I've agonized over that. In theory as second level support I'm only supposed to be called at night from the NOC. In practice, when we have a sev 1 outage I could get called from any of the top management tier, or anyone on a number of other groups that are associated with the problem. This (rather large) list is in theory knowable, but compiling all possibilities is problematic.
It doesn't help that some people have moved here (west coast) from the east and kept their cell numbers. So I can't go by my state's area codes.
And besides, I've noticed lately that the spoofed number is often the same area code and exchange of the number they're calling.
And there is the issue of daughter running into trouble in the middle of the night and having to call me from someone else's cell or one of the vanishing number of pay phones.
And finally, even if I don't answer, the ring still wakes me up. But now that I write that, I realize I could make the default ring tone silent, and then establish an appropriate ring tone for every single frakking person that might call me. So, now that I write *that*, I don't see the technique as being very practical.
So, we're back to answering every call. Your mileage may vary, of course. It depends on job and family factors and different people have different criteria.
Most of us left are downloading security only updates at best and carefully monitoring what W7 is doing. After GWX everyone is super wary of this behavior. Businesses are going to have their own update servers and/or pay the extension.
The only way 7 is going to obsolete is vendors dropping support in their software. After that we move to windows 8.1 for 4 more years. That leaves at least 5 years for microsoft to unscrew itself or equivalent software to finally release on linux. For the common man, phones and tablets are going to take over.
A good strategy, but I'd like to make a suggestion. Having gone through the Windows 7 -> Windows 8.1 process, and the Windows 7 -> Windows 10 process, I'd really suggest the latter. Windows 8.1 is pants, and the less you touch it, the more you'll be happy.
The reason we didn't go from 8.1 -> 10, is that we had so much trouble with 8.1 that we ended up doing recovery installs back to 7. A couple years later, when 10 became stable, we did some testing and realized that it was less of a risk to go directly to 10 and completely bypass 8.
Your mileage may vary, but those were our conclusions.
Is this happening to anyone else? About two weeks ago we started getting regular robocalls at 6 AM local. (Usually they've waited until 8:30 AM local time.) And then, late last week we got one robocall at 5:15 AM. (I'm on call, so I *have* to answer the phone.) And this is to a cell phone! (We haven't had a land line for a couple years.) This is going beyond annoying, to the point where I'm going to start calling FCC commissioners myself.
IE is still shipped with Windows 10 as a completely separate browser from Edge so I guess the answer is...just use IE for those sites.
IMO Microsoft's decision of starting from scratch when developing the engine for Edge was the right one. Trying to emulate all the broken IE's behaviours would've been madness.
Oh I agree that starting over with Edge was the right thing to do, and not having backwards compatibility probably reduced the size of Edge by a couple orders of magnitude.:-)
Yes IE still ships with Windows 10. My current company issued me a mac (Part of my responsibility is mac support) and IE is no longer supported on the mac. So for the two or three IE-only websites I have a Windows 10 instance running in a virtualbox. Which is kinda cool and kinda ridiculous at the same time. [1]
[1] Cool in that it works at all, and ridiculous in that I essentially have a browser installed on my laptop that takes up 23 gigabytes of storage.
Still using Firefox, though. 'Cause, maybe they've changed, maybe they haven't. I'm going to give it a little longer and see.
What I'd like to know, is what are we going to do with all those website that require Internet Explorer to work properly?
...besides not go to them, that is. That's not always possible. I just ran into this the other day -- an admin portal on a server that only worked with IE. It's not like I can go in and change the firmware.
That's exactly my point. It has no unique functionality.
The point, sorry *my* point, is that it's a concept that's very difficult for Microsoft to compete against. A cheap enough OS to provide a $200 (retail) computing device that's at all useful, is simply not part of Microsoft's business model. As previously said by many here, they've tried before, and failed.
Now, part of that failure is expectations previously set. When people found that their Windows CE or R or whatever they were calling it at the time, would not run Microsoft apps, that was often a deal killer. Whereas practically anything with a browser will run the Google suite. The Chromebook is an admission that you just don't need much in the way of local apps to be productive. And that's a space where Microsoft has a very difficult time playing.
