I have never seen a phising attempt that was convincing enough that I would actually think it was a website done by a bank. I have seen some that were close, but they always fell down visually somewhere. I also have never given my bank my email address so I would be very surprised if they sent me an email.
On another point I used to ring up my friends and put on a silly voice and see if the could figure out is was me. On one occasion my mates girlfriend answered the phone so I pretended to be from mastercard. To my suprise not only did she not realise who it was, I also managed to get her credit card number out of her. I owned up and told her who I was before she finished giving me the number but it made me realise how many people fall for this far too easily.
Phising is nothing new, its just that now its easier to trawl looking for daft people in a more automated fashion.
I'm not qualified to talk about the fundamental differences in how the OS's handle killing processes when something goes awry,....
What? This is slashdot you are not supposed to admit this. You are supposed to blindly swear that chalk is cheese and declare yourself to be professional cheesemaker who uses chalk everyday.
This was exactly what I was thinking but obviously too tired to effectively convey after reading my own post.
In Britain nowadays we manufacturer very little. There might be one or two plant that do small runs of CD's but I would bet that lot are imported from somewhere like china. The problem is that when the record companies import into our market they add a large percentage on to the price becasue we are usually daft enough to pay whatever price they ask.
The company that lost was basically selling us CD's that were meant for another country so were alot cheaper. There is no real difference in the cost of manufacture or transportation but we have been paying over the odds for things in Britain for years so the record companies will keep charging as much as they can.
It should be a clear warning sign when it's cheaper to manufacture a CD, and ship it half-way around the world, than it is to manufacture it right where you live.
One place has too much red-tape and taxes, or one place has too few standards and protections, but in this case I think it's both.
This post shows such an astounding lack of any knoweledge it earns a reply.
1) First I would like to point out that the high cost of manufacturing in the UK compared to China is nothing to do with red tape. It has alot more to do with the fact that the pound is so strong at the moment that anything we manufactured could only be bought by people earning in sterling. At two dollars to the pound we certainly would not be selling very much to the US.
2) The main outlay when manufacturing anything is usually wages. Even in a highly automated factory people are still required to keep things running smoothly. Currently wages in China are much lower than in the UK. Now partly this is due to the minimum wage we in Britain now have of about £5 per hour. But lets be realistic for a second, even without that minimum wage you would find it difficult to pay people less. Generally what drives wages is the cost of living in a particular country. You can make some savings beyond this by breaking a few local labour laws but the really big manufacturing savings only come from relocating the parts of your business that require low skill workers to somewhere that has an average wage of pence per hour not pounds.
Wouldn't it be funny if that silly little checkbox list was actually created by some spammer originally as a cover for their real objections to a spam fighting system that they were actually scared of.
I think you mean the SCO v IBM case. This is the one where Novell end up owning SCO (literally).
My understanding is that all money that Microsoft gave SCO to get involved in a legal battle with IBM was in the form of some sort of Unix license. Novell reckon they are legally entitled to a cut of this money as they sold the Unix licenses to SCO in the first place.
The problem is that SCO have spent the money fighting IBM and RedHat. If SCO lose the will go belly up as the amounts involved far exceed the worth of the company. If that happens SCO will probably be in administration before the end of the day.
Please someone correct me if I do not understand this correctly.
Please bare in mind this story is from the Daily Mail. They are not the most reliable paper in the country if you are looking for balanced news.
It may well be that some schools are not teach holocaust in history lessons, but this may well be simply because it is not in the national curriculum which every school is now required to teach from. Also absent from the national curriculum are core math skills like algebra so these are going out the window too.
Thanks for the link, I hadnt read that before but has read similar postings from Greg.
Unfortunately it did not really answer my main point. I was in no way trying to suggest that the current situation was not the best one for producing the best quality, most stable and most reliable linux kernel.
