trust me, it adds up fast (which is good for the money you make, but bad from the client's point of view.)
Plan on two to four hours minimum for the usual spyware-ridden old machine.
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Microsoft is composed of a bunch of lying sacks of shit. ANY public - or blog - statement made by ANY Microsoft employee is about as reliable as something coming out of the mouth of Bush. It's not only a falsehood, it's a deliberate lie made by people who don't give a damn what anybody else thinks about them or the messes they've made because they are personally profiting from those messes.
NO ONE at Microsoft gives a RAT'S ASS about security. Period.
Bill Gates has NEVER cared about ANYTHING except sucking as much money out of other people's pockets (since his poker days at Harvard) as he can. He learned this from his lawyer father (the same one that runs his "charitable foundation" which exists for the sole purpose of concentrating influence over various corporations through investments.)
The dweebs he has working (and speaking - including on
The CIOs who buy his crap aren't concerned about anything but covering their asses to their bosses.
"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM^H^H^HMicrosoft."
The
The bottom line is this: you're either a free man working for yourself, or you're a punk working for Microsoft.
An ABC News article yesterday actually dared to raise the concept that Microsoft is dying. They have nothing left except a bloated, unfinishable OS called Longhorn - on which they're about to get shafted.
And it's about time, too.
Mod this troll, mod this flamebait! Is that all you got, huh? Are you nuts? Come at me!
DUPE! DUPE!
That said, YESTERDAY it was a great read to see the Judge say words like "complete lack thereof" (of evidence), etc.
What he meant was this: "I'm not gonna rule in IBM's favor TODAY, but if you don't come up with something that at least creates a DISPUTE by the end of the discovery phase, I'm kicking your ass to the curb!"
I can't wait to see how Rob Enderle and Maureen O'Gara and Laura Didio are gonna spin this one in the trade press...
With all the hoopla about Armstrong Williams and this fake White House news guy Gannon (who runs gay porn sites, no less - Bush must be thrilled given Kitty Kelly's accusations), one would expect these three (and Judith Miller at the NYT, whom the Times Public Editor has accused of spreading White House propaganda that has not been revealed even to her bosses at the Times) to be under investigation for taking Microsoft and SCO bribes.
(Of course, the companies they work for take Microsoft bribes - only they call them "research contracts", but still...)
Another moron...
ANY criticism of the rightwing - or government in general, which is even worse - is now to be referred to as "Bush-bashing"...as though that means something...
What it means is that this idiot expects everyone to assume that Bush can do no wrong BECAUSE the Democrats do it, too.
Sorry, moron, I am neither a Republican NOR a Democrat (nor a Republicrat nor a Democan) and I don't give a rat's ass who's in the White House party-wise.
But Bush is STILL an asshole and the agenda of his administration is greed, power-lust, and fucking religious lunacy.
And anybody who supports this chimpanzee...is a chimpanzee.
So fuck you.
What kind of a moron are you?
Working for Gates AND insulting Linux?
Why don't you
This is less important than Whil Wheaton's questions...
Why not submit a list of questions to George Bush, while you're at it? Or maybe Karl Rove, since Bush needs a radio receiver to answer his own questions...
Why not submit a list of questions to Kim Polese at SpikeSource? She at least looks good and can talk the OSS game.
Talk about ASKING for Microsoft FUD...
Morons...
by a circle with a big red slash through it...?
As in, "we don't have any to deal with the Christian right wing freaks in this country..."
Humans...Jesus Baron von Christ! (Pardon the pun...)
"What Microsoft really needs is some way of ensuring that software wears out at a similar speed to hardware."
I thought they already had that...
In fact, for anyone with a brain, their software wears out in about twenty minutes after installation...
Some of it wears out before being downloaded...
Some idiots said recently there wouldn't be another Microsoft any time soon.
I prefer to hope there won't be the CURRENT Microsoft some time soon...
"I don't think the concept itself is THAT hard to implement - it's been done before"
Where has a metadata file system of the sort envisioned by MS been done before - and successfully - on a PC OS?
I'm not aware of any such.
"That's why they can defend certain Islamic societies that brutalize women and employ extreme conservative governments"
Umm, you mean like the neocons?
Oh, wait, you said Islamic, not Christian...
"Terrorist = Bully, and the only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them and fight"
RIGHT ON, MAN!
I'm glad to see someone is finally seeing the issue from bin Laden's side of it!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Heh, you gotta love these morons...
Can't remember Bin Laden ever being "in our sites"...
Unless you count the times they hid the Al Qaeda Web site inside other Web sites...
Speaking of bin Laden, hmmm, I seem to recall someone saying last year something about he doesn't really care about bin Laden...
And, of course, we now know he didn't care BEFORE 9/11 either...
Can't resist...
What's immoral about cigars?
(Other than being stupid enough to smoke them, of course - which is irrelevant to the current case, apparently...)
I live in a cheap room and get a Pell Grant to go to City College...:-)
But the Pell Grants run out this fall, so I have to get enough clients to justify raising my rates over the next six months or so. Shouldn't be too much of a problem, there's apparently plenty of business around, even in this area full of techies. Lot of techies, but they mostly charge a lot more than I do - and the low end doesn't want to pay $75/hour for home visits. Business will, though, so I want to move my client base from one-off home users to very small and small businesses. If I can pull down a half dozen clients paying me a monthly contract of $250-500/month plus a few hundred dollars more from home clients, I can survive all right in this town.
