M$ ratted them out. They are the ones who called the feds in. This just proves the point, that since Vista phones home with alot of personal info, it is only a matter of time before the feds are called in for Vista violators.
I guess you are not quite informed about what your privacy challenged M$ crap does. Look at what WGA does. Every time it boots up it touches base with M$. What's to prevent sometime in the near future, M$ disabling your OS? All it has to do is to change a little flag in the database, and the next time WGA phones home, you no longer have a working computer.
Or how about this little ditty. Look at registry entry
Look this one up in Google sometime. Winblows collects information about every executable you run, and time stamps this. This information is sometimes sent encrypted to M$ during the WGA phone home sessions. Why does M$ need this?
To see where M$ is going with this, just look at their recent patents. How about the patent that guarantees that ads will be displayed, viewed and accounted for inside the OS? Just more spying.
Let's face it, M$ has become Big Brother. None of the new features in Vista are to the benefit of their customers, instead its to allow an ever increasing ability to control, dictate and bow down to the big Hollywood interests.
Actually they do. Most of their consumer level printers have drivers that monitor every move you make and phone home. They even send the computer date down to the printer in order to enforce their ink extortion schemes.
Actually the 60 years of peace are due to the United States. People forget that the US had close to 100,000 men stationed in various European countries. Now that the US is slowly moving these men out, the tensions have stated to rise again. Just look at all of the recent riots. Just look at how France and Germany have once again run roughshod over the whole European Union. Is it any wonder that the UK doesn't want to complete the process to beome a full EU member?
How about not giving a Designed for Windows XP certification? If I can remember correctly, it was not necessary to run under a restricted user account in order to get this certification. Its been a while since I've done WinCrap development, so the requirements may have changed.
Don't use Windows Media Player. This crapware is sending loads of encrypted stuff to a couple of different M$ web sites. I use Guliverkli Media Player Classic instead. This works well and doesn't have any of the "phone home" issues that WMP has.
It's the concern that China controls these machines through secret chips that they refuse to fully document. I have a bunch of clients in the banking industry and they have placed Lenovo and ThinkPads on the banned list because of this. Also, they are in the process of replacing most of the existing ThinkPads with other machines, because these may be tainted and they can't guarantee if these machines are not reporting back to China any proprietary secrets. They fear that the human rights hating Communist Chinese govt may have some kind of back hole into these machines that may at some point put the banks very survival in jeopardy.
Forget about X10. It's always been a mess. Take a good look at ZWave Technologies. I've had very good success with it. It has alot of potential, so much so, that it seems that Cisco is buying the company in order to roll it out in its Linksys prodcuts.
Agreed. But, how about sending a letter to your representative? Become proactive and demand that a change be made to the brain dead approach that the FCC has to telecommunications? How about not allowing Verizon to continue to buy out competitors without allowing the market to have competition? After all the buyouts , there are really only 2 major phone companies (Verizon & ATT/SBC). Where is the competition that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 promised us? Botttom line is that act has really stifled competition, and increased prices. Until we get politically active and force our representatives to address this, we will not get any real reform.
I think you're actually better off trying something else other than Quickbooks. The latest version (Quickbooks 2006) is nothing more than a steaming pile of dog crap. I was forced to implement this for a client, and this product is so buggy and sloooow that it makes GnuCash look like a prince. In this version, they have implemented a new database (I think based on SQL Anywhere) and they really haven't done any quality control on this product.
Your Internet Service Provider has intentionally degraded the speed at which this page loads. If you would like your search results at full speed, please contact (some other ISP) at (new ISP phone #).
The only way for Verizon to get the Internet is if it loses its customers. Nonsense like this should not be tolerated by the Internet community. Verizon is nothing but a greedy company. Was it even in doubt that telecommunications costs from Verizon were going to increase after swallowing MCI? Less competition means higher prices.