What I was trying to suggest is that this is a very one sided attitude however that does not take into account the legal issues regarding selling hardware that supports linux and can be represented as such. In many ways the link you sen confirmed this very early on with the disclaimer where the author clearly states he is not a lawyer.
I did however take on Gregs point regarding kernel developers not being paid and it being hard to force them to donate their time for free to something with no gain. I was under the impression that by now, most of the kernel developers were being paid for their time like Greg and Linus. I am not either of thems line manager though so I have no idea what it says in their job description.
All I was trying to point out is that maybe a more balanced approach was required and that allowing companies to build proprietary closed source code on top of a Linux base was a very good thing if it made Linux invaluable to the commercial world. This would help ensure it continued survival.
Try looking at the Syllable project. (http://www.syllable.org/)
This project may or may not succeed but I do think they have some valid points about developer centric design sometime stiffling linux growth in the desktop market.
That means when you see a traffic warden about to put a ticket on your car you take his camera off him (they already use a still camera to prove you parked ilegally) and delete the photo of your car from the memory. If the traffic warden objects you threaten to punch his lights out.
This might sound far fetched to some people, but after having lived near Eccles for a while there is no way I would be a traffic warden there. I would rather be a traffic warden in Iraq. Even where I used to live in Greater Manchester (Hulme) I have seen a tow away truck for removing untaxed vehicles get its windscreen bricked.
At least if every warden has cctv this could be presentable in court after the fact.
What Linux really needs is a Stable Binary API so that hardware manfacturers can release drivers that work with the current kernel and know they will work from now for the life of that hardware. At the very least there should be a stable way to interact with the kernel that does not change in minor version revisions (ie - Stable API for entire 2.6 branch).
Rather than trying to force private businesses to play by the same rules as free kernel maintainers there should be an acknowledgement that some people may have a different agenda (maximise revenues in this case) and they should not be forced into adopting an approach that is entirely alien to them.
This is the main thing holding back linux from supporting a great deal of the hardware that is currently supported by Windows, OSX or BSD.
Without this stability manufacturers are still scared of saying they support linux, as they know the same piece of hardware may not support linux in 10 days time when the kernel is "tweaked". This creates all sorts of legal problems which alot of hardware manufacturers are scared of. It is easier to say they do not support Linux on the box as a disclaimer.
Another problem is that alot of hardware manufacturers do not want to release the exact technical specs of what the sell in case they competitors use them to create compatible products which could utilise their drivers. This leaves them having to compete with a product that has far lower R&D costs.
Hopefully Greg KH and Linus will realise this one day but until then we are stuck with waiting 3 years after a piece of hardware was released for someone in the community to reverse engineer the windows driver and create their (our) own.
The current approach might well produce a better quality driver (and kernel) but it is far to slow. Who wants to spend several hundred pounds on new hardware only to find it is obsolete before the linux kernel supports it.
I also don't come across many jobs dealing with legacy apps, and the ones I do I tend to steer clear of. I prefer creating my own crap than dealing with somebody elses.
Good for you, I used to do nothing but create new code in my last job.
Nowadays I work in collaberation with serveral other developers and we all maintain each others code. Since I started I have learnt far more than I ever did when I only worked on designing my own projects from scratch. I also find it far more challenging and hence more rewarding too.
I recommend you try it at some point if you want to grow as a developer.
What alovely idea, but here in the real world we have things called design constraints. Like maybe you have a web application that has been doing its job for the previous 5 or 6 years but is also constantly evolving. You have a lot of legacy code that was written to run against a mysql database from 5 years ago. That puts you on MySQL 4.0 with no stored procedures.
Now I am not saying this doesnt need an upgrade (currently in the works), but when you are talking about a mission critical app that is already making money you have to be very careful about breaking anything, you cant just throw a new version of mysql on your master database server and pray to the gods of IT. You have to be 100% sure everything will work before you move to a new version of anything, otherwise you irrepairably damage the image of your business.