Government agencies don't appear to understand how to manage the process, and vendors tend to take advantage of that.
The fundamental problem is that people don't want to accept limitations in their shiny new software. If the buyer would accept a simple reliable system that has some limitations it wouldn't cost five or ten times what it should, but no project manager wants to have their name on a system that doesn't do X and Y in three different languages with 99.999% uptime and runs on OSX, Windows, iPhones, Android phones, and can easily be ported to Linux...oh, and it must have a voice interface and be handicapped friendly, and use AI and Deep Learning just because.
What you describe definitely happens, and is a major cause of failure in this type of project, don't get me wrong. But it's not the whole story. There have been times, for instance, when vendors encourage the very feature creep that's likely to scuttle the project, because it tends to increase the bleeding.
But even in situations where creep is held to a minimum, milestones still get pushed out and the project still tends to go further and further over budget. Reasons will be found for this, like unrealistic expectations, insufficiently communicated requirements, lack of resources, and some of these may even be true.
But the fundamental model in such situations is of an agency inexperienced with managing a vendor for a custom software project, saddled with a vendor that's very experienced and highly motivated to take advantage of the situation. It's almost a playbook. Do this and this and this, allow that to happen, offer this remedy, let more things happen, pull out of original plan, let customer stew for a short time, offer remedial plan with lower expectations at higher cost.
What it comes down to is a fundamental difference in goals. The agency's goal is to replace aging software. The vendor's goal, regardless of what they actually TELL you, is to make as much money as possible.
It's like a child who's never had a pet before, given a monkey who's been very adept at escaping from zoos. It's only a matter of time before the kid wakes up to an empty cage. And probably, all his cheerios gone and crap everywhere.
Oh good lord, are they putting McAfee Security Scan Plus on their TVs? That thing doesn't do anything useful. It just natters at you and promotes their for-pay product. It's the first thing I uninstall.
"but the digital equivalents of such infrastructure projects generally don't draw the same enthusiasm. " -- it's not difficult to see why. Stories abound of government software upgrade attempts that turn into overpriced fiascos. (I was personally involved with one, where a utility was royally screwed over by a certain unnamed vendor.)
Government agencies don't appear to understand how to manage the process, and vendors tend to take advantage of that. The budget tends to bleed out to the tune of five or ten times the realistic cost of solving the problem, and the resulting product tends to be no more usable than what it replaced. The only difference being, the new product will be covered by an overpriced service contract.
These cases tend to be great examples of "you don't get what you pay for".
I don't see online voting as ever not being corrupt, except perhaps momentarily, by accident. There's just too much at stake in an election, and the payoff for being able to manipulate the results is too high. BTW, the place to start if you're going to corrupt an online voting system is in the software writing stage. Make it really convoluted so that the attack vectors can't easily be found.
Elections with paper ballots can still be influenced (for instance, accidentally dumping cartons of ballots from precincts with generally the "wrong" political leaning, something that happened recently in my area) but I think it's harder to do, and easier to get caught.
It's a voting system. Encryption is irrelevant. What matters is integrity and authenticity.
Enh well... My understanding is, voting should be (a) secret and (b) authenticated to a given person. To do both you kinda need encryption. I do agree that integrity and authenticity are the parts that seem to be missing.
Reminds me of the old Russian joke. At election, peasant woman arrives, is given ballot in envelope, shown ballot box. Peasant woman starts ripping open envelope. Guards stop her, ask what is she doing? She says, wants to see who she's voting for. Election official says "Nyet, nyet! This is SECRET ballot!"
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Step 1. Don't answer unknown callers.
Step 2. Goto 'Step 1'.
I've agonized over that. In theory as second level support I'm only supposed to be called at night from the NOC. In practice, when we have a sev 1 outage I could get called from any of the top management tier, or anyone on a number of other groups that are associated with the problem. This (rather large) list is in theory knowable, but compiling all possibilities is problematic.
It doesn't help that some people have moved here (west coast) from the east and kept their cell numbers. So I can't go by my state's area codes.
And besides, I've noticed lately that the spoofed number is often the same area code and exchange of the number they're calling.
And there is the issue of daughter running into trouble in the middle of the night and having to call me from someone else's cell or one of the vanishing number of pay phones.