Your problems formating a hardrive larger than 32GB is a direct result of M$'s greedy behavior. They are trying every which way to prevent Linux from being able to interoperate with Windows. Under M$'s reasoning, if you want a partition larger than 32GB you must format with NTFS. This makes it difficult to use this drive with both Windows & Linux because the drivers for NTFS on Linux may/may not be reliable. They are a pain to install and properly get them to work. The 32GB limit is an artificial one tht M$ has created in order to make your life more difficult with Linux. If you want a solution to this problem, see Linux mkdosfs for Windows NT/2K/XP. This cool utility allows you to create FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB. The other solution to this artificial difficulty to totally abandon Windows. If M$ does not wish us to interoperate with Linux, then maybe the answer is to eliminate the problem by eliminating the difficult Windows. Plain and simple.
I guess you're really clueless about world events. Iran today with North Korean technology has ICBMs that can attack Israel. At the current rate and with the lack of a spine by the French, the crazy Mulahs will have the capability to attack the US within a year with nuclear weapons (if not already).
Try adding the mouse gestures extension. A default setting for this click combination already exists. If the default is unsatisfactory, you can reprogram this click combination to do nothing.
Heavy-duty printing (such as graphics etc.) is network intense. This traffic can have serious effects on normal workstations. In addition, if you are using something like a JetDirect to connect the printer to the network, these devices are continually doing broadcasts to all devices on their segment. This is one way the old JetAdmin software was able to find all HP printers connected on the network. If you have a lot of printers, this broadcast traffic can be significant. To see how much broadcast traffic there is, use a sniffer like Ethereal. Isolating printers on their own VLAN is a good way to keep the effects of the printer traffic from affecting users.
I've actually had quite good success by taking a piecemeal approach to converting an office. Split the environment into server and desktop functionality. For each environment, create a test environment so that you can play, learn, make mistakes in and resolve potential show stoppers. Keep good documentation as to what you are doing.
For each environment, see what you are running. SBS means you are running file and print services, email, (possibly) database, and (possibly) routing and firewall services. Setup a test Linux server which you only have access to. Since this is a test box, even a desktop machine can be used as a server. Try to setup the Linux server to replicate the services that are provided by the SBS server. For example, if you have a common data share, create that same share on Linux using Samba. When you've done this for all identified services, use the new environment for a while so that you become knowledgeable in it. Make sure you pay attention to the maintenance aspects (things like backups, event logs etc.)
If you need management approval to take the next step, make a good business case for it. You're going to have to sell it. Prepare a good demonstration to management. Include things like handouts, a slide show and documentation. Make sure these contain things that management cares about, like cost projections, support and maintenability.
Only once you've had some experience with the installation and replacement services in the test envirornment, you are ready to proceed to convert your production environement.
Make sure that you finish with one environment before starting the other. Give yourself sometime in between the two. I always start with the server first because its the easiest of the two. The desktop always has issues that will take quite a while to resolve (such as macros in Office documents, special Windows apps, MS Access db etc.)
I use OSS Zentrack . It may be a bit of overkill for you but it allows you to organize your projects, TODOs and support calls. You can even specify how much time you spent on each. It provides a nice set of default categories that you can categorize your tasks with. You can customize the categories if you don't like the defaults. A set of customizable reports are also available. In addition, multiple users are supported. It is PHP based and can use quite a few different DBs.
Tell them that any preferential treatment of a particular class or category of users (only users who own a copy of IE) is considered discrimination. Maybe Apple/Linux/etc. users should/would submit a lawsuit of their own, considering how their own government is discriminating against them. The only way to avoid a lawsuit is to follow agreed upon web standards. This lawsuit can easily be won be a first year law student, let alone by all of the professional lawyers that would come out of the woodwork.
Using proprietary formats just begs for trouble. Just think about this. Since parts of the Office XML files are encrypted, any reverse engineering to read them brings the DMCA into play. Its only a matter of time before M$ brings this gun out. That's why M$ refuses to fully document their Office formats. If open source software impinges on the Office revenue, M$ kills it off through the use of DMCA threats. The answer to this problem is simple. Don't use MS Office.
A few years back Ziff Davis released some decent benchmarking tools. The ones for file serves were called Netbench You can set up different tests that exercise different aspects of file servers. With just a couple of PCs you can create significant load that would peg the CPU utils to 100% for a whole weekend. Although these tools are no longer supported, they still work quite well.