Even when you are sure that it will work you have to perform the switch outside of core hours and warn customers of the potential for downtime. Things do not always go 100% according to plan and the most minor error can have serious consequences. Especially when in order to do something outside working hours you are doing this at 4am. It takes several days to switch your sleep patterns over to nighttime working but quite often in the run up to the overnighter you are too busy to sleep all day.
Out here in the real world we have to deal with suboptimal platforms as the decision to go with a particular DB server might have been taken years before you started working for the company. You can not just go in and insist everything is changed to what you would prefer (even if it is a better platform).
So many people are in here whining on about Chinese piracy.
But even if 90% of Chinese software is pirated, the numbers in the US are pretty high.
Are all the people who are complaining trying to say they have never used pirated software on their PC's? Have they ever downloaded a movie off the net? Or an MP3?
Lets stop being so hypocritical for a moment please. The vast majority of people I know have engaged in some form of piracy at one time or another.
Microsoft is not SCO. It's a powerful and deep-pocketed corporation that has ran over almost every attempt to slow it down.
That does however bring about another problem - Microsoft has more to lose.
SCO was already dead and buried before the whole debacle even began as their only product was worthless and they had no money or time to develop a new one. They might have been struggling along but their were never going to get back to the heights they once occupied.
Microsoft however have deep pockets as you say. That means they have to walk a fine line. The last thing they want to do is end up in court facing a long protracted legal battle. These sort of legal battles are very expensive and you can never be truly sure of the outcome unless you own a crystal ball.
If MS actually start a patent battle they *might* lose. Regardless of what you think the chances of that are it is still a risk. That may open them up to paying the other parties costs. Since the other party would probably be IBM this would be alot. They have a huge staff of lawyers.
The server is more likely to be secured. Once you crack it, a single action can secure it and render your crack a waste.
Further, even with that crack tool, it should take very little time for a fix to be found
You seem to be under the impression that it takes very little time to repair a cracked machine. Actually in the real world it takes alot longer as there is only one acceptable solution -
1) A complete audit of all machines under your control to verify they are all safe and secure. This should also reveal the method of entry. This should include penetration testing to find all possible entry points.
2) Any machines that even look slightly compromised are rebuilt from known clean backup images or scratch, depending on which is available. Then you close the method of entry found in point one above before connecting it to the internet.
So you won't mind if I post your email address (shown in your message header) after removing the spam obfuscation then?
I really did consider doing this (especially since its a Gmail one and you probably wouldnt have got any spam anyway) but decided that giving the spammers one more email would just result in extra crap flying round the wires of the internet, even if it did never get anywhere you could read it.
Contrast this with the legal situation in the US where you could probably sue me for libel (Libel is Letters, Slander is Speech) whether you pour hot grits down your pants or not.
Actually we in th UK have some of the most over the top libel laws in the world. Not only could that comment get you sued for libel but you would also have the following problems:
1) No legal aid - you would have to pay for your entire defence out of your own pocket. Lawyers are expensive and this alone would prbably force you to appologise.
2) They could also sue anyone who published your statement. In order to "publish" something you merely have to know you are distributing it, so either slashdot (or their) ISP would receive a standard take down notice and would have to either comply, or dive head on into a horrific (ie - expensive) legal quagmire.
I had a bit of a dig about and here are some links I found:
The last is one is particularly relevant as it pertains to a printer being scared of a libel trial so shredding all the issues of something they were printing.
Am I the only peron in here who realises that what is pre-installed is completely irrelevant?
The thing that is notable from the interview is that he is unable to sell a dual boot windows / ubuntu PC due to contractual issues with Microsoft. He doesnt mention MS by name but you can bet Ubuntu arent the ones prohibiting it and he certainly says they are unable to. Yet the first thing I would be doing after purchase is trashing the disk and making it dual boot.