And finally, even if I don't answer, the ring still wakes me up. But now that I write that, I realize I could make the default ring tone silent, and then establish an appropriate ring tone for every single frakking person that might call me. So, now that I write *that*, I don't see the technique as being very practical.
So, we're back to answering every call. Your mileage may vary, of course. It depends on job and family factors and different people have different criteria.
Windows 10 (Windows in general, actually) has had a bad record on automatic installs. I don't think I want it automatically uninstalling anything.
I understand what they're trying to do, but as someone else said, the hot setup is not to push out buggy installs in the first place.
Most of us left are downloading security only updates at best and carefully monitoring what W7 is doing. After GWX everyone is super wary of this behavior. Businesses are going to have their own update servers and/or pay the extension.
The only way 7 is going to obsolete is vendors dropping support in their software. After that we move to windows 8.1 for 4 more years. That leaves at least 5 years for microsoft to unscrew itself or equivalent software to finally release on linux. For the common man, phones and tablets are going to take over.
A good strategy, but I'd like to make a suggestion. Having gone through the Windows 7 -> Windows 8.1 process, and the Windows 7 -> Windows 10 process, I'd really suggest the latter. Windows 8.1 is pants, and the less you touch it, the more you'll be happy.
The reason we didn't go from 8.1 -> 10, is that we had so much trouble with 8.1 that we ended up doing recovery installs back to 7. A couple years later, when 10 became stable, we did some testing and realized that it was less of a risk to go directly to 10 and completely bypass 8.
Your mileage may vary, but those were our conclusions.
I have a collection of thousands of recorded bagpipe songs
Doesn't that violate some international convention?
Which timezone are you in? Is your phone number's area code from that timezone as well?
Great questions, as often people who move from the east coast keep their old number.
But in my case, pacific time zone, and my number is also pacific.
Is this happening to anyone else? About two weeks ago we started getting regular robocalls at 6 AM local. (Usually they've waited until 8:30 AM local time.) And then, late last week we got one robocall at 5:15 AM. (I'm on call, so I *have* to answer the phone.) And this is to a cell phone! (We haven't had a land line for a couple years.) This is going beyond annoying, to the point where I'm going to start calling FCC commissioners myself.
IE is still shipped with Windows 10 as a completely separate browser from Edge so I guess the answer is...just use IE for those sites.
IMO Microsoft's decision of starting from scratch when developing the engine for Edge was the right one. Trying to emulate all the broken IE's behaviours would've been madness.
Oh I agree that starting over with Edge was the right thing to do, and not having backwards compatibility probably reduced the size of Edge by a couple orders of magnitude. :-)
Yes IE still ships with Windows 10. My current company issued me a mac (Part of my responsibility is mac support) and IE is no longer supported on the mac. So for the two or three IE-only websites I have a Windows 10 instance running in a virtualbox. Which is kinda cool and kinda ridiculous at the same time. [1]
[1] Cool in that it works at all, and ridiculous in that I essentially have a browser installed on my laptop that takes up 23 gigabytes of storage.
Still using Firefox, though. 'Cause, maybe they've changed, maybe they haven't. I'm going to give it a little longer and see.
What I'd like to know, is what are we going to do with all those website that require Internet Explorer to work properly?
> What can you do on a Chromebook that you can't do on just about any other personal computing device?
Do it for $200 new in box.
So the answer is no, there's nothing unique about what you can do on a Chromebook.
Beats me. But it doesn't matter much, because.
That's exactly my point. It has no unique functionality.
The point, sorry *my* point, is that it's a concept that's very difficult for Microsoft to compete against. A cheap enough OS to provide a $200 (retail) computing device that's at all useful, is simply not part of Microsoft's business model. As previously said by many here, they've tried before, and failed.
Now, part of that failure is expectations previously set. When people found that their Windows CE or R or whatever they were calling it at the time, would not run Microsoft apps, that was often a deal killer. Whereas practically anything with a browser will run the Google suite. The Chromebook is an admission that you just don't need much in the way of local apps to be productive. And that's a space where Microsoft has a very difficult time playing.
> What can you do on a Chromebook that you can't do on just about any other personal computing device?