No. My primary mission is to keep 100% of the audience coming to my employer's web site. Leaving the 10-20% on the table is not an option. M$ doesn't get this. I will do everything I can to reduce the cost of the 100%, not only of the 80%. Now, the best way to do this is to follow public web standards, not Microsoft's bastardized version of those standards. If I code a site to use those standards, I'm guaranteed that my site will work across Windows, Linux, Mac, Sparc and many other platforms. If I use M$'s bastardized standards, my site only works for Windows. Other browsers following the public standards have surpassed IE in every manner without incurring any of the security negatives. Its up to us who are more technically savvy to explain to the sheep users that there really is a better way to browse the Internet. At the same time, this reduces the overall costs to serve the full 100%. Doing well by doing good.
Yes, they are going to respond, its expected. Again, M$'s refrain is, our current products suck, just wait until the next version. The reality is that unless M$ stands up and supports the Internet standards in a very real way, there is going to be a constant market drain. Developers are tired of having to code a web site multiple times and to have to deal with IE's inconsistent rendering engine.
Your not correct regarding market share. This 10% loss has further opened the door significantly for companies like IBM, Novell, Redhat and others. Their solutions are now being seriously looked at and considered by enterprises. In the US, significant wins are slowly changing CEOs minds (just look at Google, or Home Depot - not a single Windows machine in the bunch). Overseas, its looking like a flood where alternative solutions are being implemented.
Even M$'s recent moves have created further doubt in CEOs minds. Instead of dealing and fixing IE's security problems, M$ decides to go out and buy a anti-spyware company. The number one way that spyware gets onto a machine is through IE. With M$ making money through spyware, what incentive does it have to fix IE's security problems?
My bet is just like XP SP2 was an incomplete solution, so too will be IE 7. M$ has no real interest in supporting Internet standards, has no real incentive to fix IE's security problems, and has no incentive to really innovate (this would further reduce the need to buy Longhorn when it comes out). So, I guess we'll see.
Slashdot Mirror
M$ ratted them out. They are the ones who called the feds in. This just proves the point, that since Vista phones home with alot of personal info, it is only a matter of time before the feds are called in for Vista violators.
I guess you are not quite informed about what your privacy challenged M$ crap does. Look at what WGA does. Every time it boots up it touches base with M$. What's to prevent sometime in the near future, M$ disabling your OS? All it has to do is to change a little flag in the database, and the next time WGA phones home, you no longer have a working computer.
p lorer\UserAssist
Or how about this little ditty. Look at registry entry
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ex
Look this one up in Google sometime. Winblows collects information about every executable you run, and time stamps this. This information is sometimes sent encrypted to M$ during the WGA phone home sessions. Why does M$ need this?
To see where M$ is going with this, just look at their recent patents. How about the patent that guarantees that ads will be displayed, viewed and accounted for inside the OS? Just more spying.
Let's face it, M$ has become Big Brother. None of the new features in Vista are to the benefit of their customers, instead its to allow an ever increasing ability to control, dictate and bow down to the big Hollywood interests.
Actually they do. Most of their consumer level printers have drivers that monitor every move you make and phone home. They even send the computer date down to the printer in order to enforce their ink extortion schemes.
So..
put a damn rubber band around it.
Jeesh..
Actually the 60 years of peace are due to the United States. People forget that the US had close to 100,000 men stationed in various European countries. Now that the US is slowly moving these men out, the tensions have stated to rise again. Just look at all of the recent riots. Just look at how France and Germany have once again run roughshod over the whole European Union. Is it any wonder that the UK doesn't want to complete the process to beome a full EU member?
How about not giving a Designed for Windows XP certification? If I can remember correctly, it was not necessary to run under a restricted user account in order to get this certification. Its been a while since I've done WinCrap development, so the requirements may have changed.
Don't use Windows Media Player. This crapware is sending loads of encrypted stuff to a couple of different M$ web sites. I use Guliverkli Media Player Classic instead. This works well and doesn't have any of the "phone home" issues that WMP has.