I have been using (Gentoo) Linux for a number of years now but I still need a windows PC. For starters, I use windows at work and have to connect to a VPN when I am not in the office. I also quite like playing computer games and these are mostly windows only. I havent booted my PC into windows since last weekend but I still need it occasionaly. I have never tried using WINE so maybe I could use that to run the occassional game and on my wimpy computer (Centrino 1.7Ghz) I doubt it could cope with the overhead.
But if they were bad at their job, or did something outrageous that got them fired, about all you can say is that you wouldn't recommend them for rehire
The reason for this is usually libel laws. If you say the the person was crap at their job, and it costs them getting another one, you have to be able to prove what you have said in a court of law. Since most sane people want to stay as far away from court as possible, it is better to refuse a reference rather than risk giving a bad one.
Even if you think you have cast iron evidence that the person was crap, why would you want risk the hassle of a court case (let alone losing and having to pay them a small fortune) over some guy who you no longer have to put up with anyway? Giving someone a bad reference doesnt gain you anything except a headache. From a risk / reward perspective the choice is a no brainer.
Also worth noting is that most employers would take your refusal to give him a good reference as a sign that he was a thieving child molester anyway and turn him down sharpish.
One again the slashdot mods showing they are unable to handle a point of view which differs from their own.
If you dont aggree with a post, try and be constructive and say why you disagree. Dont just mod the post as a troll because it offends your christian sensibilities.
Personally I gree with the parent poster. At least you can safely laugh at Uri Gellar in the knowledge that all he can bend is spoons. There are much more worring people out there who can bend other peoples minds into doing their bidding.
Slashdot Mirror
Here Here.
I have never seen a phising attempt that was convincing enough that I would actually think it was a website done by a bank. I have seen some that were close, but they always fell down visually somewhere. I also have never given my bank my email address so I would be very surprised if they sent me an email.
On another point I used to ring up my friends and put on a silly voice and see if the could figure out is was me. On one occasion my mates girlfriend answered the phone so I pretended to be from mastercard. To my suprise not only did she not realise who it was, I also managed to get her credit card number out of her. I owned up and told her who I was before she finished giving me the number but it made me realise how many people fall for this far too easily.
Phising is nothing new, its just that now its easier to trawl looking for daft people in a more automated fashion.
I'm not qualified to talk about the fundamental differences in how the OS's handle killing processes when something goes awry,....
What? This is slashdot you are not supposed to admit this. You are supposed to blindly swear that chalk is cheese and declare yourself to be professional cheesemaker who uses chalk everyday.
OTOH, given the massive level of technical ignorance about Windows on Slashdot,.....
Speaking personally I am nowhere near as ignorant as I would like to be about Windows.
This was exactly what I was thinking but obviously too tired to effectively convey after reading my own post.
In Britain nowadays we manufacturer very little. There might be one or two plant that do small runs of CD's but I would bet that lot are imported from somewhere like china. The problem is that when the record companies import into our market they add a large percentage on to the price becasue we are usually daft enough to pay whatever price they ask.
The company that lost was basically selling us CD's that were meant for another country so were alot cheaper. There is no real difference in the cost of manufacture or transportation but we have been paying over the odds for things in Britain for years so the record companies will keep charging as much as they can.
It should be a clear warning sign when it's cheaper to manufacture a CD, and ship it half-way around the world, than it is to manufacture it right where you live.
One place has too much red-tape and taxes, or one place has too few standards and protections, but in this case I think it's both.
This post shows such an astounding lack of any knoweledge it earns a reply.
1) First I would like to point out that the high cost of manufacturing in the UK compared to China is nothing to do with red tape. It has alot more to do with the fact that the pound is so strong at the moment that anything we manufactured could only be bought by people earning in sterling. At two dollars to the pound we certainly would not be selling very much to the US.