Do it for $200 new in box.
> Does it have some exclusive functionality to compete with?
Beats me. But it doesn't matter much, because.
But it's way too late to compete with ChromeBooks now. Microsoft should have started years ago.
Come to think of it, they did. Several times, never successfully.
Microsoft keeps trying to play in this space, and it never works out well for them.
Watching out for their customers since, well, never.
Government agencies don't appear to understand how to manage the process, and vendors tend to take advantage of that.
The fundamental problem is that people don't want to accept limitations in their shiny new software. If the buyer would accept a simple reliable system that has some limitations it wouldn't cost five or ten times what it should, but no project manager wants to have their name on a system that doesn't do X and Y in three different languages with 99.999% uptime and runs on OSX, Windows, iPhones, Android phones, and can easily be ported to Linux...oh, and it must have a voice interface and be handicapped friendly, and use AI and Deep Learning just because.
What you describe definitely happens, and is a major cause of failure in this type of project, don't get me wrong. But it's not the whole story. There have been times, for instance, when vendors encourage the very feature creep that's likely to scuttle the project, because it tends to increase the bleeding.
But even in situations where creep is held to a minimum, milestones still get pushed out and the project still tends to go further and further over budget. Reasons will be found for this, like unrealistic expectations, insufficiently communicated requirements, lack of resources, and some of these may even be true.
But the fundamental model in such situations is of an agency inexperienced with managing a vendor for a custom software project, saddled with a vendor that's very experienced and highly motivated to take advantage of the situation. It's almost a playbook. Do this and this and this, allow that to happen, offer this remedy, let more things happen, pull out of original plan, let customer stew for a short time, offer remedial plan with lower expectations at higher cost.
What it comes down to is a fundamental difference in goals. The agency's goal is to replace aging software. The vendor's goal, regardless of what they actually TELL you, is to make as much money as possible.
It's like a child who's never had a pet before, given a monkey who's been very adept at escaping from zoos. It's only a matter of time before the kid wakes up to an empty cage. And probably, all his cheerios gone and crap everywhere.
Oh good lord, are they putting McAfee Security Scan Plus on their TVs? That thing doesn't do anything useful. It just natters at you and promotes their for-pay product. It's the first thing I uninstall.
Is it *possible* to uninstall it from your TV?
"but the digital equivalents of such infrastructure projects generally don't draw the same enthusiasm. " -- it's not difficult to see why. Stories abound of government software upgrade attempts that turn into overpriced fiascos. (I was personally involved with one, where a utility was royally screwed over by a certain unnamed vendor.)
Government agencies don't appear to understand how to manage the process, and vendors tend to take advantage of that. The budget tends to bleed out to the tune of five or ten times the realistic cost of solving the problem, and the resulting product tends to be no more usable than what it replaced. The only difference being, the new product will be covered by an overpriced service contract.
These cases tend to be great examples of "you don't get what you pay for".
Ok she had a great point, but can we stop using yahoo phrasing in our headlines?
Wait, didn't I see this somewhere before?
I don't see online voting as ever not being corrupt, except perhaps momentarily, by accident. There's just too much at stake in an election, and the payoff for being able to manipulate the results is too high. BTW, the place to start if you're going to corrupt an online voting system is in the software writing stage. Make it really convoluted so that the attack vectors can't easily be found.
Elections with paper ballots can still be influenced (for instance, accidentally dumping cartons of ballots from precincts with generally the "wrong" political leaning, something that happened recently in my area) but I think it's harder to do, and easier to get caught.
It's a voting system. Encryption is irrelevant. What matters is integrity and authenticity.
Enh well... My understanding is, voting should be (a) secret and (b) authenticated to a given person. To do both you kinda need encryption. I do agree that integrity and authenticity are the parts that seem to be missing.
Reminds me of the old Russian joke. At election, peasant woman arrives, is given ballot in envelope, shown ballot box.
Peasant woman starts ripping open envelope. Guards stop her, ask what is she doing? She says, wants to see who she's voting for.
Election official says "Nyet, nyet! This is SECRET ballot!"
Badum-bum
If so, it doesn't work very well as an ad. What this tells me is that I'd be crazy to consider the product.