It's the concern that China controls these machines through secret chips that they refuse to fully document. I have a bunch of clients in the banking industry and they have placed Lenovo and ThinkPads on the banned list because of this. Also, they are in the process of replacing most of the existing ThinkPads with other machines, because these may be tainted and they can't guarantee if these machines are not reporting back to China any proprietary secrets. They fear that the human rights hating Communist Chinese govt may have some kind of back hole into these machines that may at some point put the banks very survival in jeopardy.
Forget about X10. It's always been a mess. Take a good look at ZWave Technologies. I've had very good success with it. It has alot of potential, so much so, that it seems that Cisco is buying the company in order to roll it out in its Linksys prodcuts.
Agreed. But, how about sending a letter to your representative? Become proactive and demand that a change be made to the brain dead approach that the FCC has to telecommunications? How about not allowing Verizon to continue to buy out competitors without allowing the market to have competition? After all the buyouts , there are really only 2 major phone companies (Verizon & ATT/SBC). Where is the competition that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 promised us? Botttom line is that act has really stifled competition, and increased prices. Until we get politically active and force our representatives to address this, we will not get any real reform.
I think you're actually better off trying something else other than Quickbooks. The latest version (Quickbooks 2006) is nothing more than a steaming pile of dog crap. I was forced to implement this for a client, and this product is so buggy and sloooow that it makes GnuCash look like a prince. In this version, they have implemented a new database (I think based on SQL Anywhere) and they really haven't done any quality control on this product.
This is better:
Your Internet Service Provider has intentionally degraded the speed at which this page loads. If you would like your search results at full speed, please contact (some other ISP) at (new ISP phone #).
The only way for Verizon to get the Internet is if it loses its customers. Nonsense like this should not be tolerated by the Internet community. Verizon is nothing but a greedy company. Was it even in doubt that telecommunications costs from Verizon were going to increase after swallowing MCI? Less competition means higher prices.
Your problems formating a hardrive larger than 32GB is a direct result of M$'s greedy behavior. They are trying every which way to prevent Linux from being able to interoperate with Windows. Under M$'s reasoning, if you want a partition larger than 32GB you must format with NTFS. This makes it difficult to use this drive with both Windows & Linux because the drivers for NTFS on Linux may/may not be reliable. They are a pain to install and properly get them to work. The 32GB limit is an artificial one tht M$ has created in order to make your life more difficult with Linux. If you want a solution to this problem, see Linux mkdosfs for Windows NT/2K/XP. This cool utility allows you to create FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB. The other solution to this artificial difficulty to totally abandon Windows. If M$ does not wish us to interoperate with Linux, then maybe the answer is to eliminate the problem by eliminating the difficult Windows. Plain and simple.
I guess you're really clueless about world events. Iran today with North Korean technology has ICBMs that can attack Israel. At the current rate and with the lack of a spine by the French, the crazy Mulahs will have the capability to attack the US within a year with nuclear weapons (if not already).
Try adding the mouse gestures extension. A default setting for this click combination already exists. If the default is unsatisfactory, you can reprogram this click combination to do nothing.
Heavy-duty printing (such as graphics etc.) is network intense. This traffic can have serious effects on normal workstations. In addition, if you are using something like a JetDirect to connect the printer to the network, these devices are continually doing broadcasts to all devices on their segment. This is one way the old JetAdmin software was able to find all HP printers connected on the network. If you have a lot of printers, this broadcast traffic can be significant. To see how much broadcast traffic there is, use a sniffer like Ethereal. Isolating printers on their own VLAN is a good way to keep the effects of the printer traffic from affecting users.
I've actually had quite good success by taking a piecemeal approach to converting an office. Split the environment into server and desktop functionality. For each environment, create a test environment so that you can play, learn, make mistakes in and resolve potential show stoppers. Keep good documentation as to what you are doing.
For each environment, see what you are running. SBS means you are running file and print services, email, (possibly) database, and (possibly) routing and firewall services. Setup a test Linux server which you only have access to. Since this is a test box, even a desktop machine can be used as a server. Try to setup the Linux server to replicate the services that are provided by the SBS server. For example, if you have a common data share, create that same share on Linux using Samba. When you've done this for all identified services, use the new environment for a while so that you become knowledgeable in it. Make sure you pay attention to the maintenance aspects (things like backups, event logs etc.)