2) The main outlay when manufacturing anything is usually wages. Even in a highly automated factory people are still required to keep things running smoothly. Currently wages in China are much lower than in the UK. Now partly this is due to the minimum wage we in Britain now have of about £5 per hour. But lets be realistic for a second, even without that minimum wage you would find it difficult to pay people less. Generally what drives wages is the cost of living in a particular country. You can make some savings beyond this by breaking a few local labour laws but the really big manufacturing savings only come from relocating the parts of your business that require low skill workers to somewhere that has an average wage of pence per hour not pounds.
Far too much effort being that it had no tumblers and could be turned with a paperclip.
My parents used it to stop me using the PC while they were at work for years.
Another alternative would be to just use one from a different PC as most of them were all exactly the same.
Wouldn't it be funny if that silly little checkbox list was actually created by some spammer originally as a cover for their real objections to a spam fighting system that they were actually scared of.
I think you mean the SCO v IBM case. This is the one where Novell end up owning SCO (literally).
My understanding is that all money that Microsoft gave SCO to get involved in a legal battle with IBM was in the form of some sort of Unix license. Novell reckon they are legally entitled to a cut of this money as they sold the Unix licenses to SCO in the first place.
The problem is that SCO have spent the money fighting IBM and RedHat. If SCO lose the will go belly up as the amounts involved far exceed the worth of the company. If that happens SCO will probably be in administration before the end of the day.
Please someone correct me if I do not understand this correctly.
Please bare in mind this story is from the Daily Mail. They are not the most reliable paper in the country if you are looking for balanced news.
It may well be that some schools are not teach holocaust in history lessons, but this may well be simply because it is not in the national curriculum which every school is now required to teach from. Also absent from the national curriculum are core math skills like algebra so these are going out the window too.
That paper is only fit for wiping your arse with.
Thanks for the link, I hadnt read that before but has read similar postings from Greg.
Unfortunately it did not really answer my main point. I was in no way trying to suggest that the current situation was not the best one for producing the best quality, most stable and most reliable linux kernel.
What I was trying to suggest is that this is a very one sided attitude however that does not take into account the legal issues regarding selling hardware that supports linux and can be represented as such. In many ways the link you sen confirmed this very early on with the disclaimer where the author clearly states he is not a lawyer.
I did however take on Gregs point regarding kernel developers not being paid and it being hard to force them to donate their time for free to something with no gain. I was under the impression that by now, most of the kernel developers were being paid for their time like Greg and Linus. I am not either of thems line manager though so I have no idea what it says in their job description.
All I was trying to point out is that maybe a more balanced approach was required and that allowing companies to build proprietary closed source code on top of a Linux base was a very good thing if it made Linux invaluable to the commercial world. This would help ensure it continued survival.
Try looking at the Syllable project. (http://www.syllable.org/)
This project may or may not succeed but I do think they have some valid points about developer centric design sometime stiffling linux growth in the desktop market.
antisocial behavior..
That means when you see a traffic warden about to put a ticket on your car you take his camera off him (they already use a still camera to prove you parked ilegally) and delete the photo of your car from the memory. If the traffic warden objects you threaten to punch his lights out.
This might sound far fetched to some people, but after having lived near Eccles for a while there is no way I would be a traffic warden there. I would rather be a traffic warden in Iraq. Even where I used to live in Greater Manchester (Hulme) I have seen a tow away truck for removing untaxed vehicles get its windscreen bricked.
At least if every warden has cctv this could be presentable in court after the fact.
What Linux really needs is a Stable Binary API so that hardware manfacturers can release drivers that work with the current kernel and know they will work from now for the life of that hardware. At the very least there should be a stable way to interact with the kernel that does not change in minor version revisions (ie - Stable API for entire 2.6 branch).
Rather than trying to force private businesses to play by the same rules as free kernel maintainers there should be an acknowledgement that some people may have a different agenda (maximise revenues in this case) and they should not be forced into adopting an approach that is entirely alien to them.
This is the main thing holding back linux from supporting a great deal of the hardware that is currently supported by Windows, OSX or BSD.