No wive, no kids, no car gives me the edge.
A lot of small businesses used WIndows 98 and didn't upgrade to either 2000 or XP.
Windows 2K was mostly for corporate use - home users didn't need it over Windows 98 (well, they did, but they didn't know it).
XP was supposed to be direct corporate upgrade from 2000 (with some eye candy for the home users in "Home" edition - which is irrelevant to my point.) But XP simply wasn't significantly better for CORPORATE use than 2000. That's why it took a long time to get corporations weaned off it. That's why MS came up with their license that guaranteed a new version every three years or so (and then screwed up with Longhorn which is pissing off a lot of corporations who paid for that license).
XP was released around October 2001. Your stats page shows it had only 30% in March 2004, two and a half years later. I'd say that was a lot slower upgrades than Microsoft wanted.
Even now, the latest stats show 2000 and 98 still have nearly 30% of the Microsoft installed base.
Try this interesting article for a perspective.
They want compost, tell them to subscribe to
Oh, wait, you mean it's gotta help GROW flowers...
Never mind...
"If I feel bad its taking so damn long, and I could have done it quicker, I cut em a little slack and give em a half-hour off or something"
Yeah, I do that, too. I'm dealing with low-end clients who can't afford to pay me for as many hours as it will take to get rid of ALL the spyware, and I hate leaving a job half-done.
Or if I know I screwed up and wasn't as efficient as I should have been. Not that they'd know, but I'D know, which is enough for me.
Then I also lose money because I can't even calculate my half-hour rate properly half the time and undercharge the customer...I'd make a lousy Ferenghi...:-)
Depends.
I get clients who are just using some old laptop as their primary machine to do email, and now it's slow from the spyware and viruses.
They simply can't afford $100 an hour for that stuff.
But, yeah, less than $50-75 an hour, maybe, is definitely working the low end (which I do, which is why I have clients like the above.)
This is certainly doable.
You could also probably set up Bart's PE (Windows XP bootable live CD) to do it.
Only problem would be where to put the downloaded updates - also whether you could be sure you had Internet access to get them in the first place.
If you could do all this from a USB key, it would be better than a CD. And there are Linux distros meant to run from a USB key, so it's certainly doable.
"I get free housing for as long as I need"
And a girlfriend with four other girls in the house...
Where is Paradise when I need it?
People are claiming "pizza, beer, sex"...
So let's get it out in the open!
Who here has ACTUALLY been given sex for PC work?
And by whom? Your relatives? The hot babe down the street? The hot secretary from the office? The granny who couldn't install Linux?
C'mon, let's hear the stories...
Actually I've checked Craigslist several times, and there are people on there all over the place.
There was a guy doing it "for fun" for IIRC $15/hour, and there are guys with nice HTML ads charging the usual $65 and up - and everybody in between. A lot of the ads are not very professionally done or very clear about their business policies. One guy had his wife run the ad, claiming he was really good with computers so you should hire him...:-)
And there's probably 100 ads or more a day. Which tells me there is a lot of business out there - which is not surprising since (quoting Woody Allen for the umpteenth time) "Nothing works and nobody cares."
I put out maybe thirty fliers over the course of two hours around my neighborhood last year and got at least fifteen calls over the next few weeks, and at least eight or nine one-off clients and one repeat client that's used me three or four times. Damn good rate of return for some fliers put up on laundromat bulletin boards and the like.
Carry an external CD or DVD burner around with you (along with a decent burner software package - which usually comes with the burner), hook it up, burn off X gig of files (don't do anything fancy like compression or image backups - they won't know how to restore it - just burn straight directories), give it to them in a jewel box (or holder if more than one). Charge by the gig or charge by the time it takes.
You could even use a Knoppix Live CD with K3b to do it...
"If it brakes?"
Then you have to charge travel time for driving to wherever it eventually stopped...
And have you seen what is charged for putting new brake pads on a PC?
My rate is "free" when being begged by a hot babe.
Hasn't happened yet, unfortunately...:-)
Oh, and that also depends on HER being "free"...
If the latter condition is not met, my rate doubles...:-)
(Twice "free" is...waitamint, WTF?)
"i suspect about 1 hour of work is all that is needed"
Don't count on that with spyware - just running a copy of Ad-Aware might take half an hour to an hour (or more) depending on how slow their machine is, how much stuff they have on it, how much spyware they have on it - and then it won't find everything, and the rest you have to clean off manually - which means checking spyware sites to identify where the DLLs and registry keys are hidden, editing the registry, rebooting a half dozen times, etc. Trust me, it adds up fast (which is good for the money you make, but bad from the client's point of view.)
Plan on two to four hours minimum for the usual spyware-ridden old machine.
"if you show (& report, & pay taxes on) a profit"
So don't...
(Naturally, I'm referring to the "reporting and paying taxes on" part...if you don't have the "show" part, the rest is irrelevant...)
YMMV, IANAL, IANATA (I Am Not A Tax Accountant) and IDGAS (I Don't Give A Shit)...