If you need management approval to take the next step, make a good business case for it. You're going to have to sell it. Prepare a good demonstration to management. Include things like handouts, a slide show and documentation. Make sure these contain things that management cares about, like cost projections, support and maintenability.
Only once you've had some experience with the installation and replacement services in the test envirornment, you are ready to proceed to convert your production environement.
Make sure that you finish with one environment before starting the other. Give yourself sometime in between the two. I always start with the server first because its the easiest of the two. The desktop always has issues that will take quite a while to resolve (such as macros in Office documents, special Windows apps, MS Access db etc.)
I use OSS Zentrack . It may be a bit of overkill for you but it allows you to organize your projects, TODOs and support calls. You can even specify how much time you spent on each. It provides a nice set of default categories that you can categorize your tasks with. You can customize the categories if you don't like the defaults. A set of customizable reports are also available. In addition, multiple users are supported. It is PHP based and can use quite a few different DBs.
Tell them that any preferential treatment of a particular class or category of users (only users who own a copy of IE) is considered discrimination. Maybe Apple/Linux/etc. users should/would submit a lawsuit of their own, considering how their own government is discriminating against them. The only way to avoid a lawsuit is to follow agreed upon web standards. This lawsuit can easily be won be a first year law student, let alone by all of the professional lawyers that would come out of the woodwork.
Trebuchet Machines
Using proprietary formats just begs for trouble. Just think about this. Since parts of the Office XML files are encrypted, any reverse engineering to read them brings the DMCA into play. Its only a matter of time before M$ brings this gun out. That's why M$ refuses to fully document their Office formats. If open source software impinges on the Office revenue, M$ kills it off through the use of DMCA threats. The answer to this problem is simple. Don't use MS Office.
Omnipage by Scansoft allows you to scan in paper docs and convert them to XML/HTML. It's not OSS, but it does work quite effectively.
A few years back Ziff Davis released some decent benchmarking tools. The ones for file serves were called Netbench You can set up different tests that exercise different aspects of file servers. With just a couple of PCs you can create significant load that would peg the CPU utils to 100% for a whole weekend. Although these tools are no longer supported, they still work quite well.
No. My primary mission is to keep 100% of the audience coming to my employer's web site. Leaving the 10-20% on the table is not an option. M$ doesn't get this. I will do everything I can to reduce the cost of the 100%, not only of the 80%. Now, the best way to do this is to follow public web standards, not Microsoft's bastardized version of those standards. If I code a site to use those standards, I'm guaranteed that my site will work across Windows, Linux, Mac, Sparc and many other platforms. If I use M$'s bastardized standards, my site only works for Windows. Other browsers following the public standards have surpassed IE in every manner without incurring any of the security negatives. Its up to us who are more technically savvy to explain to the sheep users that there really is a better way to browse the Internet. At the same time, this reduces the overall costs to serve the full 100%. Doing well by doing good.
Yes, they are going to respond, its expected. Again, M$'s refrain is, our current products suck, just wait until the next version. The reality is that unless M$ stands up and supports the Internet standards in a very real way, there is going to be a constant market drain. Developers are tired of having to code a web site multiple times and to have to deal with IE's inconsistent rendering engine.
Your not correct regarding market share. This 10% loss has further opened the door significantly for companies like IBM, Novell, Redhat and others. Their solutions are now being seriously looked at and considered by enterprises. In the US, significant wins are slowly changing CEOs minds (just look at Google, or Home Depot - not a single Windows machine in the bunch). Overseas, its looking like a flood where alternative solutions are being implemented.
Even M$'s recent moves have created further doubt in CEOs minds. Instead of dealing and fixing IE's security problems, M$ decides to go out and buy a anti-spyware company. The number one way that spyware gets onto a machine is through IE. With M$ making money through spyware, what incentive does it have to fix IE's security problems?
My bet is just like XP SP2 was an incomplete solution, so too will be IE 7. M$ has no real interest in supporting Internet standards, has no real incentive to fix IE's security problems, and has no incentive to really innovate (this would further reduce the need to buy Longhorn when it comes out). So, I guess we'll see.