Without this stability manufacturers are still scared of saying they support linux, as they know the same piece of hardware may not support linux in 10 days time when the kernel is "tweaked". This creates all sorts of legal problems which alot of hardware manufacturers are scared of. It is easier to say they do not support Linux on the box as a disclaimer.
Another problem is that alot of hardware manufacturers do not want to release the exact technical specs of what the sell in case they competitors use them to create compatible products which could utilise their drivers. This leaves them having to compete with a product that has far lower R&D costs.
Hopefully Greg KH and Linus will realise this one day but until then we are stuck with waiting 3 years after a piece of hardware was released for someone in the community to reverse engineer the windows driver and create their (our) own.
The current approach might well produce a better quality driver (and kernel) but it is far to slow. Who wants to spend several hundred pounds on new hardware only to find it is obsolete before the linux kernel supports it.
I also don't come across many jobs dealing with legacy apps, and the ones I do I tend to steer clear of. I prefer creating my own crap than dealing with somebody elses.
Good for you, I used to do nothing but create new code in my last job.
Nowadays I work in collaberation with serveral other developers and we all maintain each others code. Since I started I have learnt far more than I ever did when I only worked on designing my own projects from scratch. I also find it far more challenging and hence more rewarding too.
I recommend you try it at some point if you want to grow as a developer.
I can see how you would think that, both are a bunch of criminals. :)
What alovely idea, but here in the real world we have things called design constraints. Like maybe you have a web application that has been doing its job for the previous 5 or 6 years but is also constantly evolving. You have a lot of legacy code that was written to run against a mysql database from 5 years ago. That puts you on MySQL 4.0 with no stored procedures.
Now I am not saying this doesnt need an upgrade (currently in the works), but when you are talking about a mission critical app that is already making money you have to be very careful about breaking anything, you cant just throw a new version of mysql on your master database server and pray to the gods of IT. You have to be 100% sure everything will work before you move to a new version of anything, otherwise you irrepairably damage the image of your business.
Even when you are sure that it will work you have to perform the switch outside of core hours and warn customers of the potential for downtime. Things do not always go 100% according to plan and the most minor error can have serious consequences. Especially when in order to do something outside working hours you are doing this at 4am. It takes several days to switch your sleep patterns over to nighttime working but quite often in the run up to the overnighter you are too busy to sleep all day.
Out here in the real world we have to deal with suboptimal platforms as the decision to go with a particular DB server might have been taken years before you started working for the company. You can not just go in and insist everything is changed to what you would prefer (even if it is a better platform).
So many people are in here whining on about Chinese piracy.
But even if 90% of Chinese software is pirated, the numbers in the US are pretty high.
Are all the people who are complaining trying to say they have never used pirated software on their PC's? Have they ever downloaded a movie off the net? Or an MP3?
Lets stop being so hypocritical for a moment please. The vast majority of people I know have engaged in some form of piracy at one time or another.
Microsoft is not SCO. It's a powerful and deep-pocketed corporation that has ran over almost every attempt to slow it down.
That does however bring about another problem - Microsoft has more to lose.
SCO was already dead and buried before the whole debacle even began as their only product was worthless and they had no money or time to develop a new one. They might have been struggling along but their were never going to get back to the heights they once occupied.
Microsoft however have deep pockets as you say. That means they have to walk a fine line. The last thing they want to do is end up in court facing a long protracted legal battle. These sort of legal battles are very expensive and you can never be truly sure of the outcome unless you own a crystal ball.
If MS actually start a patent battle they *might* lose. Regardless of what you think the chances of that are it is still a risk. That may open them up to paying the other parties costs. Since the other party would probably be IBM this would be alot. They have a huge staff of lawyers.
The server is more likely to be secured. Once you crack it, a single action can secure it and render your crack a waste.
Further, even with that crack tool, it should take very little time for a fix to be found
You seem to be under the impression that it takes very little time to repair a cracked machine. Actually in the real world it takes alot longer as there is only one acceptable solution -
1) A complete audit of all machines under your control to verify they are all safe and secure. This should also reveal the method of entry. This should include penetration testing to find all possible entry points.
2) Any machines that even look slightly compromised are rebuilt from known clean backup images or scratch, depending on which is available. Then you close the method of entry found in point one above before connecting it to the internet.
This is an expensive, time consuming task.
Which bit?
And are you a UK resident?
Please post some links and perhaps explanation rather than just a two word reply.
(Who modded those two words as informative?)
So you won't mind if I post your email address (shown in your message header) after removing the spam obfuscation then?
I really did consider doing this (especially since its a Gmail one and you probably wouldnt have got any spam anyway) but decided that giving the spammers one more email would just result in extra crap flying round the wires of the internet, even if it did never get anywhere you could read it.
Contrast this with the legal situation in the US where you could probably sue me for libel (Libel is Letters, Slander is Speech) whether you pour hot grits down your pants or not.
8 24902,00.htmln t-and-flame-groups-legal-pitfalls-with-postings/6 3/ai_53706056
Actually we in th UK have some of the most over the top libel laws in the world. Not only could that comment get you sued for libel but you would also have the following problems:
1) No legal aid - you would have to pay for your entire defence out of your own pocket. Lawyers are expensive and this alone would prbably force you to appologise.
2) They could also sue anyone who published your statement. In order to "publish" something you merely have to know you are distributing it, so either slashdot (or their) ISP would receive a standard take down notice and would have to either comply, or dive head on into a horrific (ie - expensive) legal quagmire.
I had a bit of a dig about and here are some links I found:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,
http://digital-lifestyles.info/2006/03/23/john-bu
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1295/is_2_
The last is one is particularly relevant as it pertains to a printer being scared of a libel trial so shredding all the issues of something they were printing.
I think I should ask them if they hire new writers.
Sounds like you write for them already.
Am I the only peron in here who realises that what is pre-installed is completely irrelevant?
The thing that is notable from the interview is that he is unable to sell a dual boot windows / ubuntu PC due to contractual issues with Microsoft. He doesnt mention MS by name but you can bet Ubuntu arent the ones prohibiting it and he certainly says they are unable to. Yet the first thing I would be doing after purchase is trashing the disk and making it dual boot.
I have been using (Gentoo) Linux for a number of years now but I still need a windows PC. For starters, I use windows at work and have to connect to a VPN when I am not in the office. I also quite like playing computer games and these are mostly windows only. I havent booted my PC into windows since last weekend but I still need it occasionaly. I have never tried using WINE so maybe I could use that to run the occassional game and on my wimpy computer (Centrino 1.7Ghz) I doubt it could cope with the overhead.
But if they were bad at their job, or did something outrageous that got them fired, about all you can say is that you wouldn't recommend them for rehire
The reason for this is usually libel laws. If you say the the person was crap at their job, and it costs them getting another one, you have to be able to prove what you have said in a court of law. Since most sane people want to stay as far away from court as possible, it is better to refuse a reference rather than risk giving a bad one.
Even if you think you have cast iron evidence that the person was crap, why would you want risk the hassle of a court case (let alone losing and having to pay them a small fortune) over some guy who you no longer have to put up with anyway? Giving someone a bad reference doesnt gain you anything except a headache. From a risk / reward perspective the choice is a no brainer.
Also worth noting is that most employers would take your refusal to give him a good reference as a sign that he was a thieving child molester anyway and turn him down sharpish.
One again the slashdot mods showing they are unable to handle a point of view which differs from their own.
If you dont aggree with a post, try and be constructive and say why you disagree. Dont just mod the post as a troll because it offends your christian sensibilities.
Personally I gree with the parent poster. At least you can safely laugh at Uri Gellar in the knowledge that all he can bend is spoons. There are much more worring people out there who can bend other peoples minds into doing their bidding.